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.

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.

Hunter Over the Pool

Down in Florida the cherry blossoms were already coming out on Valentines Day. Here is Orion over the swimming pool in the backyard. There is a little purple splotch to the right of the belt, but that is just a bit of lens glare from the lights.

Orion...Again

Sometimes it seems like I am constantly posting picture of Orion. There is a good reason for that. Orion is one of the most distinctive and cool looking constellations in the northern hemisphere. It is also full of awesome nebulae and is home to some bright red supergiants.

Here, the great hunter is pictured up above some trees with that weird fluffy moss stuff that covers all the trees in Florida.

Palms in Paridise

Palms at Wakulah

After a day spent lying on Cocoa Beach, I spent some time lying on the beach at night. On the way back to the hotel, I found these palms overlooking the parking lot. I think this picture is pretty cool. It looks blurry, but that is just because the trees were blowing in the wind. The weird blue light on the right is from the pool.

I had a wonderful trip to Florida, including to the Space Coast and the Kennedy Space Center. I have many many pictures of all things space that I cannot wait to share. I saw rockets of all shapes and sizes, I saw an actual rocket sitting on an actual launch pad waiting to launch. I saw the pads where the shuttles flew from, I saw the shuttle Atlantis in her natural habitat of the Vehicle Assembly Building. Those are just a few highlights of my visit to Cape Canaveral, and I will talk about them later as I post the pictures.

In this we see Orion almost straight overhead lounging in a Cocoa Beach palm tree. It was neat to see the stars all in a different place because of the latitude. Over on the other coast of Florida where I spent most of my time the nights were a lot darker than I expected, lots of stars.

Tower at the Top

The top of Mt Doug hosts this tower. I took this a month or so ago. Orion is just coming over the hill, Taurus is just below the red light in the center of the frame, and the Pleiades are just above that.

I am currently in Florida, so I am going to be making short posts for the next week or so. I went out last night and tools some cool pictures, and I plan to do the same tonight. I am going to wait until I get back home to post them so that I can use my large computer screen to edit the pictures.

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!

An Oddly Flat Sea

A 30 second exposure of the beach yeilded this last night. There were little waves, and the several broke during the exposure making the ocean look really weird.

This photo is looking towards Orion. It is really neat how over the course of the year the stars move around in the sky so much. I remember just a few months ago, Orion would just be rising at 9 or 10 o'clock. Now it is up when the sun goes down. 

It is no small wonder that the "march of the heavens" so captivated the ancients. Their slow progress through the sky is somewhat comforting.

Last night down at the observatory we took our first look at Mars. It is not a particularly interesting thing to look at. It is just a small reddish dot, but it is still pretty cool.

As we speak there is a new rover on its way to the red planet. Curiosity will land in August. There is a link to the mission page in the links section. 

I was thinking about this last night. Even in my memory it is incredible how far our understanding of Mars has come. I remember when Spirit and Opportunity landed 7 and a half years ago, how amazing it was. Their 3 month planned mission was historic. Now, pictures of the martian surface are commonplace and easily recognizable by just about anyone, and still one of those rovers is still trucking away soon to be joined by Curiosity. Pretty cool if you ask me. Anyways, this picture doesn't even have Mars in it, so I don't know how I got talking about this. Tonight I am going to go out to capture an Iridium Flare. I got one last night, but it was just a little wimpy one, and it peaked right in between two exposures. The one I am going to try to get tonight is going to be about as bright as a crescent moon when it peaks...should be good!

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.

Our Friend Orion

Orion

The great Orion appearing over the Salish Sea. The streak across the picture is from an airplane. I went out to try and take a picture of an Iridium flare. There is a constellation of about 80 satellites called Iridium. They have  extremely reflective antennae, and when the sunshines at a certain angle on them the get really really bright for a few seconds. At Heavens Above in the links section on the right, there are predictions for when and where they will happen. I set up my camera to get this one, but I had my aim off by about 45 degrees. I saw it happen, but alas, I did not catch it. They are really cool so I am going to keep trying.

The Hunter Stuck in a Tree

There are three now familiar constellations in this picture. Orion at the bottom left, one leg stuck behind a tree, is the most easily recognizable.

Taurus the Bull is the sideways V near the center of the picture. Not really a constellation but an open cluster of stars, the Pleiades are the blue patch up and to the right of Taurus.

Clusters of stars like the Pleiades are groups of young, very hot and bright stars. They are around a hundred million years old, middle aged for their type.

Clusters like these form in dark nebulas, otherwise known as molecular clouds or stellar nurseries. The dark nebulae are regions of dense molecular hydrogen in interstellar space. Dense is a relative term. There are about 10 atoms per cubic centimeter in these clouds, as compared to about 30,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms per cubic centimeter on earth.

Nevertheless, they have a huge volume, and they are dense enough to block out most of the stars behind them. We can see through them at longer wavelengths such as radio. Just by themselves these clouds are not particularly exciting. What happens when something compresses them is very exciting.

There are many ways these clouds can be compressed. A nearby star could go supernova, and the shock-waves could compress it, or it could run into another cloud, or several other variations of that theme.  When the cloud is compressed, it becomes denser. The densest bits of the cloud start to form into a solid mass of molecules. This intensifies the gravity of the new ball of gas, and starts sucking more and more stuff into it.

Every time an atom hits it, it releases energy in the form of heat, and also contributes further to the gravitational pull. Eventually, these balls of gas start spinning, and form a disk. At this point they are proto-stars. These proto-stars suck the inside of the cloud into themselves, and eventually breach a hole in the side of the cloud, letting us see in. Some of these areas are just enormous with thousands of stars being born, while others are much smaller.

After a certain point, planets start forming out of the disk surrounding the proto-star, and once the material that makes up the star has squished in to a certain point, the temperature at the center reaches millions of degrees due to the intense pressure, and eventually hydrogen fusion starts to take place, producing helium.

It is at this point that it is considered a star. For your typical star, like our own, this process takes around 30 million years. That seems like a long time, but in astronomical scales it is not very long at all when you consider that a star can last for billions of years.

Back to this photo. I took it on the 12th of January, at around 9.30pm from Mt Tolmie. The exposure was 333 seconds or 5 and a half minutes.

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....