For Christmas I was given a green 200 mW laser! A couple of AAA batteries later and the laser can point out any star or object in the night sky, with the beam clearly visible the entire way up to infinity. Its the epitome of an Astronomer’s toolkit, at least in my eyes, and it got me thinking about all the amazing things you can see in the sky right now. It also makes me feel like I’m brandishing a light saber, and sadly it’s about as close as I’ll ever get. First off, Venus is back in the evening...
Saturday Morning, 4:47am, Launch: Confirmed. SpaceX launched another successful resupply mission to the International Space Station this morning. The successful launch comes in the wake of the Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explosion back in late October, and is the fourth mission as part of a 12+ Mission contract with NASA worth 1.6 Billion dollars. The Dragon capsule is expected to rendezvous with the ISS early Monday morning, where Astronauts will use the Canada arm to grab it and connect. The capsule will remain connected to the ISS for more than four weeks as ISS astronauts unpack supplies and repack completed experiments...
The Hubble Space Telescope’s just had its 25th Anniversary of bringing us the greatest Astronomical images the world has ever seen. To celebrate, the Hubble team revisited one of Hubble’s most iconic images by pointing the cameras at the Eagle nebula once more. The image, dubbed the ‘Pillars of Creation’ show columns of star forming gas and dust, where the proverbial ‘magic’ happens. But let’s begin with the old image, taken in 1995, so we can compare the differences between then and now. And now the newest image. Quite a striking difference. Like a fine wine, Hubble has only gotten...
NASA is sure to start selling trips to these fabulous space destinations! The only problem is that we have no way of getting there, or more importantly, back home. Still the posters give a great homage to the ‘see America’ posters of the 1920s, and they sure make me want to visit. Kepler 186f is a habitable zone planet around a red dwarf star, meaning it could support liquid water. If any plant life forms on this planet, it would photosynthesize differently, potentially giving it a red colour palette. HD 403007g is a planet with 8 times the mass of Earth....
When I became a Masters student, a big part of the reason I liked the supervisor I had was that she studied M31: The Andromeda Galaxy. Since I was young I was obsessed with finding this galaxy in a telescope, and I will never forget the night I first found it. Seeing that strange fuzzy patch, photons that had travelled for 2.5 Million years through space, it was my first ever experience with ‘time travel’. Consequently, it makes sense that I am excited about a recent Hubble release: the highest resolution photo of the Andromeda Galaxy Ever taken. Let’s start...
I thought Hurricanes had powerful winds. The strongest wind ever recorded was a gust up to 400 Kph near a tropical cyclone in Australia. But Earthbound wind has nothing on Galactic wind. Around the time when our ancestors were just learning to walk upright, the core of the Milky Way Galaxy unleashed a blast of gasses and material at 2 Million Kph. Millions of years later, we see the aftermath of this eruption as two massive bubbles of material blown out above and below the galactic centre, at least 30,000 Light Years tall! The lobes were discovered by the...
A lot of the data that comes from Space can be called art. Though if you’ve ever seen raw Astronomical data, it’s anything but. It takes a talented artist to bring out the detail in the photo and make it truly beautiful! In the case of large missions like the Cassini Spacecraft, there are a plethora of scientists and artists alike making the most of the data. Especially with Cassini, I always get the feeling it’s a professional photographer taking the photos. The lighting, composition, and other photographic buzzwords are all exceptional, as if it was staged by someone saying...
You might think simulating the entire Universe is difficult, and it is, but not for the reasons you would think. The Physics is actually somewhat straightforward. We know the math behind star formation, Gravity, and fluid dynamics, and throwing in a few other effects is not too bad. The hard part is finding a computer powerful enough to do the calculations in a reasonable amount of time. Think about it. Imagine having a universe of 100 Billion ‘particles’ used for a simulation. Each particle has a starting point, and that it pretty easy to do. But then for every...
You may know that the Universe is much more complex than we know. If you look at nearly anything in a different wavelength of light, new details can pop up that you’d never expect. Astronomers today use all the wavelengths of light to study the Universe. Even the most seemingly boring objects can come to life in different wavelengths. As a prime example, take the Moon. Now I don’t find the Moon boring at all, in fact it’s quite interesting and has a lot of influence on the Earth, so its fun to talk about. But when we look at...
Hey, it matters to us humans! A new year, a new start, new goals, dreams, desires, and most of all, hope. Hope that the year ahead will be as good as or better than the one before. The new year is pretty astronomically insignificant though. The Sun orbits the Earth in 365.25 days. We’re just in a different place in space!
