Another eclipse picture

The Moon near the end of totality.

JISHOU, HUNAN — I had to Photoshop this one a bit to clean it up. I mistakenly had the Tamron’s vibration control on, and the resulting movement smeared the Moon’s image, but left the star images intact.

This is a 10-second exposure with the lens zoomed to 230 mm, taken near the end of totality around 11:00 pm local time. Everything else is the same: Nikon D60 on tripod, Tamron 70-300 zoom lens, f5.6, ASA 200.

The stars surrounding the Moon are fainter members of Taurus: from top left going clockwise, 13 Tau/HIP23900A, iota Tau/HIP23497, HIP23589, 15 Tau/HIP23883 (closest apparently to Moon here), and L Tau/HIP 23871. Iota Tau is a member of the Hyades star cluster, whose V-shape outlines the horns of the bull. The stars of the Hyades are about 150-160 light-years away from Earth.

How do I know which star is which? It’s not an encyclopedic memory or fancy astronomy equipment. I used Stellarium, a free planetarium application for your computer. Here’s a screen shot of Stellarium showing the same view on my desktop.

Screenshot of Stellarium view of Moon at 11:00 pm Dec 10, 2001

Stellarium will give you details about any object you click on.

Interestingly enough, 15 Tau, which in this photo appears closest to the Moon, is actually the farthest star of the five from us. It’s 1032 light-years away. That’s some old light there.

Lunar eclipse, December 10, 2011

Alnath (β Tau) and the eclipsed Moon -1 sec exposure

JISHOU, HUNAN — I caught the total lunar eclipse about halfway through totality. I didn’t do all the good stuff, like wait for the equipment to cool to ambient temperature (0°C here), because I almost forgot to go out. So, out of 25 shots I got three halfway decent ones. The focus seems to be a bit off, I fear.

The three images here are of the Moon toward the end of totality. You can just barely see it brighten on the lower right edge as it leaves the Earth’s shadow. The star to the left is Alnath (β Tauri), the second brightest star in Taurus. Alnath is a bluish-white B-class star, about 700 times brighter than the Sun, 4.5 times heavier and 5 times bigger. It’s 131 light-years away.

I used a tripod-mounted Nikon D60 with a 70-300 Tamron zoom lens at 70 mm, f5.6, ASA 200. The three exposures are 1.0 sec (above), 1.6 sec and 2.5 sec (below).

Alnath (β Tau) and eclipsed Moon - 1.6 sec exposure

Alnath (β Tau) and eclipsed Moon - 2.6 sec exposure

Totality ended around 11:00 pm here.

Gorgeous amateur astrophotography images at the BBC website

The Royal Observatory at Greenwich and Sky at Night magazine sponsor an astrophotography contest each year. The 2011 winners are highlighted in a slide show at the BBC website.

This is the overall winner, a mosaic of Jupiter with two of its moons, Io (left) and Ganymede. The details on all three images in this composite are amazing, and that’s what impressed the judges, too. Damien Peach used a Celestron 14-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope with a Point Grey Flea3 CCD camera to capture these images.

The overall winner of the 2011 Astronomy Photographer contest, by D. Peach

I want to highlight this one at left, too, because it shows a feature of our solar system not commonly seen.

The zodiacal light by Harley Grady

It was the winner in the Newcomer category, and shows the zodiacal light from a farm in Texas. You have to have exceptionally clear, dark skies to capture the zodiacal light, which is the very faint reflection of sunlight from the gas and dust within our own solar system.

Harley Grady took this image with a Canon EOS 5D Mk II DSLR camera with a 16-35mm lens, which shows what you can do with fairly simple equipment. All you need is a good tripod, or some other sturdy support, clear skies and some patience. Long exposure times bring out details our naked eyes cannot see.

You can also see the winners, picked from nearly 800 entries, at the Sky at Night website.

When you wish upon a (non-main sequence) star …

Don’t you just hate it when the star you wish on explodes?

