A halo appeared around the Sun on Nov. 1, 2010 in Centurion South Africa. Credit: Alan Buff.
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Residents around Johannesburg, South Africa were treated with a rare astronomical (or actually atmospheric) sight — a halo around the Sun. These halos are striking to see, but unlike an eclipse, they can’t be predicted. Conditions in the atmosphere have to be just right, with moisture or ice crystals creating a “rainbow” effect around the Sun. Sometimes the halos surround the Sun completely, other times, they appear as arcs around the solar sphere. Basically, sunlight is reflecting off moisture in the atmosphere. These images were sent in by Alan Buff from Centurion, South Africa. See more below.
Another image of a halo that appeared around the Sun on Nov. 1, 2010 in Centurion South Africa; this one has a building blocking out the Sun itself. Credit: Alan Buff.
In folklore, these halos seen around the Sun or the Moon means precipitation is on the way, which makes sense, since moisture in the atmosphere usually makes it down to the ground. High clouds of ice crystals are called cirrus clouds, and these often form in at the leading edge of warm fronts that bring rain.
Newspaper and internet articles report that Johannesburg was buzzing about the weird halos; however, the explanation was simple and did not include aliens or end-of-the-world scenarios.
A halo appeared around the Sun on Nov. 1, 2010 in Centurion South Africa. Credit: Alan Buff.
Thanks again to Alan Buff for sharing his images with Universe Today.
The Bad Astronomer posted a time-lapse video today which is wonderful, and you should go watch it, but I’m going to counter with another incredible time-lapse that might be even better (in my opinion! — and as suggested by Daniel Fischer on Twitter). This one was created by photographer Dustin Farrell, and shows a year’s compilation of his time lapse work. “All shot on the Canon 5D2 and processed in Adobe After Effects,” Farrell writes on his Vimeo page. “The majority of the shots are in my beautiful home state of Arizona. Goblin Valley State Park and Natural Bridges National Monument in Utah also make an appearance,” — as do NASA’s new electric rovers. Check out Farrell’s company’s website, CrewWest, Inc.
Screenshot from the Gigapan image of space shuttle Discovery on the launchpad.
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From experience, I can tell you being at one of the launchpads at Kennedy Space Center is awesome beyond words. Not many people, though, get to see a shuttle on the launchpad up close and personal, and with just a couple launches left, many are at least are hoping to get a view of the launch. But if you aren’t able to travel to Florida and see a shuttle on the pad, you can take advantage of a few different websites that can take you there virtually, and probably bring you closer than you could ever get in person.
The first website is Gigapan, where NASA photographer Bill Ingalls has put together all the high resolution images he took on Sunday, Oct. 31, 2010 at Kennedy Space Center, and created one huge images that you can pan around and see everything up close. Go to the Gigapan website, and by moving your mouse around or by clicking on the images below the big image, you will be transported up close and personal with various locations within the image.
The Gigapan technology was originally developed for the Mars Exploration Rovers, and the panoramas created from Mars enabled a simulated experience of being on another planet. The Gigapan project aims to create a similar experience, but for exploration of Earth.
The second website is John O’Connor’s NASA Tech website. I met John when I was at Kennedy Space Center earlier this year, was able to watch him take the images for the extremely high resolution virtual tours he creates. The interactive 360 degree images he creates are nothing short of stunning — but they are also very bandwidth intensive — so be prepared, and watch out if you don’t have high speed internet or have a lot of browsers or windows open on your computer. Right now on his website you can see different views of the launchpad with Discovery sitting on top, and also go inside the space station processing facility and see Robonaut 2 before he was stowed for launch on STS-133, and much more.
Here’s an image I took of John setting up his equipment when we were at Launchpad 39B in March of this year.
