A Happy Family

I have been taking a ton of photos these past few weeks, and I have a huge backlog of them. I though I would do a bit of a different post today and put up a few photos instead of just one. Here are Photos of five of the planets in our solar system.

First up is Venus, the second planet from the sun. I took this picture with my little 4 inch scope on the night of the meteor shower recently. You can clearly see the fact that it is a crescent, being lit from the sun from the left side of the picture.

Next up is Uranus. This is one of the gas giants far out in the outer solar system. You can see a few little dots just to the right of the planet. Those are some of its moons. Most of Uranus' moons are named after characters from Shakespeare and Alexander Pope.

The next planet out is Neptune. Here we can see Neptune and its largest moon Triton. Neptune is the 8th and last planet from the sun.

One in from Uranus is Saturn, the 6th planet, and most peoples favorite. Unfortunately I never had a chance to take a really good photo of Saturn although I did see it looking excellent many times. On a good night you can see storms on the planet, and the gap between the rings and the planet itself!

I have put Jupiter, the 5th planet from the sun last because I think this is the best picture. I took this yesterday morning. You can clearly see the different bands of color on the planet itself, as well as the four moon all on one side at that moment.

To complete the set, we still need Mars, Mercury and Earth, the 4th, 1st and 3rd planets respectively. I have never had a chance to image Mars or Mercury through the telescope, and we are on earth, but I have captured them in pictures.

Here is Mars, the red planet, now with curiosity exploring away on its surface. This is an ancient photo of mine, but it is the only one I could find with Mars in It which is weird. Mars is the reddish dot high in the center of the frame.

And last but not least in any way is Mercury. Saturday morning was in fact the first morning I have actually taken a picture of Mercury. The little rocky planet is hard to capture because it is so small and close to the sun. If you go straight up from the top of the mountain - Mt Baker on planet earth to be exact - and slightly to the left up to just before the sky starts turning blue, you will find a tiny white dot which is Mercury.

Out of all of these planets, I still think that my favourite is a planet we call Earth.

And that concludes todays post. I hope you enjoyed!

Slipping into the sun

Here is another view of that spectacular alignment of last weekend. This was taken just as it was about to slip away into the sunrise at about 5:30 in the morning.

Pictured are Venus at the bottom left, the moon in the middle, and Jupiter at the top right.

This one I took from the top of Mount Tolmie on my way to bed. I tend to like to get to bed before the  sun rises just on a matter of principle.

4 Little Dots and 1 Big Dot

Here is our long lost friend Jupiter, seen here with all four of his buddies, the Galilean moons. In this picture the order is from left to right Ganymede, Callisto, Io, and Europa.I took this through my little 4.5 inch telescope just a few days ago at about 4 in the morning or so. A friend and I spent the entire night from sunrise to sunset outside taking photos of the stars. It was lovely!

A Beautiful Alignment

I took this on saturday night...well sunday morning actually at around 3:30. In the picture is the moon shining bright in the center. Lined up to either side of it however is what makes this image special. Up and to the right is the bright dot that is Jupiter, and below to the left is the bright dot that is Venus. The all lined up for a very spectacular show. Also in this picture is Taurus, just to the right of Jupiter.

My Apologies

My apologies for my absence for the last while. If anyone has been checking for new posts I apologize fore there not being any. I am going to make a real effort to get back into doing a post every day.

This photo is from much earlier in the year when Venus and Jupiter were cozy together in the sky. The reason why I chose this image for today is that on tuesday of this coming week, the planet Venus will transit in front of the sun as seen from earth. This is a very rare occurrence. The transits happen in pairs 8 years apart. These pairs though are separated by more than 105 years. The next time to see a transit happen will be 2117 and before 2004 it was 1882. More on this tomorrow

Another interesting event in the next couple days is a partial lunar eclipse visible from most of North and South America as well as East Asia.

On another note entirely, congratulations to SpaceX on their more than successful flight last week. More on that later as well.