Another photo of Supernova 2010lt

JISHOU, HUNAN — This Jan. 3 photo is by New Mexico photographer Joseph Brimacombe. The tick marks at 12:00 and 3:00 mark Supernova 2010lt, which was discovered a few days ago by 10-year-old Kathryn Aurora Gray of New Brunswick, Canada. I have made a close-up of SN2010lt from his photo, which appears after the full photo.

Supernova 2010lt (detail) Photo by Joseph Brimacombe

The detail shows the “fuzziness” typical of a galaxy, in this case UGC 3378, which is 240 million light-years away from us. The supernova is within the fuzziness (and the same distance from Earth), so it’s part of the galaxy.

Here’s a news report of the discovery I found online.

http://www.metatube.com/flash/player.swf

Canadian schoolgirl discovers supernova

Kathryn Gray, discoverer of SN2010lt

Kathryn Gray, 10, was studying starfield photos on her computer at her home in Birdton, New Brunswick, Canada, when she spotted something that looked like a supernova. It was, and she’s the youngest person ever to find one.

A supernova is the last gasp of a massive star that’s run out of nuclear fuel to “burn.” The star collapses in seconds, and the falling material gets very hot, very fast and explodes. UPDATED TO CORRECT AN ERROR.

In this case, Supernova 2010lt (Kathryn’s Supernova?) exploded because it was unable to regulate nuclear fusion. There was a runaway reaction, leading to a sudden, catastrophic explosion. The pre-supernova star may be quite dim, but the explosion makes it thousands of times brighter — for a very short time.

Astronomers looking for supernovas compare recent photos of the sky with older ones, to see if anything has changed. Kathryn hit paydirt. Here’s an animation to show what she saw.

Supernovas happen when a large star explodes

The star in question is in the galaxy UGC 3378, the bright spot at 8 o’clock relative to the supernova, in the constellation Camelopardalis. It’s 240 million light-years away, so that should give you an idea how bright that supernova is. Or was, since it happened 240 million years in our past and the light has only just now reached us.

Catching a supernova “in the act” gives astronomers a chance to study them thoroughly, which improves our understanding of how stars “work” and how they live and die. Stars create heavier elements from hydrogen and helium, including the elements we’re made out of, but that process ends with iron. Some titanic supernovas create the elements heavier than iron. (Meaning the elements past iron on the periodic table.)

Kathryn’s supernova has been classified a type 1A, meaning it’s associated with a white dwarf star — a white-hot, planet-sized remnant of a star a little larger than our sun is now. Type 1a supernova have very similar characteristics, so astronomers use them as “distance markers” to see how far away these stars (and galaxies) are. (Brightness falls off with distance by a very simple mathematical relation.)

I missed the eclipse, but not the solstice moon

JISHOU, HUNAN — I snapped this from my balcony window this morning around 6:50. It was misty here, as it is usually early in the day, but the moon looked so good hanging just above the mountains to the west that I grabbed my camera and squeezed off a few shots. These were two of the best.

The full moon at winter solstice

Technical details: Shot with a Nikon D60 with manual Nikkor 200 mm lens, ASA 400, f5.6, 1/100 sec

Solstice moon over the hills

Technical details: Shot with a Nikon D60 with Nikkor 18-55 AF-S DX lens, ASA 400, f5.6, 1/13 sec (braced against window frame)

Ooooo … pretty!

The Milky Way galaxy: The microwave version

This lovely image is of our home, the Milky Way galaxy, but in a way our mortal eyes cannot perceive it. It doesn’t show stars, but the stuff that makes (or will make) up stars and planets and whatnot — clouds of gas and dust.

Our eyes can see only a tiny fraction of light — the visible spectrum, ROYGBIV (rainbow colors) — but the universe also glows in other kinds of light: gamma ray, X-ray, ultraviolet, infra-red, microwave and radio. And each frequency tells us something different.

The atmosphere blocks some of those frequencies (fortunately for life in Earth), so to view the universe in this exotic light astronomers have to depend on telescopes out in space. The European Space Agency, for example, launched the Planck Surveyor telescope to capture images in the microwave range, like this one here.

Microwave imaging gives us two important sets of information about the Milky Way and the universe we are in.