A 'movie' put together from images of the October 12, 2010 approach of asteroid 2010 TD54.Image credit: Patrick Wiggins, NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassador to Utah
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Amateur astronomer Patrick Wiggins from Utah (and fellow Solar System Ambassador) was able to capture images this morning of the newly found asteroid 2010 TD54 that whizzed by Earth — harmlessly — coming within about 46,000 km (less than 30,000 miles) of our planet. The small asteroid was only detected this past Saturday, and NASA’s Near Earth Object Office predicted there was only 1 in a million chance it would hit Earth, and was small enough that it wouldn’t survive a fiery trip through the atmosphere even if it was going to make crash head-on into Earth. Patrick put together a couple of “movies” from the images he captured. They show the asteroid whispering silently through the sky, although moving along fairly quickly at 17.37 km/s. Estimates are the asteroid is about 7.3 m wide, and contained the energy of about 22 kilotons if it would have come crashing through Earth’s atmosphere. For this animation, the mount was set to allow the target to pass through the field of view, and includes 16 five-second exposures shot between 08:51:51 and 08:54:04 UTC.
There’s an additional image below.
In this animation, asteroid 2010 TD54 appears stationary as the stars move. Image credit: Patrick Wiggins, NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassador to Utah
For this set of images, Patrick set the mount set to nearly follow the target. The animation includes 23 five- second exposures shot between 09:01:27 and 09:04:39 UTC.
Patrick uses a Paramount ME, Celestron C-14 operating at f/5.5, SBIG ST-10 binned 3×3 with clear filter. The field of view in this image is about 18×26 arc minutes.
Great work! And Universe Today thanks Patrick for allowing us to post his images/animations.
While most people are breathing a sigh of relief that this asteroid didn’t hit Earth, others are of the opinion this near miss was a missed opportunity. “The message here should be: It was a pity that TD54 *missed* Earth because it would have made a nice fireball and meteorite shower!” said astronomer and writer Daniel Fischer, who writes the Cosmos4U blog.
Other astronomers and meteorite buffs said this asteroid could have ended up like the famous 2008 TC3, the first asteroid to have been spotted before hitting Earth, which crashed in northern Sudan, providing a treasure trove of information about asteroids and the early solar system in a very handy “sample return.”
The European Southern Observatory pumps out incredible astronomical images, usually weekly, and they have now put together a collection of their top 100 images. They are all wonderfully amazing, so check them out for a large amount of eye candy. ESO is a consortium of countries, astronomers and telescopes, including the Very Large Telescope, VISTA, APEX, the telescopes at La Silla, and ALMA, so there were a lot of images to choose from to pick the top 100. Go get lost in the images!
ESO also just announced a free competition for anyone who enjoys making beautiful images of the night sky using real astronomical data. Called “Hidden Treasures,” the competition has some extremely attractive prizes for the lucky winners who produce the most beautiful and original images, including an all expenses paid trip to ESO’s VLT on Cerro Paranal, in Chile. And the winner will have a chance to participate in the nightly VLT observations, too. Check out the competition here.
This is a great: amateur rocketeers Luke Geissbuhler and his son Max launched their own DIY satellite via a weather balloon from New York, and using an HD video camera captured some amazing video of the contraption’s rise to near the edge of space (closer than a lot of us will ever get, anyway….) and its plummeting fall. You gotta love their enthusiasm and their “flight tests” at the beginning of the video. It might help that the Dad is a photographer that works in Hollywood films, but then again, I think Max’s countdown and lollipop were the real impetus behind the successful mission. They were able to track the device with GPS, and recover the camera. Lucky for us!
Composite images of Venus occultation on Sept. 11, 2010. Credit: Kerneels Mulder
On September 11, 2010 South Africa had an amazing view of a full daylight occultation of Venus by the Moon, and Kerneels Mulder captured it, and shared it with Universe Today. He sent us this video created from the images he took of the event, and below is a composite look at all the images, showing Venus as it reappears from behind the Moon.
“The occultation happened in full daylight, with the Moon only 40° from the Sun, making it difficult to capture detailed images,” Mulder wrote us. “Venus disappeared behind the dark side of the Moon at around 14:20 (GMT+2) and reappeared on the bright side of the Moon at 15:54 (GMT+2).”
Mulder said the sight was amazing. “With the naked eye Venus was easily visible as a bright dot close to the crescent Moon. The 3.5” refractor used during imaging showed an even more awe-inspiring view with both the crescents of the Venus and the Moon visible in the same field of view.”
'Blazing Bristlecone' by Tom Lowe of the USA, winner of the 2010 years Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition.
