Artsy Fartsy Me

This one is a bit more of an artsy shot than an astrophoto, but I think it is worth sharing with the world.

This was a magnificent sunset last week from the top of Mt Tolmie. It was one of the more spectacular sunsets I have ever seen, not the least because it took place during a rare Victoria thunderstorm.

Dark to Light

This one is a bit different. I found a program that stitches together panoramas with the click of just a few buttons. I took this photo quite a while ago now from the top of Mt Tolmie at sunset. If you click on the image it will get a lot bigger. The image spans just over 180 degrees of sky looking from the still bright west to the already dark east.

Jupiter and Venus, Together

This photo is from the 6th of this month. I took it from near the top of Mt Tolmie. I wanted to try and get a photo with Mercury as well, but the clouds completely blocked it from view. In the picture are Jupiter and Venus. Venus is the lower and brighter of the two white dots. Venus is just nearing its greatest eastern elongation which it will reach on the 27th of March. That is the date when it is the farthest away from the sun in the evening sky, and also the day that it will remain above the horizon the longest. After the 27th it will start appearing closer and closer to the sun until on the 5th and 6th of June it makes a transit of the sun.

Looking through a telescope, you can see that Venus looks like a quarter moon. As the days go on, past the 27th, it will star turning into a sliver and getting smaller and smaller until on the day of inferior conjunction, we cannot see any of the planet illuminated. After that throughout the summer it will get fatter and fatter until on the 15th of August it will be half illuminated again, this time visible in the hours before sunrise. As it continues on, it will continue to get more and more lit up, but it will be going around the sun and getting further and further away and it will get dimmer and closer to the sun once again.

Even with the most advanced telescopes Venus is just a featureless dot. The atmosphere is so thick that to see through it you need to send a space craft there and use radar to map the surface. Venus is so hot and the atmosphere so thick that on the surface there is the same pressure as being a kilometer beneath the ocean on earth at a temperature of  460 degrees celsius. If you had infinite money and resources, you could build cities that floated on the ocean of air at 50km above the surface where the temperature and pressure are just about the same as on earth. Unfortunately, the atmosphere is also made of about 96% carbon dioxide.

The Red Sunset

This is the sunset I mentioned when in the post "A Red Ball in a Tree, a Bike, and some Snow?". I took this in 2008 in Comox BC.

I am currently in Cocoa Beach right now just a few miles south of Kennedy Space Center. Driving in we saw the Vehicle Assembly Building peeking over the curvature of the earth from many miles away. From the pier at Cocoa Beach I could see one of the launch towers at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

I am so excited to go on the tour tomorrow.

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. 

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.

Goddess of Love

Venus, the Goddess of Love

Sometimes called the evening star, Venus is one of the brightest things in the sky. In fact, only the sun and the moon are appear brighter. Since the orbit of Venus is smaller than the earth, it always appears near the sun. As it approaches the points in its orbit where it appears furthest away from the sun, it is the first "star" that appears in the night sky, or the last to disappear before sunrise, depending on witch side of the sun it is on.

Currently Venus is the up in the evening for an hour or two after the sun sets. It will soon reach its greatest elongation, and start moving closer and closer to the sun. In June Venus will pass directly between the earth and the sun, an event next occurring in 2117. 

For the photo I used a half second exposure at f/4.0 and ISO 400. The view is to the WSW over the Strait of Juan de Fuca at about 6:45pm on the 15th of January this year.