Wednesday, December 17, 2014

Prismatic Sun 10/27/2014

Last week despite driving 80 miles to the east, trying to outrun an encroaching cloud-bank, I still missed out on the sunset partial eclipse.  Although the main event was obscured, my practice shots taken the day before yielded evidence of an interesting atmospheric sunset phenomenon. 
  As the sun gets lower in the sky it shines through denser layers of atmosphere.  The thicker atmosphere's refractive properties have a prismatic effect on the Sun, allowing its image to be separated into its component colors.  Meaning the sun's red wavelengths set first and the blue-green set last.  The first image shows the red breaking away at the bottom.

   Later as the solar disk was slipping below the horizon the green wavelengths of light were lingering above the Sun.

  
   Over the past week a massive sunspot complex, the size of Jupiter has been making its way across the face of the Sun.  Today I noticed that the sunspots could be seen through thickening clouds and was able to get some photos with the clouds acting as a solar filter.


Lunar Eclipse 10/8/2014



   Left for work over an hour early to try to photograph the lunar eclipse.  Took the first photo as I was loading up the car, before the eclipse started.
5:06 AM
  The first place I looked to set the photo gear was a lakeside park on the shore of America's Great Lake, but 30 mph winds had the beach sand blowing and drifting across the parking lot.  Plan B was to set up a little closer to work, a decision that cost me photos of the beginning of the eclipse, but allowed me to get the more important totality shots right up to the time I needed to be through the gate.
5:32 AM

5:50 AM

6:08 AM

6:10 AM


6:29 AM
  An added bonus to this lunar show was that the planet Uranus was just over a half of a degree from the Moon at the time it was immersed in the Earth's shadow.  It was the first time I was able to photograph the 7th planet from the Sun.  Insert your own middle school joke here.....

   Earlier in the week I took some practice sunset shots for the partial solar eclipse coming up on the 23rd.
leaning light

cropped image

Venus and Jupiter Conjunction 8/18/2014



  After predawn clouds thwarted my efforts to photograph Venus and Jupiter against a sunless sky, I had to go to plan B.  That plan, to photograph them through a telescope, had a much higher degree of difficulty.  It  would yield less aesthetically pleasing images and still require the clouds to part.

  When I got off of work after sunrise the skies were still an impenetrable gray mass. But lighter skies in the direction of home gave me hope. 

  Finding the two planets during the day took some advance preparation.  I figured that the planets being just under 18 degrees from the Sun, would make them nearly impossible to spot through my telescope's low magnification finder scope.  So last night before work I aligned my scope's equatorial mount as close as I could with the Earth's axis of rotation.  That way I could zero in on the target by offsetting from an object that I could locate.  Luckily the Moon was in a much more favorable position for daylight observation and provided a reference point.  
   Through broken clouds I found the Moon just west of due south and 60 degrees above the horizon.  After finding it through the wide-field finder scope and the main telescope, I did some minor tweaking to the finder to ensure they were perfectly aligned.  Then I set the setting circles on the scope's mount to the Moon's coordinates, 4hrs 24mins of Right Ascension and verified declination of +17 degrees.  (Right Ascension is the angular distance measured eastward from the point where the Sun is at the Vernal Equinox, and Declination is the angular measure North (+) or South (-) of the celestial equator which is the projection of the Earth's equator onto the celestial sphere).  Then by swinging the telescope around to Right Ascension 8hr 40min and scanning up to +19 degrees declination I should have seen the planets through the eyepiece in the 1 degree field of view. That is if I had perfectly aligned the scope last night.  Miraculously I was only a little off but close enough that Venus appeared on the edge of the field of view.  A little fine tuning  brought both planets  into the field (Note: I never saw Jupiter but I knew where it was and aimed accordingly) and I was ready to remove the eyepiece and attach the camera.  Here are the results that illustrate the difficulty in finding the two brightest planets when they are in a less than perfect sky just 18 degrees away from the Sun. 
Only Venus is readily apparent 


Increasing contrast of the image makes Venus easier and Jupiter detectable




Inverted color image makes them a little easier to see.


