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.

Airplanes in the Sky

This is once again from my yard in Courtenay where the skys are clear and dark. An airplane bound for Asia cuts across the picture.

Garden Under the Stars

The beautiful night sky over my moms beautiful garden in Merville.

Getting out of the city is so nice. The sky is just so amazingly clear and full of stars.

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.

Sea Monster

Believe it or not, this beast can be found in a playground not far from where I live. It is huge and made of concrete and very strange. Also strange about this picture is that I cannot figure out what stars are which. I know that I took it to the southeast at about 7:30 pm on the 14th of January, but apart from that, I am not sure. 

I have tried to work it out, but to no avail. If anyone can figure it out it would be nice. I keep thinking I have found it, but then there is something that doesn't make sense. Clouds covering half of the sky doesn't help either.

Until the weather improves, and I can get some new photos, I am going to throw in some old ones from several years ago in with the more recent shots. I hope the clouds clear off sometime soon...

A Saanich Moonrise

Moonrise

This is a timelapse of the moonrise on the 11th of January this year. I set my camera to take a 30 second exposure every minute for about an hour and a half. 

At the very beginning the moon appears very orange, as it was that night. It was just a few days after full moon so it was very bright. If you watch to the left of the moon you cans see a few stars rising in tandem with the moon. You can see how star trails are formed with the motion of the planet causing the stars to slide across the sky.

Little Streaks in the Sky

I took this picture over the Christmas holidays in Courtenay, up-island. Unfortunately, there was a power line going right across where I took the picture. I think the red color comes from a car that went by on the road. It was a little bit misty, and the lights just turned it all red. The exposure was almost 24 minutes long.

Just out of the picture to the top left is the north celestial pole, where all the stars appear to rotate around. Polaris, is near enough to the celestial pole that we see it as the north star, although it is a little bit off. Over the course of centuries and millennia, the north star moves as the earth precesses in its orbit. In just a thousand years, there will be no bright star near enough to the north celestial pole to call it the north star.

The Northwestern Sky

The Northwestern Sky

Looking to the north west from Mt Tolmie in Victoria, this is what you would have seen at 7.30 in the evening last night. One of the more prominent stars in the frame is Deneb. If you go up from the bright star just abobe the tallest tree, and follow it almost strait towards the top of the picture, the next bright star is Deneb.

Deneb is in the constellation Cygnus, and is in fact the constellations brightest star. It is also one of the corners of the Summer Triangle, made up of Deneb, Vega, and Altair, all bright stars hight in the summer sky.

To make the photo I used my lens set at 18mm, f/5.0, ISO 400, and an exposure length of 58 seconds.