Welcome Back...Again

As you may have noticed, I have been very bad at posting lately. I have no good excuse except that this is the final week of the final term of second year university, and I am taking the maximum number of courses my university allows you to take. Tomorrow is the last day of class however, and after that is easter, and after that is all done, I am going to really try to make sure I get something up every day. The thing is that I like to take my time and write a good post. But as I just said in the previous sentence, that takes time, and time is not something I have had a lot of recently. So here is to onwards and upwards, and more frequent posts!

This is a photo from the 6th of March. A few posts ago, I posted a picture from about 20 minutes earlier. In this shot, the sun's light had almost completely gone, and the lights of the city were taking up their duty of lighting up the sky. Through the light clouds you can see a few stars, but the main features are Venus and Jupiter. Of course by now, Jupiter is much lower in the sky than Venus, and drops below the horizon just a short time after the sun sets.

Tonight at the UVic observatory open-house, we will have lots to look at, provided those pesky clouds clear off...The moon is almost full which is a bit annoying as it eats up all the faint objects in the sky because it is so bright. Then there is Jupiter for a little bit, Venus, Mars, Orion's Nebula, an coming up a bit later is Saturn. Pretty soon it will be high enough to get a good look at it, and it will keep getting higher all summer, replacing Jupiter as the best big planet to look at.

This year will be a good one for the observation of Saturn. The last few have not been great because when the planet is in our night sky, the rings were directly edge on  to our view. Now though they are not, and they are getting more and more tilted every day. They will be the most tilted to us around 2017.

I will do my best to keep posting regularly, but no guarantees for the next couple weeks.

Passing in the Night

Venus is no longer below Jupiter in the evening sky. Jupiter has overtaken Venus for the time being in their eternal march across the sky. This particular picture is from the night of the 13th, 5 days ago. From Mount Tolmie there was a great view of the two planets sidling up to each-other. I went for the wide angle with this picture, and surprised myself by actually getting all of Orion in the photo along with the planets. The hunter is joined by the head of Taurus, and by the Pleiades to round out the major participants in this piece of stellar art.

Jupiter and Venus, Together

This photo is from the 6th of this month. I took it from near the top of Mt Tolmie. I wanted to try and get a photo with Mercury as well, but the clouds completely blocked it from view. In the picture are Jupiter and Venus. Venus is the lower and brighter of the two white dots. Venus is just nearing its greatest eastern elongation which it will reach on the 27th of March. That is the date when it is the farthest away from the sun in the evening sky, and also the day that it will remain above the horizon the longest. After the 27th it will start appearing closer and closer to the sun until on the 5th and 6th of June it makes a transit of the sun.

Looking through a telescope, you can see that Venus looks like a quarter moon. As the days go on, past the 27th, it will star turning into a sliver and getting smaller and smaller until on the day of inferior conjunction, we cannot see any of the planet illuminated. After that throughout the summer it will get fatter and fatter until on the 15th of August it will be half illuminated again, this time visible in the hours before sunrise. As it continues on, it will continue to get more and more lit up, but it will be going around the sun and getting further and further away and it will get dimmer and closer to the sun once again.

Even with the most advanced telescopes Venus is just a featureless dot. The atmosphere is so thick that to see through it you need to send a space craft there and use radar to map the surface. Venus is so hot and the atmosphere so thick that on the surface there is the same pressure as being a kilometer beneath the ocean on earth at a temperature of  460 degrees celsius. If you had infinite money and resources, you could build cities that floated on the ocean of air at 50km above the surface where the temperature and pressure are just about the same as on earth. Unfortunately, the atmosphere is also made of about 96% carbon dioxide.

Weird and Wonderful

The forest in Florida is much different than around here. It is filled with all sorts of weird and wonderful plants.

Just a few hours ago I went out and got some pictures of tonight's Moon-Jupiter-Venus all close together thing. Pretty cool If I do say so myself.

Last night the three were in almost a straight line and tonight the crescent moon is right beside Jupiter.

King of Gods

Jupiter, King of Gods

To the Romans, Jupiter was the ruler of the gods. The planet Jupiter is indeed somewhat special. It is the largest planet in our solar system both in mass and in radius. Along with Venus and the moon, Jupiter is one of the brightest things in the sky.

