Cant Escape the Lights

It sure is a lot darker once you get out of the city, but you are by no means free of light pollution. Here, the lights of Courtenay light up the sky from about 20 km away.

A Stunning Milky Way

I apologize for the infrequency of posts of late, but settling into a new semester of school while working is a bit busy. I will try to get back on with posts every day, but no promises.

This is a picture of the Milky Way arching its majestic way across the skies of Merville. I nearly drove my car into the ditch on numerous occasions for the sheer majesty of this celestial river of light.

Green Trees Dark Skys

I think the title says it all in this one. It is neat to see what parts of the trees moved and what parts were still. This is a composite of two photos.

Looking Out

The telescope pointing at a nearly full moon. An airplane crossed the sky in this picture.

Blue Snowball

This is NGC 7662 known also by the slightly more charismatic name the Blue Snowball. It is a planetary nebula like the Dumbell Nebula and the Ring Nebula which I have featured pictures of. This picture was fun to take because I was looking at pictures of planetary nebulae on the internet trying to find ones to take photos of. I saw a picture of this one and decided to take a picture of it. I turned the telescope to it, pressed the shutter, and out popped this picture a 30 second exposure later, looking almost identical to the picture I had seen online.

The Littlest One

Take a look at this. Watch it a few times...See what you can see.


If you saw one of the dots moving you saw the same thing I did. What is that moving dot you might be thinking...I have the answer. That dot is Pluto, once a fully fledged planet, now just a dwarf planet hanging out in the far outer reaches of the solar system.

The two images were taken almost exactly 24 hours apart. The dots that stay still are stars in the background, and anything which moves is in our solar system. This is one of the ways of finding asteroids and Kuiper belt objects. Take images a day or two apart then flip back and forth between them to see if anything moves.

Late Night Heavy Lifting

The Dumbell Nebula. M27. First noted by Charles Messier in 1764, this spectacular planetary nebula lies about 1200 light years away. Contrary to its name, a planetary nebula has nothing to do with planets. They were named that for their disc like appearance in early telescopes, much like planets.

What we now know them to be is a shell of gas ejected by a star as it begins to collapse at the end of its life. The outer layers of the star are thrown off and expand out into space. This particular nebula is expanding at about 17 miles per second. In another few thousand years the gas will expand to the point that it is too diffuse to see and the white dwarf at its center will be all that remains.

In this nebula you can see the bright white dwarf right at the center of the nebula. It is that star which lights up the hot gasses. The different colors come from the different gasses. Red is hydrogen gas and the blue green is mostly oxygen.

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.

Blast from the past

There is nothing particularily special going on in this picture. I took it last december from Mt Douglas Park.

Clearly seen are Taurus and Orion.

Dipper Digging Coal

Here is something a little different. This is the big dipper from the bottom of a little gully in a coal field.

As you can see, the stars are out of focus. That is because I focused on the ground just in front of the camera.

I sat the camera down on the ground and focused it. I pressed the shutter for a 30 second exposure, then shone a flashlight across the gull for a second or two.

I think the effect is kinda neat! I think it looks like the dipper has been digging in the dirt.

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!

Its a Small World After All!

Here is one which is a little bit different. This one is from atop the building which houses the telescope at UVic - The Bob Wright Centere - and is a polar projection of a panorama. Just to the right of the dome in the foreground is actually a dome in the background which houses the old 20 inch telescope. This was taken at about 5:30am. I call it the Tiny Planet Projection.

Ahhh...

The sun coming over the shoulder of Mt Baker just after six one morning not so long ago. A flock of birds flying through the picture and the mountains shadows on the clouds complete this image for me.

A Different Sort of Glob

Here is a globular cluster. We have already seen M13 a few times, but this one is M2. It is somewhat more faint than M13, but it is just as spectacular. This cluster is about 37,000 light years away and is almost 200 light years across. There are nearly 150,000 stars in the cluster.

This second picture is the result of playing with the levels in the picture to get a more accurate representation of the colors. I have yet to figure out how to do it without completely blowing out the center.

A Dome in Action

I posted a panorama of the dome earlier, but this one is sort of an action shot. Here the telescope is pointing at Jupiter in the early morning sky.

Whirlpool Having a Snack

This is my very first and very grainy picture of M51 - the Whirlpool Galaxy. As you can see there are actually two galaxies here, one large face on spiral, and another small one with no real shape. The small one is in fact being subjected to galactic cannibalism, the larger spiral is eating it. Another cool thing about this is that you can see some of the dark dust lanes in the spiral arms of the galaxy.

I am actually writing this on the 18th, I am way ahead, so if I take a better picture in the meantime I will leave this one here, and add the new one to this post.

Dark Sky

There is nothing special in this picture, it is just a shot of the night sky taken at Goldstream park. The sky is a lot darker there than in the rest of the city.

Sisters in the Sky

While not the most spectacular of photos, this is a picture of the stars in the Pleiades. You can see the main stars form a sort of miniature dipper. At least I think they do. If you do it right you can get some really cool pictures of the Pleiades with all sorts of nebulosity, and I am going to give that a try a little later in the year once they start coming up a bit earlier.

I thoght that picture was a bit dull, so here is another. The Pleiades are just down from the top of the picture on the right. You can see a little bit of the blue reflection nebulosity going on in that one! Also in this picture are Jupiter, the moon, and Venus going down the line there.

Ring Number Two

I posted a picture of the Ring Nebula or M57 a while ago, but it was not nearly as nice as I think this one is. Here you can see the different colors of the planetary nebula and even the white dwarf lying at the center. This planetary nebula was created when a red giant star expelled its outer layers of gas in its dying days, forming a shell of gas expanding away from the star.

The Great Hunter

Although it is blurry and grainy and all, one can clearly see that this is the ever wonderful Orion Nebula. Sitting in the middle of the nebula is the group of stars called the Trapezium. These super bright young stars are in the center of the star forming region.

I took this just a few days ago, and it was already getting light out and it was right down on the horizon so it is not nearly as good as it could be, but I will try again later when it is nice and high in the sky.