A Very Long Flight

The sun. This picture is from just before second contact when Venus becomes entirely on the surface of the sun. Venus is most of the way onto the sun at about the 11 o'clock position. The image of the sun is from a projection telescope. The telescope is focused so that the image appears on a projection screen about a foot behind the telescope. It is one of the best ways to view the sun. One reason is you do not risk burning your eyes because of improper filtering, and the other is that it lets many people look at the image at the same time. The large smudgy bits are clouds, and the little black dots are sunspots.

To give you an idea of scale, the small sunspots you can see are around the size of the earth. Venus appears much bigger, but in fact it is just slightly smaller than earth. The reason it appears so large is that it is much closer than the sun. It is just over 1/4 of the distance from here to the sun, or about 30 million kilometers. That doesn't really mean much to us, but to give a sense of the distance, it would take an airliner 4.8 years to cover that distance. It takes light about 2 minutes to do the same trip.

Transit For Real

I took this photo just a few hours ago during the transit of Venus. I talked about it in my previous post, but here is a picture of what it actually looks like.

Venus is the big round dot on the sun. The little dots are sunspots.

I will write more later, I am exhausted at the moment.

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.

One Year Ago

I took this photo one year ago today from the beaches at Cinque Terre. This was one of the most amazing sunsets I have ever seen.

The town I shot it from is called Vernazza. This winter Vernazza and some of the other towns along that section of coast were devastated by landslides. The cleanup effort is under way, but it will be a long hard process. You can find more information here.

The sun as you can see is not round in this picture, it is sorta split into two and squished a bit. This is because of the temperature of the air not steadily decreasing with altitude, rather, it decreases at a variable rate, or perhaps even has an inversion in the atmosphere where the temperature increases with hight for a bit. The effect is a mirage.

It is such a nice sight that I will not sully it with any more babble about temperature, instead I want to thank my cousin. This weekend he graciously has let me borrow his telescope. It is a 4 inch refractor, and the really cool thing is that it is motorized and can track the stars as the earth spins. I am hoping to get an adaptor that will allow me to attach my camera directly to the telescope so that I can get some long exposure pictures of things in the sky without them just turning into streaks. So thank you again sir!

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. 

Totem Poles and Golf Balls

This totem pole, one of the tallest in the world stands 127.5 feet tall. It seems to reach for the sky. It might even appear that it reaches for the stars.

If this is what it looks like, it does not even get anywhere close. It would take 995,873,684,210,526 of these totem poles lined up end to end to get to the nearest star.

In space distances are so huge that they are measured in light years. Light travels at 300,000 kilometers per second. It takes about 1 second to get to the moon, 8 minutes from the sun to the earth, and 5 hours 20 minutes to get from the sun to Pluto.

The nearest star, Alpha Proxima, is just under 4 light years from our sun. Our galaxy is around 80,000 light years across. The most distant object we can see with our eyes is 2,000,000 light years away, the Andromeda Galaxy. The most distant object we have detected is 13,200,000,000 light years away.

Space is a really big place.


In my mind, the largest relationship i can fathom is the earth and the moon. You can draw both the earth and the moon to scale on a piece of paper, and put them the right distance apart for that scale. I can fathom that. the relationship between our sun and the nearest star would be like taking a golf ball representing our sun, and then taking another golf ball, representing the nearest star. To put these at the right distance apart for their scale, the balls would need to be about 250km apart. And at that scale the earth is about the size of a grain of sand.

As I said before; Space is a really big place.

Enough about that. I took this photo at Beacon Hill park. Just behind the trees on the left is Polaris. The 2 minute exposure lets you see the motion of the stars start to form a circle.

Sunset from 30,000 Feet

Sunset from 30,000 feet

There is nothing quite like a spectacular sunset. Seeing one from cruise in an airplane seems to make it just a little bit more amazing. I took this photo in November 2008 somewhere over northern Mexico. The bands of color are just spectacular.

The reason the sky is all those fancy colors is actually the same reason that the sky is blue most of the time. It is caused by a property of light called scattering. Radio waves come in lots of different frequencies, each with a different station broadcasting it. The different frequencies mean a different number of waves passing by each second, and since it is traveling at the speed of light, that means that as the frequency changes, the length of the wave changes too.

The exact same thing happens with light too. In fact, radio waves are light, just at a frequency that our eyes cannot detect. Visible light is just a little section of the electromagnetic spectrum. Within that little bit of the spectrum, the wavelengths vary, red being long waves, and violet being short waves.

As light comes into the atmosphere it starts hitting air and dust. Since each color's wavelength is different, some of the colors are able to go around the particles because the waves are bigger than the particle, but others hit the particles and sort of bounce around the sky from molecule to molecule. Blue light bounces around a ton, and comes towards our eyes from every direction, so we see lots of blue. Red, on the other end of the spectrum doesnt hit a lot of things, and just passes right by most stuff, so there it is only coming directly from the sun.

When the sun sets, it is sort of going around the corner of the earth, so the light has to come a lot further through the atmosphere, and so more of the red light gets reflected, so we see lots of red around the sum. In this picture you can see all the colors in order, red, then orange, yellow, green is sort of smushed into yellow, then blue.

Pretty hard to beat a sunset from an airplane I think.

A Red Ball in a Tree, a Bike, and some Snow?

One of the suns many faces. I shot this some years ago just before sundown. There was a spectacular sunset, very very red. I have never seen a sunset so red. Just before the sun disappeared, I got this shot. The shutter speed was 1/4000th of a second, the fastest my then camera could do. I used f/38 to further darken the image. 

I did not edit the picture in any way except to crop it. 

I have always like this picture, even if it is a little abstract.

I dont have much else to say about this picture, so I will tell you about today. It snowed a lot overnight. When I woke up it was to my amazement that there appeared to be a blizzard outside, which to be fair, there was. I have not seen it snow like that in quite a while. Looking online, I found that every single school in the Victoria region was closed...except UVic. Digging further, it turns out that UVic has only closed for weather 2 times in the past 50 years.

Being me, I decided to ride my bike to school. It was quite a lot of fun. The snow is that very powdery snow that is still very good for compacting into snowballs, or into a sheet of very slippy snow on the road. I found that going in a straight line is not too difficult. It is just turning that tends to be an issue. I made it to the campus without incident. I think that if I can ride a bike in it, there is no excuse for missing class. Anyways, good times were had by all.