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The Royal Observatory Greenwich in the UK was the perfect setting to announce the winners of this year’s Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition, and I was privileged to be in attendance at the ceremony on Thursday evening. “We were really blown away by the quality of all of the almost 500 entries this year,” said Marek Kukula, the public astronomer at the Royal Observatory Greenwich. “So, congratulations to all who entered but in particular, congrats to the 22 winners tonight.”
The overall winner this year was Tom Lowe from the US, with this awe-striking image of our Milky Way. “I have to say, this pictures perfectly captures the spirit of the Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition,” said Kukula at the awards ceremony, “with not only the beautiful composition where the tree follows the arch of the Milky Way, but also the connection between things in space and things on Earth. The Bristlecone pines that you see in the foreground are some of the oldest living things on Earth, but yet they are dwarfed by the light shining behind them that has been traveling for almost 30,000 years. It is just a beautiful concept.”
See more of the winners below.
'Siberian Totality' by Anthony Ayiomamitis, winner of the category 'Our Solar System.'
“After the success of last year’s competition, we challenged everybody again to take the best photographs of the solar system and beyond,” said Dallas Campbell, from “Bang Goes the Theory” on BBC,” who emceed the event along with Kukula. “We asked people to submit photographs in four categories: Earth and Space, Our Solar System, Deep Space, and Young Astronomy Photographer. We also added two new categories: People and Space and Best Newcomer.” Besides being the overall winner, Lowe’s image (top) was the winner of the Earth and Space category.
This stunning image of a total solar eclipse by Anthony Ayiomamitis from Greece won the “Our Solar System” category. “On eclipse day, the clouds were present everywhere and only one hour before first contact (partial phase) did the skies clear,” said Ayiomamitis “…and they cleared beautifully and with pristine transparency. There was a slight wind, especially at the top of the roof of the Institute of Nuclear Physics, but it was a very small price to pay.”
During an eclipse, the Sun’s corona is visible but this image captures even how the Sun’s magnetic fields warp and shape the super-heated gas of the corona into loops and streamers.
Jupiter by Nick Smith, Runner-up in the category 'Our Solar System'
UK amateur astronomer Nick Smith was in attendance at the ceremony, and he was the runner-up in this category with this crisp image of Jupiter. He also received a “highly commended” prize for his image of the Sinus Iridium on the Moon.
'Sinus Iridium' by Nick Smith, Highly Commended in the category 'Our Solar System
I had the chance to talk with Smith, and he said he used a Celestron C14 14-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope with a Tele Vue 1.8x Barlow lens and a Lumenera Infinity 2-1M CCD camera. “I’ve been doing astrophotography for about 5 years,” he said. “Last year I had same results, one runner up and one highly commended, so I’m still waiting for that elusive win!”
'Orion Deep Wide Field' by Rogelio Bernal Andreo (USA), winner of the 'Deep Space' category
This absolutely stunning image taken by Rogelio Bernal Andreo of the USA shows wide angle view of the constellation Orion, with the three bright stars of Orion’s Belt on the left of this image. Here, however, a long exposure reveals an epic vista of dust and gas clouds which are too faint to be seen by the naked eye. This is an immense region of space hundreds of light years across. It contains several well-known astronomical sights, including the Horsehead Nebula (bottom center) and the Orion Nebula (top right).
A Perfect Circle by Dhruv Arvind Paranjpye from India.
The fourth category was for young astrophotographers, and this stunning image of an annular solar eclipse as taken by 14 year old Dhruv Arvind Paranjpye from India. This type of perfect circle occurs when the Moon is too far from the Earth to completely cover the Sun’s disc, and Paranjpye caught the moment perfectly as a bright ring appeared as the uncovered part of the Sun shone around the edges of the Moon, and through a thin veil of clouds.
'Solar Halo' by Laurent V. Joli-Coeur from Canada.
This runner-up winner in the young astronomer category was taken by Laurent V. Joli-Coeur from Canada, who is 13 years old. He was in attendance at the ROG for the awards ceremony, and commented that he was in the family car with his mother when he saw a beautiful solar halo through the roof. “I used my mother’s camera, a simple DLSR camera,” Joli-Coeur told Universe Today. “I asked my mother to stop the car and I took the picture in manual mode, and was very pleased how it turned out.” The camera was a Canon Digital Rebel DSLR camera with a Canon EF-S 18-55 mm lens. I asked if this picture was the first attempt at any astrophotography for him, but he said, “Actually I do a lot of lunar photography, and wide field imaging of the Milky Way and solar halos.” So, look for more images from him in the future.
