Space and astronomy news
Skywatchers in Australia were treated to unexpected beautiful views of the Aurora Australis. This timelapse is by Alex Cherney in Flinders Victroia, Australia who captured auroral views on June 19th 2012 at 00:09-02:38 AEST, in between clouds and rain. Lovely.
Check out more images of the recent Aurora Australis at Ian Musgrave’s Astroblog.
It’s Noctilucent Cloud season! And Brendan Alexander in Donegal Ireland captured this beautiful view on the morning of June 18, 2012. “The skies cleared before dawn and I was treated to the best Noctilucent Cloud display I have seen this season so far,” Brendan said on Flickr. We’ve featured Brendan’s work many times on Universe Today.
Details:
Location: Killygordon, Lifford, Co. Donegal, Ireland
Date: 18 June 2012
Time: 02:00-02:30
Camera: Self modded Canon 1000D, Simga 20mm
Exposure: 6sec, ISO 400 F5
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This stunning photo of the Milky Way was captured from what may be the coldest and most isolated research facility on Earth: the French-Italian Concordia Base station, located at 3,200 meters (nearly 10,500 feet) altitude on the Antarctic plateau, 1,670 km (1,037 miles) from the geographic south pole.
Taken by Dr. Alexander Kumar, a doctor, researcher and photographer who’s been living at the Base since January, the image shows the full beauty of the sky above the southern continent — a sky that doesn’t see the Sun from May to August.
During the winter months no transportation can be made to or from Concordia Base — no deliveries or evacuations, not for any reason. The team there is truly alone, very much like future space explorers will one day be. This isolation is one reason that Concordia is used by ESA for research for missions to Mars.
Of course, taking photos outside is no easy task. Temperatures outside the Base in winter can drop down to -70ºC (-100ºF)!
Still, despite the isolation, darkness and cold, Dr. Kumar finds inspiration in his surroundings.
“The dark may cause fear, but if you take the time to adapt and look within it, you never know what you may find – at the bottom of the ocean, in the night sky, or under your bed in the middle of the night,” writes Kumar on the Concordia blog. “If you don’t overcome your fear of the ‘unknown’ and ‘monsters’, you will never see marvellous secrets hidden in the dark.
“I hope this photo inspires you too for the days, weeks and months ahead. In terms of the space exploration we are only beginning. We have to continue pushing out into the great beyond.”
Read more of the “Chronicles from Concordia” here.
Image credits: ESA/IPEV/PNRA – A. Kumar
Caption: ‘Cerchi di stelle’ — Circles of stars. Credit: Gerlos on Flickr.
This beautiful view of star trails was captured by Gerlos on Flickr, as seen in the skies over Petralia, Sottana, Sicily, Italy on June 16, 2012. Gerlos said the image is a “composition of 363 shots (+10 dark frames) taken for 25 seconds every 30 seconds between 1:55 and 4:23 at f / 4 and ISO 1600 with Canon 550D, EF-S 18-55 lens + extra wide field Opteka 0.45 HD². Images acquired using the function of the interval Magic Lantern and made using StarStax.
Want to get your astrophoto featured on Universe Today? Join our Flickr group or send us your images by email (this means you’re giving us permission to post them). Please explain what’s in the picture, when you took it, the equipment you used, etc.
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You may recall in 2011 we featured an astrophoto by Rolf Wahl Olsen from New Zealand, who took the first amateur image of another solar system, Beta Pictoris. Olsen wrote to tell us he now has a new and better camera and recently focused on a new target with some incredible results.
“This time I have taken a very deep image of the famous Sombrero galaxy (Messier 104) showing 136 globular clusters around it,” Olsen said via email. “I have seen a few images before of the Sombrero with a couple of globular clusters identified, but not to this extent. It is really quite dramatic to be able to see how they literally swarm around the galaxy.”
Highlighted in this image are 136 of the Sombrero’s brightest globular clusters, ranging in magnitudes from 17.5 to 22+, the names and magnitude details of these clusters Olsen has listed on his website. This galaxy may have up to 1,900 in total of these satellite galaxies. Some of these globulars are very large and one is classified as a separate Ultra Compact Dwarf galaxy, SUCD1, the closest known example of such an object.
“I hope you enjoy it,” Olsen said. “This was certainly a fun project, though surprisingly laborious to mark and match all these faint clusters!”
Indeed, this seems to be a nearly Herculean task!
