This post is a collaboration with my good friend Bob Wegner, a professional musician, amateur astronomer, and genuinely good person. With the New Horizons spacecraft passing Ultima Thule on New Year’s eve 2019, Bob and I noticed that Queen guitarist and astronomer Brian May was on hand for the live event, playing a newly-written song to mark the event. Bob and I often talk about astronomy, as I’m always interested in his perspective as an enthusiast, while he’s equally interested in my opinion as a professional. We decided to take this event and write about it from two perspectives. For...
Mars is a planet wide desert with underground and polar cap water, but it’s general arid environment and occasional wind give rise to dusty weather events such as tornado-like dust devils and local dust storms. Every so often, one of these little dust storms expands and becomes a planet wide phenomena, and in early June this is exactly what happened. So what does it mean for our rovers and orbiters? Global dust storms are a recurring phenomenon on Mars, and happen regularly about the planet regardless of season. Every 3-4 Martian years (6-8 Earth years) one of these smaller storms...
I really enjoy looking at images of the Sun from one of the several round-the-clock monitoring systems. It’s fascinating that the public can get access to almost real time images of the Sun and see what’s going on in several wavelengths. I’ve always hoped to see what other stars look like in the future, and today, that future is one step closer. Here’s a brand new picture of another star! This is a real image of distant star π1Gruis, a star 350 times as massive as the Sun, in the southern hemisphere constellation Grus. The star is 530 light years...
Although the August 21st eclipse happened about 6 weeks ago, I realized it would take me a long time to edit all the photos I took during my trip. I had over 2000 individual shots of the eclipse alone, taking a single (1/4000 s) shot every 10 seconds, at ISO 100, with my telescope coming out at around f/6. I’ve done a lot of time-lapse photography before, so I thought it would be a routine shot, but I was wrong. Eclipses are much tougher to edit in terms of a time-lapse. But first, the end result of my 10 hours...
Science and technology benefit one another. New scientific theories afford new opportunities to create technology that can harness the laws of nature. Conversely, new technologies allow for better instrumentation and unprecedented efficiency in scientific progress. It’s a continual feedback loop, and some of the greatest challenges in science are solved simply by throwing more resources at them, or in other words, gathering more data. A good example of this is a relatively old problem for astronomers – determining how the spin of a galaxy affects it’s shape. We certainly don’t want for analogies on Earth, spinning pizza, driving on a...
I remember vividly my first astronomy class in university. Winter 2004, only months before the Cassini spacecraft was set to arrive at Saturn after a seven year journey. On several occasions in that class we talked about what we might see when Cassini reached it’s destination. The first dedicated mission to the jewel of the solar system, originally conceived right after the voyager flyby in 1982, would give us a chance to study more than just a planet, but an entire system of interaction between a planet and it’s moons. Beyond that, it included the Huygens probe, to land at...
You’d think I would have learned my lesson by now. Every time I think I’ve seen it all, that I’ve seen every strange phenomenon in space, every unique planet, moon, star, galaxy, every variation, I’m proven wrong. I expect that the order has been established and everything newly discovered will fall into a category with no more unique variation. But here we are again. The close up view of Pan. Pan was photographed only a few days ago by the Cassini spacecraft as it carries out the final months of it’s mission to Saturn. It was revealed to be a...
The challenge of learning astrophotography, and photography in general, is two-fold. There’s the work you do at the eyepiece, requiring you to choose the right settings for the right shot. Then there’s the work you do at the computer screen, the post-processing and adjustments. Ultimately the more important one is the camera work. If you take a bad photograph, no amount of post-processing will help you, even if you are an expert at it. It’s like the image is the cake, and the processing is the icing. No matter how much icing you cover it with, a bad cake is...
The Spring has been a bit slower than I would have liked in terms of astrophotography. I have seen a lot of fantastically clear evenings, but have been plagued by a lack of time and a few technical issues that have kept me from getting the many hours of practice needed to become competent. I did manage to purchase an inexpensive adapter to use my camera with my telescope, giving me a ton of new options for photography, as well as a ton of new challenges. The two main problems I had, and need to address in the future, are...
Have you seen a gorgeous red sky in the evening, just after sunset? If it’s cloudy, the effect becomes even more spectacular. The Sunlight reflects off the clouds and back down to the ground, creating the calm of twilight. Clouds only go so high, so as the Earth continues to turn and we go deeper into nighttime, the glow disappears. But sometimes it sticks around a bit longer. During a rocket launch at dusk, the exhaust trail from the rocket climbs into the upper atmosphere, far above cloud layers. It can reflect sunlight, with the shape of the particles refracting...
