It has been way too long since I posted a nice space related image. This entry on the Astronomy Picture Of The Day website pointed to this incredible photo of Saturn’s north pole.
More details about the image on the Casini Mission page.
Awesome science.
Jason.
Many people have used a webcam to do astrophotography before so I decided to give it a try. These are the steps I took and some mediocre results from night one.
Take a Microsoft LifeCam HD-3000.
Prise open the outer case and then unscrew all the nearly microsocopic screws with a jewlers screwdriver until the base circuit board is separated from the rest of the case.
I then used Araldite (2 part epoxy glue) to glue the cable to the back of the circuit board to hold all the fine cables in place. Once that set I used some Blue-Tak to stick the circuit board onto part of a broken star diagonal.
Make sure the CCD detector is as close to the center as possible. The Blue-Tak allows it to be recentered if need be and holds the circuit board well enough in place.
The stripes across the detector in the above was actually a finger print (gives scale to how small this all is) and destroyed the initial daylight tests. Cleaning it is not easy. I found the best result was one of those microfiber cloths that you use to clean eye glasses. Even that left a few unseen spots that are still visible on the movie capture, so try and keep the CCD as clean as possible.
Once the circuit board is attached it is all screwed to the back of the scope (Celestron Nexstar 5 that has seen better days but still has excellent optics and tracking).
Capture movies with AMCap and process with RegiStax.
Seeing was poor to say the least tonight for my first test and bloody cold with a biting wind, but here is a test moon image stacked with RegiStax.
Here is a movie sample of seeing conditions. First part is the moon moving across the field of view. 25x magnification. Second part a quick test with 2x barlow for 50x magnification.
With more time on a more steady night I will have another attempt. It would be interesting to have a try with Saturn and Jupiter using the barlow.
Jason.
Here is an awesome movie showing the transit of Venus yesterday.
Watch in highest def possible full screen.
More info about the movie with higher resolution movies and images to download here.
Thanks to The Bad Astronomer for the link. I knew that Phil would find the best example of the transit after it was all over and he didn’t let us down.
Jason.
NASA’s Astronomy Picture Of The Day always has interesting space related images and movies and is worth checking out on a regular basis. Here are two incredible recent movies APOD pointed to.
First up is this incredible HD solar prominence.
“When a rather large-sized (M 3.6 class) flare occurred near the edge of the Sun, it blew out a gorgeous, waving mass of erupting plasma that swirled and twisted over a 90-minute period (Feb. 24, 2011). This event was captured in extreme ultraviolet light by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft . Some of the material blew out into space and other portions fell back to the surface. Because SDO images are super-HD, we can zoom in on the action and still see exquisite details. And using a cadence of a frame taken every 24 seconds, the sense of motion is, by all appearances, seamless. Sit back and enjoy the jaw-dropping solar show.”
Make sure you click the fullscreen icon and select the full HD resolution to see this in all its glory.
Next is this footage of Saturn from the Cassini spacecraft. As Cassini was approaching and orbiting Saturn it took thousands of images. A bunch of those images have now been carefully cropped, rotated, digitally tweaked etc to create this awesome movie. Again, make sure you watch this in full screen mode.
Jason.
Powers Of Ten is a great short film from the 60’s (created by Charles and Ray Eames) that gives a unique perspective on sizes from the very large to the very minute. Quoting the video info…
Powers of Ten takes us on an adventure in magnitudes. Starting at a picnic by the lakeside in Chicago, this famous film transports us to the outer edges of the universe. Every ten seconds we view the starting point from ten times farther out until our own galaxy is visible only as a speck of light among many others. Returning to Earth with breathtaking speed, we move inward – into the hand of the sleeping picnicker – with ten times more magnification every ten seconds. Our journey ends inside a proton of a carbon atom within a DNA molecule in a white blood cell.
I saw this as a sequence of images in a book years ago, but never got to watch the video until now.
Jason.
If you are not a regular reader of Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy blog and the Universe Today blog you should be.
This image (courtesy of the Bad Astronomer Phil Plait) shows an arrow pointing to one of the earliest galaxies ever formed in the universe.
See here for the official press release.
Most people consider the speed of light to be instantly fast. Even our own solar system shows light speed is far from instant. When you look at the moon you are seeing it as it was approximately 1.3 seconds ago. When you look at Saturn through a telescope you are seeing how it was approximately 80 minutes ago. The further you look away into space the further back in time you are seeing.
On the universal scale the distance to the moon and Saturn are nothing. The indicated dot in the above image is 13.1 billion light years away. Meaning the “gleam” from it took 13.1 billion years to reach us. According to all the recent measurements, our universe is around 13.7 billion years old. So that allows us to look back in time to when the universe (and the smudge) was “only” 600 million years old.
Awesome science.
Jason.
The Hubble Space Telescope recently had an overhaul with new equipment and cameras. The results are stunning.
More information here.
For an idea of just how good the new equipment is have a look at this before and after
courtesy of the Universe Today Blog post here.
NASA has had funding issues for a while now, but missions and successes like this reach out to the general public and hopefully inspire a whole new generation of future astronomers to get into science.
Jason.
Here are a few of the more interesting space related blogs and websites I frequently read. All have some inspiring and mind-blowing articles and images.
Websites
Astronomy Picture Of The Day. Also be sure to check out their archive for 14 years worth of images.
NASA
NASA Cassini Equinox Mission. Images of Saturn and its moons.
NASA JPL MER. Images from the Mars rovers.
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Superb high res pictures of the surface of Mars from orbit.
STSI. Latest info and images from the Hubble Space Telescope.
TRACE and SOHO. Images of our nearest star.
Blogs
Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy
Universe Today
Jason.
I just finished watching Carl Sagan’s Cosmos for the first time in years since it was first on TV. Surprisingly most of it is still relevant and they only needed to make slight changes in the update segments at the end of each episode.
Highly recommended for anyone interested in science and/or space. Or even for people who do not really have an interest in the universe beyond their own microcosm lives. Sagan had (RIP) a way of making science accessible to the mainstream. His famous Pale Blue Dot speech sums up his character.
The one thing that sticks in my mind from the Cosmos series is his comments of “and if we don’t destroy ourselves, then…” when talking about the potential for the human race in the future.
Jason.
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