Oddly passing clouds made them stand out more


    The modern equivalent of my 20 year old scope comes with automatic alignment  and a computer database with the positions of all the planets and thousands of stars, galaxies and nebulae.  All you would have to do after the alignment process would be to enter the object you want to observe and stand back as it scans right to it.  Funny thing is that the modern scope, with all that technology, cost the same as my analog telescope did two decades ago.

Astronomy Alert : Venus and Jupiter Close Conjunction Monday 8/16/2014


On Monday morning August 18, 2014, the two brightest planets, Jupiter and Venus will be just one third of a degree apart.  For reference the Moon is one half degree in diameter.  The photograph below was taken just before 6 AM this morning as they rose over Lake Erie, when they were 2 degrees apart. 


    The next image identifies the two planets



  The positions they'll assume at 6 AM  Monday are shown here.

Venus gets photobombed 12/28/2013

 This morning I stayed over an hour into dayshift.  During the hour working with my buddy Sean, who recently bought a telescope, the conversation turned to planets currently visible.  I mentioned to him that Venus is now a large crescent as it is heading to a January 11th  alignment with the Sun.
    This afternoon I awoke to a beautiful late-December clear sky with a temperature in the mid-40's, a perfect opportunity to try to find Venus during the day.  I found it almost immediately with binoculars but with the smaller field of view of my telescope the low-contrast sky made for a frustrating hour-long search before I finally found it. Once it was located I removed the telescope eyepiece and hooked up my camera, refocused and fired off 4 photos.  When I reviewed the photos, I was shocked to see that Delta Airlines photobombed my Venus portrait by flying a DC-9 through my field of view.  


  Four photos and I was done. I wasn't going to top that.  The funny thing is, is that I never saw the plane even after I noticed I had captured a photo of it.   Although the jet looks like it is low, consider that this was taken through a scope of 2000mm focal length, so the planes angular size is only 9 minutes of arc, less than 1/3 of the 30 minutes of arc that the moon appears.  
  Here is the calculation of the distance to the jet.  9 arc minutes =0.15 degrees.  Sine of 0.15 degrees = 0.00261799.  The length of a DC-9 fuselage is 104.4 ft.  The length of the fuselage divided by the distance to the plane=sine of 0.15.
   So 104.4 ft divided by 0.00261799 (the sine of the angle) = 39877 ft
  Among certain circles there are rumors that I heavily photoshop my photos.  Here is the original photo. You can judge the degree of photoshopping.


Breaking News Spaceweather.com put my photo on their front page here is the link.
http://www.spaceweather.com/

Here is a screengrab of their home page from December 28, 2013.  So if you click on the link above after my photo has been replaced you can check their archives by entering the date above in the archive search in their right hand column.

Photos of the week, Birds, Moon, Jupiter and Waterspout 9/28/2013


Here are a few photos I took from my yard this week.



Red-eyed Vireo


Thick Crescent


Jupiter with four moons


Moon ID photo


Ruby-throated Hummingbird still hanging around

Nashville Warbler

Red-eyed Vireo

Same bird

  The photo below was taken last Saturday from the Point Mouillee Headquarters.  It is a funnel cloud attempting to become a waterspout.

Waterspout Funnel Cloud

Big Starry Sky Country 9/2/2013





  Day 1 :  Saw 1 bird in North Dakota.


Lark Sparrow

  Then a herd of horses in Theodore Roosevelt National Park.  Sadly we passed by this group about 10 minutes later and the young brown horse on the left side of the photo was laying flat on the ground as the others stood over it.



  A pronghorn greeted us at our rental on day 1 in Montana.





    Big Sky Country became Big Starry Sky Country when the Sun went down.  This photo shows the center of our Milky Way Galaxy in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius.  The dark parts are clouds of dust and gas veiling the galaxy's core.



The second photo show the view overhead of the Cygnus-Orion Arm of our spiral Galaxy. Our solar system lies on the outskirts of this arm.


  Next photo is of the far regions of the Cygnus-Orion Arm, away from the core of the galaxy,  with the Andromeda Galaxy on the right side of the photo.


  The Andromeda Galaxy is comparable in size to our Galaxy.

