Here’s a very quick image of today’s sun. I took it using the 80 mm f/6.25 Apogee refractor and a Cannon EOS rebel XS.
OK, It’s no longer just today’s image but a few images taken over several weeks showing the changing face of the sun..
Gary
Same data as previous image
This image was taken 05-09-12
And still taking images of Arp’s Peculiar Galaxies for the Astronomical League program, I’ll post a few recent ones. These are taken at Farpoint Observatory with the 27″ “Tombaugh” reflector.
Arp 120 (above) is a seriously disturbed galaxy pair, with an amazingly distorted trails of stars. Those small dark patches in the star trails are real–rogue dark nebulas blocking some of the light.
Arp 242 is a crowd-pleaser, two galaxies that appear to be making several passes at each other and gravitationally smearing each others’ shapes before parting ways or (more likely) eventually merging. Not sure which, yet–please ask again a few billion years from now.
Two more gravitationally interacting galaxies. If your monitor is adjusted well, you’ll see two streams of stars between the galaxies. The tiny bright spots in the galaxies’ arms are star-forming areas. Any time you have stars and surrounding gas colliding with this bulk and force, you have to expect lots of new stars to form.
Arp 286 shows yet more galaxies being distorted by each other’s gravity. And it’s almost always gravity that makes the shapes of Arp Peculiar Galaxies so, well, peculiar. It’s not their fault–if we had 200 billion solar masses stretching us up close for billions of years, we might look a bit peculiar, too.
Here’s an image of a recent supernova in the constellation Leo. M95′s ‘new’ star was spotted March 16th by Paolo Fagotti of Italy. I’ve marked its position in the image I took Mar 22. I estimated the magnitude at 13.2 R.
Recommended: a time-lapse video of minor planets (asteroids) as they are discovered over the past 30 years or so. This new one is updated to mid-2011.
Watch it in the highest resolution your PC will allow. Now, here’s the link!: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONUSP23cmAE Turn off the music if you don’t care for it. This video compresses 30 years into about 3 minutes; it might be easier to follow details of the 7-minute version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqC1QjlVUYk
Notice 3 things as you watch:
Highly recommended: a recent presentation given on the Google campus by Prof. Raja GuhaThakurta of UC Santa Cruz.
It runs an hour and a quarter, but it’s so packed with interesting ideas, pictures, and simulation videos of galaxy collisions, etc that you don’t notice the time. Give up that Seinfeld rerun and give it a try. Google Tech Talk videos like this one are offered in several resolutions to match your PC and web connection speed–use 720 HighDef if you can. Just make sure you view it full-screen.
Here’s the link!: Our Place in the Cosmos
Continuing Astronomical League programs, I’ve started taking images of Arp’s Peculiar Galaxies, which actually more often than not groups of galaxies acting oddly because of mutual gravitation effects. Here’s number 227 (from Arp’s list of 338; 34-minute monochrome exposure):
The halos around the galaxy at left are real–they are thin streams of stars and dust around the galaxy proper. “Thin” of course being relative to the galaxies’ size, so in this case some tens of thousands of light-years.
Now, the Arp images being taken in this program are Dual Purpose, since the 40-60 minutes of imaging needed to define an Arp galaxy when using NEKAAL’s 27″ reflector matches the typical time needed to detect a minor planet and to get a first measurement of its motion. Last month bagged 9 new minor planet designations for Farpoint.
M106 was taken with a 60% sunlight moon in the sky//
From the article: “New observations by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope suggest that 55 Cancri e may be wetter and weirder than anyone imagined.”
OK, it’s bigger than earth, cyan in color, and oozes. But does that make it weird? Um, there’s more, so apparently yes.
Read all about it here…
Flat galaxies aren’t strictly flat, as in having zero thickness. They do have thickness. And that’s not really a contradiction: if zero thickness were the only meaning of flat, flat tires wouldn’t be flat either…
No, flat galaxies are simply galaxies of a roughly disk shape, and ones that we happen to see edge-on. (Actually, that’s the only vantage from which you can tell they aren’t perfectly flat.)
So, this year I launched into the Astronomical League’s Flat Galaxy program, taking images of flat galaxies using the big Tombaugh telescope and its ccd camera. My trial attempts were, well, trying:
The Integral Galaxy (so called for its shape) is warped by gravitation from a nearby dwarf galaxy (not seen here). It’s a very nice galaxy, but this image is noisier than it should be, and the star shapes are not really round.
Over this last summer, I got some skills:
The above is NGC 973. This image’s noise is lower, stars are tiny (well focused) and round, structure of the galaxy is obvious, and you can even see several other galaxies in the image–I count 5, your mileage may vary.
By the end of the summer and the end of my flat galaxy program, I had better control of the situation:
The above is the Needle Galaxy, NGC 4565. So last month I sent the Astronomical League 100 (!) flat galaxy images and details about how I took them and more details about geometric measurements I made on them, and then last week I received certificate number 9 for AL Flat Galaxies. But mostly this was imaging (elementary) school for me. My next AL project concerns the more difficult Arp galaxies, some images to be posted soon…
With 200 billion stars in our own galaxy, you might expect the night sky to be lit up like daylight. If you live in a big city, it just might be—but not because of starlight. But just why is it so dark at night? It took astronomers a very long time to figure it out.
Credit: NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
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