Jupiter is big. The radius is more than 10 times that of the Earth. It might sound as though that makes for a lot of potential real estate, but not so; Jupiter is a gas giant. Unlike earth which is made of metals and rocks, Jupiter is made of gas. There is no surface to speak of, we define the size of it by its atmosphere. The gas gets more and more dense as you go down into the planet. Like the earth, exactly what Jupiter's center is like is somewhat of a mystery. There are many theories, many placing a small rocky core with liquid metallic hydrogen surrounding it. Who knows.

In this picture, taken through an 8 inch telescope, you can see two the dark belts currently present on the planet. The dark belts and lighter zones between them are bands of circulation moving in opposing directions. There are very strong winds on Jupiter and the conflicting circulation of the bands causes and keeps alive many storms along their interfaces.

The Great Red Spot is an example of such a storm. It has been observed for centuries, and is kept going because it is wedged between a belt taking the top one way, and a zone traveling the other, that keep it rotating.

Another neat thing about Jupiter is how oblate it is. All planets want to be spheres, but the forces caused by rotation make them bulge out at their equator. Earth is several kilometers bigger around at the equator than around the poles. Jupiter is much much bigger around the equator, to the tune of a few thousand kilometers. You can actually see this in the photo. 

There are all sorts of other interesting things to say about this planet, but I will leave those for now.

Lights in a Sea of Darkness

Sunset is a beautiful thing. Last night I spent a few hours perched on the side of Mt Tolmie watching the sun go down and the stars gradually appear. About half way through this video, at the top of the screen near the center, you can see Venus appear and gradually get brighter. If I had stayed out for another couple hours, Venus would have followed the sun below the horizon, then the moon, and then Jupiter. All were lined up neatly in the western sky. 

This video consists of nearly 200 photos taken every 30 seconds or so from 4.30 pm to 6.30 pm. I wanted to stay longer, but my hands no longer had any feeling in them, and the battery on the camera was succumbing to the cold. 

Four Little Stars

In the year 1610, Galileo Galilei was the first to document the moons of Jupiter. He saw 4 small stars beside the mighty planet. The next night he noticed they had moved. Even over the course of one night he could see them moving. Eventually, he realized that they were moons orbiting the planet as our moon orbits the earth. He was able, after much observation to predict where they would be at a given time with a great deal of precision.

At the time, this was truly groundbreaking stuff. Not only did he prove that there were things out there that could not be seen with the naked eye, he also dealt a huge blow to the geocentric, earth is at the center of everything model of the universe that had been around for thousands of years.

The ability to predict very precisely where the moons would be at a specific time was of great aid to the mapmakers and explorers of the day. They had already been able to determine the latitude they were at, but up until then, longitude was a problem, as they had no way of telling where they were. The moons of Jupiter provided them with a clock, and with that clock, a lot of fancy math and some carful observations, the could pinpoint their location on the earth with great accuracy.

Theses days, we know that in addition to Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, the moons in this picture, there are at least another 60 or so smaller moons floating around Jupiter. These four are by far the biggest however.

Io is the innermost moon. It is the most volcanically active place in the solar system. There are hundreds of volcanoes, any number constantly in eruption. Europa is next out, the surface being ice. It seems like there is an ocean of liquid water underneath the cover of the ice. It is one of the places scientists are most hopeful of finding life. Ganymede is also ice, with the possibility of a little water layer, and Callisto is much like our moon, a solid chunk of frozen rock. All of them are around the same size as our moon.

This picture, taken through a telescope show three of the moons with Jupiter in the center. I had to overexpose the planet to make the moons show up.

Jupiter and its moons are probably my favorite thing to look at in the night sky.

Stargazing in the past few days

It has been a good couple of days for photographing the stars. There have been a few evenings where I have managed to sneak in a few photos. If the weather stays the same as it is right now, I looks like I might just be able to grab some photos tonight as well.

Last night was spectacular around 6:00. Venus was high in the sky, Jupiter was shining away, Orion standing proud. There were some clouds off in the distance, but for a while they didnt bother me. The trouble is that to get any sort of definition to the stars, the exposure needs to be several minutes long, and by the time I had taken three photos, the clouds had rolled in, and it started to snow.

I am hopeful that tonight brings some clear weather as the forecast is not looking so great for the next week or so. Lots of rain....