Badger at Night 8/30/2013

  Below are a couple of photos I took recently from the deck of the S.S. Badger a ferry that runs from Ludington, MI to Manitowoc, WI.  Out in the middle of Lake Michigan the stars shone so brightly that I had to try to take some photos, even though I my tripods were still in my car, which was inaccessible, below deck .  I cranked up my camera's sensitivity up to ISO 25,600,  set the shutter for 6 seconds and braced the camera against fixed objects on the deck.  The vibration and rolling of the ship caused the the star images to streak a bit but the parts of the ship which vibrated and rolled together came out clear enough, so a tripod wouldn't have helped much anyway.

Bridge of the Badger


Milky Way from the deck of the Badger

Nova Delphinus 2013 : WARNING : NERDY SCIENTIFIC CONTENT

On Wednesday August 14 amateur Japanese astronomer Koichi Itagaki discovered a nova in the constellation Delphinus.  He noticed a star in a photograph that wasn't in a similar photograph he took two nights earlier.  This was not a supernova which is the cataclysmic destruction of a star 8-15x more massive than the Sun.  A supernova is preceded by the collapse of the star under its own weight because it has spent too much of its fuel and gravity overcomes the outward pressure generated by the fusion process that stars use to burn. The last supernova in our galaxy that was visible to the naked eye from Earth occurred in 1604.  A supernova can briefly outshine the cumulative brightness of all the other stars in its own galaxy as it becomes 100 billion times brighter than the original star was during its lifetime.  When the red giant star Betelgeuse, in the constellation Orion,  goes supernova it will shine in our sky as bright as our sun does.
    Nova Delphinus 2013 was just an ordinary nova that occurs when the gravitational pull of a white dwarf star in a binary star system steals mass from its companion.  The extra mass causes a runaway nuclear fusion reaction and results in a rapid increase in luminosity of the white dwarf star.  The degree of brightness increase is on order of 10,000-1,000,000 times.
   Tonight I was able to photograph the nova from my yard.  It is the brightest star near the center of the photo below.  It is shining at about 5th magnitude,  which is dimmer than dimmest stars that I can see from my suburban yard.  





    Although the star appears no different than the surrounding stars, I was able to identify it by comparing it to a star map downloaded from Sky and Telescopes website.  Link.....Sky and Telescope Nova Press Release    In the photo below I highlighted the star groupings that I compared to the downloaded map, in order to find the nova.  My photo shows stars dimmer than the star map does.



added black lines to show star groups highlighted in my photo

The graph below indicates that the nova is already starting to fade.

 

Moon with Morning Planets

The old Moon (two days before New Moon) provided an attractive target in the east this morning but it wasn't alone.  It was accompanied by not one....not two..... but three planets  



   Above the Moon and easiest to see is the king of planets, Jupiter.  Just to the Moon's upper left is faint Mars, which like Jupiter is just starting to appear in the morning sky as the Earth is set to overtake them in their race around the Sun.  Mars is currently only 27 degrees from being on the exact opposite side Sun.  The third planet in the photo is the elusive Mercury.  It appears to the lower left of the Moon.  While the Earth is undefeated in its racing career versus Jupiter and Mars, it does not come close to beating Mercury which zips around the Sun completing one orbit every 88 days.

Planet positions indicated



Cropped photo shows planets more clearly

Cropped photo with answers.
  In the photo you'll notice that the whole Moon can be seen with the crescent shape brightly illuminated.  While the Crescent shape is due to the Moon being backlit for the most part as it is only two days from positioning itself between the Earth and Sun,  what is illuminating the rest of its disk?  ......................The Earth.  If you were standing on the dimly lit part of the Moon you would see an almost Full Earth dominating the night sky.  The Full Earth appears 42-100x brighter from the Moon than the Full Moon does from the Earth because the Earth's diameter is more than 3.5x larger than the Moon's (covering more than 12x greater area) but the Earth is also at least 3x more reflective (depending on cloud cover).
   Jupiter and Mars will be rising a little earlier every day until reaching opposition (when the Earth passes between them and the Sun) and they will be visible all night. For Jupiter that occurs on January 5, 2014.  Mars being closer to the Sun than Jupiter has a velocity closer to Earth's speed so it takes Earth longer to to lap it.  Its opposition doesn't occur until April 8, 2014.  Mercury is getting lower each morning and will be on the opposite side of the Sun on August 24.  The Moon may be visible much lower tomorrow morning and will be in line with the Sun on Tuesday and not visible until later in the week when it returns to the evening sky as a thin crescent low near the horizon.