It is not known how the Sombrero amassed such a large number of globular clusters. While the Sombrero (M 104) is a disk galaxy, usually large elliptical galaxies typically have a greater concentration of clusters, such as the approximately 12,000 globular clusters orbiting the giant elliptical galaxy Messier 87. In comparison our own spiral Milky Way galaxy has only around 150-200 such clusters.
The Sombrero lies some 30 million light years away in the direction of the constellation Virgo.
You can find more information on Olsen’s website, and here’s a link to the full resolution image (1MB), which includes the list of details of all 136 globulars, and the unannotated full res image (1MB) is here.
Image details:
Date: 19th April, 22nd and 24th May 2012
Exposure: LRGB: 210:17:17:17m, total 4hrs 21mins
Telescope: 10″ Serrurier Truss Newtonian
Camera: QSI 683wsg with Lodestar guider
Filters: Astrodon LRGB E-Series Gen 2
Taken from Olsen’s observatory in Auckland, New Zealand
For more photos, check out Rolf’s astrophoto site.
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Images and video from the Transit of Venus on June 5/6, 2012 are still pouring in, and we needed to share just a few more. Here’s an awesome close-up look at the event in Hydrogen Alpha from accomplished astrophotographer John Chumack. He used a Lunt Solar Scope 60mm/50F H-Alpha filter and a DMK 21AF04 Fire-wire camera. This is 741 frames & 1/91 second exposure. John has more images on our Flickr page, and on his website, Galactic Images.
Venus transit with a transit of B747 jumbo across the solar disk which was captured by one of the members of the Tamilnadu Astronomical Society in India, Mr. Muralikrishna Kanagala during our transit event at Elliots Beach, Madras, India at 6.02 hrs IST, as the Sun rose. He used a Baader filtered Sony DSH H50 Camera.
Patrick Cullis put together this amazing time-lapse of the Transit, which features two telescopes, an airplane transit, sunset, and a few different angles of the view.
The above video is from the Solar Dynamics Observatory, a composite of the entire Transit, set to music.
And finally, this image and story from Blake Crosby and his son Orion from Charleston, South Carolina, displaying the lengths people would go to witness this event:
“This won’t be the best shot of the transit by a long shot, but my son and I jumped through a lot of hoops just to get it,” Crosby wrote in an email. “We live in Charleston, SC and our horizon is blocked by towering pine trees so we checked into the 9th floor of a Holiday Inn with a westward facing room. After lugging up all of our equipment, we found out that the doors to the balconies had been permanently closed, so we would have to shoot through a pane of glass with our Canon Rebel XS attached to a Celestron Nexstar 4SE with a Seymour filter. Furthermore, we were greeted, like many others, with a thick wall of clouds that just didn’t want to budge. Even worse, the hotel’s wifi was so shoddy we couldn’t stream any of the live views from the internet. However, we got a lucky break at about 8:00 EDT when the clouds parted for about 2 minutes and we were able to snap a couple of pics. My son Orion remarked that he was glad we endured those setbacks just so we could get a glimpse of an event that won’t happen again in our lifetimes.”
You can always see more images of many great astronomical views on our Flickr group page. Join us in sharing your images there and we may post them on Universe Today!
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Despite a horrendous weather forecast, the clouds parted – at least partially – just in the nick of time for a massive crowd of astronomy and space enthusiasts gathered at Princeton University to see for themselves the dramatic start of the Transit of Venus shortly after 6 p.m. EDT as it arrived at and crossed the limb of the Sun.
And what a glorious view it was for the well over 500 kids, teenagers and adults who descended on the campus of Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey for a viewing event jointly organized by the Astrophysics Dept and the Amateur Astronomers Association of Princeton (AAAP), the local astronomy club to which I belong.
See Transit of Venus astrophotos snapped from Princeton, above and below by Astrophotographer and Prof. Bob Vanderbei of Princeton U and a AAAP club member.
It was gratifying to see so many children and whole families come out at dinner time to witness this ultra rare celestial event with their own eyes – almost certainly a last-in-a-lifetime experience that won’t occur again for another 105 years until 2117. The crowd gathered on the roof of Princeton’s Engineering Dept. parking deck – see photos
For the next two and a half hours until sunset at around 8:30 p.m. EDT, we enjoyed spectacular glimpses as Venus slowly and methodically moved across the northern face of the sun as the racing clouds came and went on numerous occasions, delighting everyone up to the very end when Venus was a bit more than a third of the way through the solar transit.
Indeed the flittering clouds passing by in front of Venus and the Sun’s active disk made for an especially eerie, otherworldly and constantly changing scene for all who observed through about a dozen AAAP provided telescopes properly outfitted with special solar filters for safely viewing the sun.
