A Happy Family

I have been taking a ton of photos these past few weeks, and I have a huge backlog of them. I though I would do a bit of a different post today and put up a few photos instead of just one. Here are Photos of five of the planets in our solar system.

First up is Venus, the second planet from the sun. I took this picture with my little 4 inch scope on the night of the meteor shower recently. You can clearly see the fact that it is a crescent, being lit from the sun from the left side of the picture.

Next up is Uranus. This is one of the gas giants far out in the outer solar system. You can see a few little dots just to the right of the planet. Those are some of its moons. Most of Uranus' moons are named after characters from Shakespeare and Alexander Pope.

The next planet out is Neptune. Here we can see Neptune and its largest moon Triton. Neptune is the 8th and last planet from the sun.

One in from Uranus is Saturn, the 6th planet, and most peoples favorite. Unfortunately I never had a chance to take a really good photo of Saturn although I did see it looking excellent many times. On a good night you can see storms on the planet, and the gap between the rings and the planet itself!

I have put Jupiter, the 5th planet from the sun last because I think this is the best picture. I took this yesterday morning. You can clearly see the different bands of color on the planet itself, as well as the four moon all on one side at that moment.

To complete the set, we still need Mars, Mercury and Earth, the 4th, 1st and 3rd planets respectively. I have never had a chance to image Mars or Mercury through the telescope, and we are on earth, but I have captured them in pictures.

Here is Mars, the red planet, now with curiosity exploring away on its surface. This is an ancient photo of mine, but it is the only one I could find with Mars in It which is weird. Mars is the reddish dot high in the center of the frame.

And last but not least in any way is Mercury. Saturday morning was in fact the first morning I have actually taken a picture of Mercury. The little rocky planet is hard to capture because it is so small and close to the sun. If you go straight up from the top of the mountain - Mt Baker on planet earth to be exact - and slightly to the left up to just before the sky starts turning blue, you will find a tiny white dot which is Mercury.

Out of all of these planets, I still think that my favourite is a planet we call Earth.

And that concludes todays post. I hope you enjoyed!

Slipping into the sun

Here is another view of that spectacular alignment of last weekend. This was taken just as it was about to slip away into the sunrise at about 5:30 in the morning.

Pictured are Venus at the bottom left, the moon in the middle, and Jupiter at the top right.

This one I took from the top of Mount Tolmie on my way to bed. I tend to like to get to bed before the  sun rises just on a matter of principle.

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.

A Very Long Flight

The sun. This picture is from just before second contact when Venus becomes entirely on the surface of the sun. Venus is most of the way onto the sun at about the 11 o'clock position. The image of the sun is from a projection telescope. The telescope is focused so that the image appears on a projection screen about a foot behind the telescope. It is one of the best ways to view the sun. One reason is you do not risk burning your eyes because of improper filtering, and the other is that it lets many people look at the image at the same time. The large smudgy bits are clouds, and the little black dots are sunspots.

To give you an idea of scale, the small sunspots you can see are around the size of the earth. Venus appears much bigger, but in fact it is just slightly smaller than earth. The reason it appears so large is that it is much closer than the sun. It is just over 1/4 of the distance from here to the sun, or about 30 million kilometers. That doesn't really mean much to us, but to give a sense of the distance, it would take an airliner 4.8 years to cover that distance. It takes light about 2 minutes to do the same trip.

Transit For Real

I took this photo just a few hours ago during the transit of Venus. I talked about it in my previous post, but here is a picture of what it actually looks like.

Venus is the big round dot on the sun. The little dots are sunspots.

I will write more later, I am exhausted at the moment.

A Little Black Dot

I don't actually have a picture for this post. I am instead going to write a bit about the events of tomorrow, June 5th. As I wrote yesterday, there happens to be a transit of Venus occurring this tuesday. This is one of the rarer astronomical events that we can easily predict and observe.

A transit is very simple. As seen from earth, the planet Venus passes directly in front of the sun. We see a small black dot which slowly moves across the face of the sun. It is very much like a very tiny solar eclipse. During the 2004 transit, Venus was in front of the sun for around 6 hours, and the same will be true this time around.

The transits happen on a 243 year cycle with pairs of transits 8 years apart, separated by first 121, then 105 years. The first transit to be predicted was the 1631 transit. Kepler predicted it in 1927, but his calculations were not sufficiently accurate to determine that it would not be visible from Europe. As such, there were no observations made during that transit. He had predicted that in 1639 there would be a near miss and not an actual transit.

Horrocks fiddled with the calculations and deduced that there would in fact be a 1639 transit. He and his friend Crabtree both observed the transit, but due to clouds and sunset, they were only able to observe a very short part of the transit.

The next pair of transits was 1761 and 1769. For these transits, observers were sent all across the world. The reason for this was that Halley had predicted that if you observed the transits from widely spaced points on the earth, one could use parallax to determine the distance from the earth to the sun. The earth is large enough that Venus takes a different path across the sun depending on where you observe from.

