After the eclipse on August 21st, I took a deep breath. I spent a year focussed on photographing the eclipse, and with that goal complete, what was next? I was in the plateau of the Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming, a couple dozen miles from Yellowstone, and had three days to enjoy with my fiancee. As luck would have it, those days were absent of any clouds, giving me two perfect evenings in clear, dark, dry skies to do some of the best astrophotography of my life. Here’s what I shot. The milky way shot for me is a...
Every so often we see a new set of images from Pluto, giving us a chance to rediscover it multiple times. It’s like we are experiencing the July fly-by over and over again, and each new set of images reveals something new and exciting. I feel the same sense of excitement and discovery each time I see a new image, realizing that it spent 6 hours as a beam of light crossing the 5 Billion Kilometres of the solar system to connect us to the New Horizons probe, a lonely little piece of human ingenuity flying through the darkness. Here...
I’m over-stimulated. I literally can’t take it anymore. These images from Pluto are mind-blowing, but with so many incredible photos released over the past week, I have reached my limit. I can no longer contain my excitement(not that I have in the past). Here are the newest images showing a Pluto we have never seen before. This second image is my favorite. It shows so much depth and detail, and reveals Pluto to be a world, far more than just a boring rock occupying the outer reaches of our solar system. Visible in the image is the layered atmosphere, mountain...
The rendering I’ve been waiting for is finally here! A conceptual video of the flyby of Pluto from far away, leading through closest approach and turning back to see the dark side, all together. This will give you a sense of the motion of New Horizons, and the state of the Pluto system in the Kuiper Belt. The credit goes not just to NASA, but to space enthusiast Björn Jónsson, who created the rendering from the latest Pluto images and data from New Horizons. The strangest part of watching this was the sense of longing I felt as we fly past...
Friday’s science update from the New Horizons team shed some more light on the seemingly endless jaw-dropping discoveries from the Pluto system. We have found a surprising atmosphere and very cold ice flows, contributing to a surprisingly active geology for an object that receives so little sunlight. Seven hours after the craft made its closest approach of Pluto, it turned around and took a backlit shot, revealing two distinct layers of hazy atmosphere at 80 Km and 50 Km above the surface respectively. It looks more like an eclipse photograph from much closer to home, but it shows a hauntingly...