As part of this public outreach program, NASA also sent me special solar glasses to hand out as a safe and alternative way to directly view the sun during all solar eclipses and transits through your very own eyes – but not optical aids such as cameras or telescopes.
Altogether the Transit lasted 6 hours and 40 minutes for those in the prime viewing locations such as Hawaii – from where NASA was streaming a live Transit of Venus webcast.
You should NEVER look directly at the sun through any telescopes or binoculars not equipped with special eye protection – because that can result in severe eye injury or permanent blindness!
We in Princeton were quite lucky to observe anything because other astro friends and fans in nearby areas such as Philadelphia, PA and Brooklyn, NY reported seeing absolutely nothing for this last-in-a-lifetime celestial event.
Princeton’s Astrophysics Department organized a series of lectures prior to the observing sessions about the Transit of Venus and how NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope currently uses the transit method to detect and discover well over a thousand exoplanet and planet candidates – a few of which are the size of Earth and even as small as Mars, the Red Planet.
NASA’s Curiosity rover is currently speeding towards Mars for an August 6 landing in search of signs of life. Astronomers goal with Kepler’s transit detection method is to search for Earth-sized planets in the habitable zone that could potentially harbor life !
So, NASA and astronomers worldwide are using the Transit of Venus in a scientifically valuable way – beyond mere enjoyment – to help refine their planet hunting techniques.
Historically, scientists used the Transit of Venus over the past few centuries to help determine the size of our Solar System.
See more event photos from the local daily – The Trenton Times – here
And those who stayed late after sunset – and while the Transit of Venus was still visibly ongoing elsewhere – were treated to an extra astronomical bonus – at 10:07 p.m. EDT the International Space Station (ISS) coincidentally flew overhead and was visible between more break in the clouds.
Of course clouds are no issue if you’re watching the Transit of Venus from the ISS or the Hinode spacecraft. See this Hinode Transit image published on APOD on June 9 and enhanced by Marco Di Lorenzo.
This week, local NY & NJ residents also had another extra special space treat – the chance to see another last-in-a-lifetime celestial event: The Transit of Space Shuttle Enterprise across the Manhattan Skyline on a seagoing voyage to her permanent new home at the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum.
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I’m not sure how often this happens, but I’ve never seen it before: crepuscular rays on both the west and east horizon at the same time — or crepuscular and anti-crepuscular rays occurring simultaneously. I’m staying out in the wilds of Minnesota this summer, with great views of both horizons and captured these images last evening, June 9, 2012. The word crepuscular means “relating to twilight,” and these rays occur when objects such as mountain peaks or clouds partially shadow the Sun’s rays, usually when the Sun is low on the horizon. These rays are visible only when the atmosphere contains enough haze or dust particles so that sunlight in unshadowed areas can be scattered toward the observer.
Then occasionally, light rays scattered by dust and haze sometimes appear on “antisolar” point, (the horizon opposite to the setting sun). These rays, called anti-crepuscular rays, originate at the Sun, cross over the sky to the opposite horizon, and appear to converge toward the antisolar point.
Anyone else ever seen this before?
For both crepuscular and anti-crepsucular, the light rays are actually parallel, but appear to converge to the horizon due to “perspective,” the same visual effect that makes parallel railroad tracks appear to converge in the distance. One of the astronauts on the International Space Station actually captured crepuscular rays from orbit, showing how the rays are actually parallel. You can see that image and the description here.
Below are the two images separately. It was a beautiful evening and a thrilling sight.
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This unusual prominence on the Sun looks like an exhaust-spewing smokestack. It was captured by noted Australian amateur astronomer Monty Leventhal on May 29, 2012. He used a Canon 600D camera with a Hydrogen-alpha filter and a Meade S.C. 10 inch telescope.
Want to get your astrophoto featured on Universe Today? Join our Flickr group or send us your images by email (this means you’re giving us permission to post them). Please explain what’s in the picture, when you took it, the equipment you used, etc.
We’re still loving all the eclipse photos and videos coming in: Astrophotographer Ted Judah put together this great video showing his views of the May 20, 2012 annular solar eclipse at Sundial Bridge in Redding, California. Not only are there spectacular shots of the eclipse — including views of the simmering surface of the Sun in the annulus of bright light surrounding the Moon at the maximum phase (starting at about 4:00 in the video) — but he shares the joy of astronomy outreach, as Ted set up his telescope and allowed passersby to see eclipsed Sun for themselves. Great music, too by Peter Adams titled, appropriately, “Shoot the Moon.”