The Moon of Yesternight

I know that I have posted a fair few pictures of the moon before, but this one is a little different. This is a composite of photos I took last night with the 32 inch telescope at UVic. The field of view is very small on the telescope, so to cover the entire moon I needed to take about 30 photos. When combined, that produced a picture that is 14000x11000 pixels. To put that in perspective, the image is 154 megapixels! If my calculations are correct, that means that the picture would be about 12 feet wide if it was displayed at the full resolution zoomed to the real size.

The image here is much smaller as I had to compress the file to upload it. If anyone is interested, I could send the full resolution picture so that you can take a look. It is cool to be able to poke around on the moon with it.

Earthshine

This is a shot where you can see earthshine. There is a the bright crescent moon, but the rest of the moon is visible, not entirely black. This is actually light from the sun which has reflected off the earth and is lighting up the moon!

The Great Crescent

You can guess what this is a picture of I am sure. I don't think I really need to write anything about this one. I love the moon...

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.

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.

Just Past Full

Lots of moon pictures these days!

Fly Me to the Moon

This I think is a very cool picture. I was looking through the finder scope of the 32 inch with my camera, and I saw a black moving thing on the moon. I snapped the shutter and this is what I saw! It was only lined up with the moon for about half a second, so it is super lucky that I got it. The only unfortunate thing is that i also got part of the crosshairs from the finderscope in the picture as well.

Open to the Moon

Staring at a nearly full moon last night.

Da Moon

This is the moon. I took this through my 4 inch refracting telescope with my camera attached to it. Fun stuff.

Not Running Away Again!

As you can probably see, this is a picture of the moon. That in itself is not super interesting. This picture was taken with my own camera. Again not super interesting as all of the photos here fit that description. What is interesting is that my camera had no lens attached to it when this photo was taken, save for the 32 inch telescope at UVic.

My very wonderful prof got an adaptor so that my, or any other camera can be attached to the telescope. This is very very cool. With the moon all it does is give you a close up view, but with faint objects, it opens whole new worlds of photographic possibility.

The next few posts will be from my first night trying out this adaptor, and while they will not be anything spectacular, I think they are very cool.

A Bright Pre-Easter Surprise

An elusive iridium flare. Nearly as elusive as posts to my blog have become!

This one was a kinda wimpy one as flares go, only reaching a brightness of -2 or so, about the same as the brightest planet in the sky right now, Venus.

It was good natured enough to take place right near the big dipper as you can see. It also avoided the nearly full and very bright moon which was lighting up the clouds.

I took this at the astronomy open house from the roof of the Bob Wright Building at UVic. Since the satellite takes about 45 seconds to go from invisible to peak brightness and back to invisible, and it is moving across the sky very quickly it is very hard to take a picture of a flare and time it right so you get the whole thing in the exposure.

If you look closely you can see that I bumped the camera a little as I was taking my hand from the shutter. It gave the left bit a little bit of a wobble.

I have some new photos to share, and after my exam tonight I may go out and capture some more if it stays clear. I hope to be back on track with posting now.

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.

The Very Not Full Moon

That folks is, wait for it, a piece of the moon! The Apollo missions brought back a total of 842 pounds of moon, and at the Kennedy Space Center, they have a few little pieces on display. Most are encased like this one, but they do have this one little bit that you can touch. I touched it. It was awesome. I have touched the moon. Crazy stuff.

Kitty Hawk

One of the great spacecraft of the Apollo program. This particular command module is that of Apollo 14. I saw it down in Florida at the KSC. This capsule was launched on the 13th of January 1971 and spend almost exactly 9 days in space. 2 days and 18 hours were spent orbiting the moon. Apollo 14 was the first mission to have an extended stay on the moon, the astronauts spending 9.5 hours outside the lunar module on the lunar surface over the two day period.

It was on this flight that Alan Shepard became the only person to have played golf on another planet. He brought with him two golf balls and a makeshift 6 iron and hit both balls off into the distance. There is a video of him doing this actually.

Bright and shiny at launch, re entry and splashdown in the Pacific gave the burnt up color to the capsule, mainly because it actually was burnt up a bit in the atmosphere, reaching hundreds of degrees as the atmosphere tried to burn it up. It is incredible to see the actual spacecraft that went all the way around the moon...Amazing.

A Bright Moon

The full moon through a tree late last year. You can see the clouds glowing in the light of the moon. The moon was so bright that night that while waiting for an exposure of a few minutes, I sat on a bench reading a book to pass the time. The other pictures I have of that night show it looking like daytime, but with stars. The full moon is a very bright light in the sky.

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.

Man Over Moon

I took this the same night I took the pictures of the legislature buildings. This handsome gentleman is Captain Vancouver the explorer. The crescent moon is visible between his legs.

I am headed to Cape Canaveral tomorrow. I am so excited. I am going to go to the home of NASA and see some of the most incredible machines ever devised by humankind. A big thanks to G+G for making this possible.

Moon Over the River

This is a sepia-fied photo of the crescent moon over the river by my house. The white balance was all funny in the original, so I had to switch it. 

The moon looks weird in this picture. It has what seems like two lobes to it. That is because it was about half full. 

I did not have a chance to do a post last night as I was in transit all day from Victoria to Florida. I am here now and I hope to be able to do some cool photos where I am here. Yay for waking up in Florida!

Fly Me to the Moon

This is one of my favorite pictures I have taken of an airplane. I figure that since I am on my way to the states to take a flight, I would post this now.

I took this at CFB Comox several years ago. The plane in the picture is an American P-3 Orion Maritime patrol aircraft.

I might add more to this post later, but for now, enjoy!

A Funny Line and and Extra Dot

A first.

This was the first picture I ever tried to take of the night sky on January 20th, 2008. Although the full moon made some weird effects on in the photo, all the weird pink and green areas, I think I actually did capture something pretty cool. There is a bright line just to the right of center, about two thirds of the way up. If you look at it closely you will see that it looks very much like a satellite. I tried to figure out what satellite it was, but that proved somewhat difficult.

It was a 15 second exposure, so that is about the right distance for a satellite to move in that time. It is markedly brighter at the end of the trail though, so It could be part of an Iridium Flare, which I described in the post "Our Friend Orion". It could also be a meteorite, or just a weird distortion, or a cat hair or, well anything really. I think a satellite is the most likely though.

Another interesting thing about this shot is that if you look closely to this photo, and any others I have posted of this part of the sky, there will be an extra "star" in the sky. If you look just above the little streak, there are two bright dots, the bottom, orangey one is in fact a little planet we call Mars. The same little planet is currently rising here at about 8:30 pm. I have tried to go out and catch the God of War, but the clouds have really not been too co-operative.