At the time, they had calculated relative distances to the planets, but they did not have a baseline to determine actual hard distances. The distance they came up with was 153,000,000km plus or minus 1,000,000. That is very close to the currently accepted 149,600,000km. During the pair of transits in 1874 and 1882, the distance to the sun was refined to 149,590,000km plus or minus 310,000km.

Anyhow, the transit on tuesday kicks off at around 3pm and goes on until sunset here in Victoria. If anyone is in Victoria there are many options if you would like to take a look at the transit yourself. The Royal Astronomical Society of Canada is putting on several observing sites around the city, the DAO out on Observatory Hill is having an open house and finally UVic is putting on a big open house on the 5th floor of the Bob Wright Building.

We will have welders glass and solar sunglasses to observe unaided, as well as several projection telescopes to look at projected image of the sun. There will also be several solar telescopes to look directly at the sun. We will also have our 32 inch telescope running looking at stars and other planets which we can see during the daytime. If the weather fails we will also have our projector set up to watch feeds of the transit from somewhere sunny...

Cross your fingers for clear skies!

My Apologies

My apologies for my absence for the last while. If anyone has been checking for new posts I apologize fore there not being any. I am going to make a real effort to get back into doing a post every day.

This photo is from much earlier in the year when Venus and Jupiter were cozy together in the sky. The reason why I chose this image for today is that on tuesday of this coming week, the planet Venus will transit in front of the sun as seen from earth. This is a very rare occurrence. The transits happen in pairs 8 years apart. These pairs though are separated by more than 105 years. The next time to see a transit happen will be 2117 and before 2004 it was 1882. More on this tomorrow

Another interesting event in the next couple days is a partial lunar eclipse visible from most of North and South America as well as East Asia.

On another note entirely, congratulations to SpaceX on their more than successful flight last week. More on that later as well.

Goddess in a Tree

It was sure a beautiful night on Friday. After I rushed up and took the photo in the last post, I set up my telescope to take a look at Saturn. I also took some photos of Venus.

Venus is in the tree in on the right. A car going by left some cool light streaks on the left and the city lights make some interesting colors in the sky, I quite like this photo if I do say so myself. The trees look so weird and alien...

Welcome Back...Again

As you may have noticed, I have been very bad at posting lately. I have no good excuse except that this is the final week of the final term of second year university, and I am taking the maximum number of courses my university allows you to take. Tomorrow is the last day of class however, and after that is easter, and after that is all done, I am going to really try to make sure I get something up every day. The thing is that I like to take my time and write a good post. But as I just said in the previous sentence, that takes time, and time is not something I have had a lot of recently. So here is to onwards and upwards, and more frequent posts!

This is a photo from the 6th of March. A few posts ago, I posted a picture from about 20 minutes earlier. In this shot, the sun's light had almost completely gone, and the lights of the city were taking up their duty of lighting up the sky. Through the light clouds you can see a few stars, but the main features are Venus and Jupiter. Of course by now, Jupiter is much lower in the sky than Venus, and drops below the horizon just a short time after the sun sets.

Tonight at the UVic observatory open-house, we will have lots to look at, provided those pesky clouds clear off...The moon is almost full which is a bit annoying as it eats up all the faint objects in the sky because it is so bright. Then there is Jupiter for a little bit, Venus, Mars, Orion's Nebula, an coming up a bit later is Saturn. Pretty soon it will be high enough to get a good look at it, and it will keep getting higher all summer, replacing Jupiter as the best big planet to look at.

This year will be a good one for the observation of Saturn. The last few have not been great because when the planet is in our night sky, the rings were directly edge on  to our view. Now though they are not, and they are getting more and more tilted every day. They will be the most tilted to us around 2017.

I will do my best to keep posting regularly, but no guarantees for the next couple weeks.

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.

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.

Weird and Wonderful

The forest in Florida is much different than around here. It is filled with all sorts of weird and wonderful plants.

Just a few hours ago I went out and got some pictures of tonight's Moon-Jupiter-Venus all close together thing. Pretty cool If I do say so myself.

Last night the three were in almost a straight line and tonight the crescent moon is right beside Jupiter.

A Star of Many Names

 

Venus

From the top of Mt Doug, there are spectacular views, daytime, nighttime, clear, or cloudy it is always a nice place to look out from. In this shot, looking a little to the south of southwest, we can see the bright "star" Venus shining away above the clouds. 

The other bright spot up and to the left on the other side of the photo is Diphda, or Beta Ceti, or Deneb Kaitos, or about 15 other names depending on the catalogue you look in. It just so happens to be an orange giant about 96 light years from here. If it was placed at the same distance away from us as our own sun, it would be about 145 times as bright as the sun. This may sound like a lot, but the brightest star we have found, if it was the same distance from us as the sun would be 8,700,000 times as bright. 

The photo is from the 17th of January. It is a 30 second exposure.

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. 

Thousands of Lights

The Moon and Venus over the Legislature

Some things don't need much in the way of explanation. The legislature you can find, the moon you can see, and Venus is the little dot just above the roof underneath and to the left of the moon. That is all there is to say about that.

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.

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....