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.

A Beautiful Alignment

I took this on saturday night...well sunday morning actually at around 3:30. In the picture is the moon shining bright in the center. Lined up to either side of it however is what makes this image special. Up and to the right is the bright dot that is Jupiter, and below to the left is the bright dot that is Venus. The all lined up for a very spectacular show. Also in this picture is Taurus, just to the right of Jupiter.

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.

Stars in the Sky

Looking up at the sky in Florida you still see the same stars for the most part. There are some that are missing, and some that you cannot see from here. The main difference is that the major constellations are all in a different place. 

Here is the Pleiades, guarded as always by Taurus. Their light coming to us across trillions of kilometers of space just so that we can take pictures of them. 

Go Stars! (Not the ones from Dallas, Go Canucks Go!)

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.

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.

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.