First, the huge clouds of gas and dust in the galaxy (which are mostly invisible to our eyes) are what eventually turn into stars and planets (and all the stuff that ends up on planets). In the photo, those clouds are all those wispy bluish-white and pinkish-white tendrils stretching out from the center (the galactic equator).

Putting it another way, that’s what we looked like about 5 to 6 billion years ago, before the Sun, the Earth (and the rest of the solar system) condensed out of a cloud of dust and gas. Needless to say, everything on the Earth was once in that same cloud, including the atoms that make up you and me.

So studying present-day dust clouds can help us understand the clouds that became us a long time ago.

Secondly, astronomers are also keenly interested in the background “behind” the Milky Way, because that’s the radiation left over from the Big Bang — the beginning of the universe. In the image, it’s colored magenta and orange. (Those are “false colors,” since microwave light doesn’t really have color.)

Our best estimates now put the Big Bang around 13 to 14 billion years ago. At the time, the universe was much smaller, denser and hotter than it is now. It was so dense, in fact, that light could not travel very far at all. It wasn’t until matter spread out far enough to become transparent that light from the Big Bang could get through. That happened about 380,000 years after the Big Bang.

So those microwaves are really, really frakkin’ old. And the pattern of magentas and oranges can help astronomers learn more about the early universe, before there were even stars and planets around.

The Cosmic Background Radiation is one of the main sources of evidence for the Big Bang. In 1948 physicists George Gamow, Ralph Alpher, and Robert Herman calculated that the expansion of the universe after the Big Bang would have shifted the original radiation from gamma rays to microwaves of a specific frequency (corresponding to a temperature). Other theoretical physicists at Princeton revisited the prediction in the mid-1960s and started to build a detector to test their predictions. (One of those guys was my freshman year physics lecturer, David T. Wilkinson, one of the best teachers I ever had.)

Meanwhile, down the road at Bell Labs, two researchers looking for something entirely different had already built such a detector. No matter how they fiddled with the contraption, there was a constant “noise” corresponding to a temperature of 3.5 K that they couldn’t get rid of. So, they phoned the physics guys at Princeton and asked their advice. Entirely by accident, the Bell researchers, Arno Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson, had detected exactly the kind of temperature that the theoretical guys had anticipated!

Penzias and Wilson later got a Nobel Prize in Physics for their accidental discovery. The Princeton physicists only got the simple satisfaction of knowing they were right.

The image above is a high resolution version of what Penzias and Wilson found with their ground-based “telescope.” In a way, it’s a portrait of what the Big Bang looks like 13 to 14 billion years after the fact. Studying the “afterglow” can tell us more about how the early universe behaved, so we can better understand how it is now.

Remember, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Cool pic from space: Those southern lights

A crewmember aboard the International Space Station caught this view of the aurora australis (the Southern Lights) during a geomagnetic storm last month.

The Southern Lights from orbit

Auroras happen when electrically charged particles from the Sun smack into Earth’s atmosphere and ionize the oxygen and nitrogen there. Since the high speed particles follow the Earth’s magnetic field, they primarily end up over the magnetic poles. B ut, when the Sun is especially active (or when it burps out a solar flare, as it did on May 24), the auroral displays can be seen at lower latitudes.

Ionized gases emit light of particular frequencies — colors. Neon, for example, glows a bright red color. Oxygen in the atmosphere typically emits green light, as we can see in the photo.

Part of my ever-expanding Web empire

JISHOU, HUNAN — Since the Great Firewall of China has inexplicably blocked Picasaweb, where I host most of my photos from China, I have signed up with Flickr. So far, Flickr is not blocked {cross fingers}, so my Chinese friends can see my photos.

I paid for additional storage on Picasaweb, so I can upload most of photos there for posterity, but I am not yet going to shell out $25 to get extra space on Flickr. I’m hoping China’s net nannies will relent, and let Chinese netizens access Picasaweb again.

Flickr allows 100 MB a month for free, so I have uploaded my pix from the July 22 solar eclipse. I’ve included a sample here to pique your curiosity.