'The Pelican Nebula Up Close' by Elias Jordan
I had to include this “Highly Commended” image in the young astronomers group by Elias Jordan, aged 15, who I follow on Twitter. “Thanks everyone!” he said on Twitter, “It was hard to keep the news from you for three weeks!”
'Photon Worshippers' by Steven Christenson from the USA.
This is the winning image in a new category this year, “People and Space.” For a few days each year, the setting Sun shines directly through the archway of a large rock formation at Pfeiffer Beach in Big Sur, California, and Steven Christenson caught the event, plus the people watching. One of the judges, Sir Patrick Moore, said “It’s a rare event – it happens only once a year and the photographer has taken full advantage – the composition is fabulous.”
M51, the Whirlpool Galaxy by Ken Mackintosh from the UK.
Another new category this year was “Best Newcomer,” won by Ken Mackintosh from the UK, with this image of the Whirlpool Galaxy.
“I’m lucky,” Mackintosh told Universe Today. “I just started doing astronomical photography a little over a year ago and I say I’m lucky because took this image about a year ago, and just barely scraped into the time constraint. Seeing the images in the other categories, I think next year I’ll really struggle to win anything because the winners this year are just jaw dropping.”
Mackintosh used Canon 450 DSLR, along with a Max Vision 127 telescope. He said he has been interested in astronomy since he was young, but wasn’t active in astronomy for many years. “I went into business and totally lost touch with astronomy until about a year ago when I was cruising around Flickr, and saw this contest, and my interest was totally reignited. Taking images like this, there’s a lot of work and frustration but when you get a good one, it’s totally worth it, and it keeps you going. I’m so glad they’ve started this competition,as it really provided a lot of motivation for me.”
Amazingly, he took this image from his back yard garden in Sussex, so he wants others interested in astrophotography to know that even in urban areas, astronomy and astrophography can be done. “Just in the past few years the equipment has become available at reasonable prices that is powerful enough to take images like this,” he said. “I can’t stress enough this is actually not too difficult to do, so anyone who has had interest in astronomy and photography, it is not that difficult. The difficulty comes in the kind of finesse and artistry to finish the images. It’s almost like the artistic side is as difficult as the technical. But as the technology improves, that side of it will become much easier.”
The Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition started in 2009 for the International Year of Astronomy. It was so popular that the organizers and sponsors decided to do it again this year. You can find info on the websites below on how to enter in 2011.
To see all the winning astronomy pictures in the six categories, see the Royal Observatory Greenwich website, or you can see all the images submitted on the Flickr Astronomy Photographer of the Year page. And if you live in the UK or visit there soon, you can see an exhibit of the Astronomy Photographer of the Year winners at the ROG from now until February 27, 2011.
The ROG is a must-see destination for any astronomy enthusiast, and is a wonderful location that is full of history, beauty and hands-on learning. There you can straddle the Prime Meridian, see early telescopes and time pieces and look across the same beautiful vistas that early British astronomers saw from the hilltop home of the observatory.
This Hubble image reveals the gigantic Pinwheel Galaxy (M101), one of the best known examples of "grand design spirals". Credit: NASA/ESA
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When I tell people I majored in astronomy, the general reaction is one of shock and awe. Although people don’t realize just how much physics it is (which scares them even more when they found out), they’re still impressed that anyone would choose to major in a physical science. Quite often, I’m asked the question, “Why did you choose that major?”
Only somewhat jokingly, I reply, “Because it’s pretty.” For what reasons would we explore something if we did not find some sort of beauty in it? This answer also tends to steer potential follow up questions to topics of images they’ve seen and away from topics from half-heard stories about black holes from sci-fi movies.
The topic of aesthetics in astronomy is one I’ve used here for my own devices, but a new study explores how we view astronomical images and what sorts of information people, both expert and amateur, take from them.
The study was conducted by a group formed in 2008 known as The Aesthetics and Astronomy Group. It is comprised of astrophysicists, astronomy image development professionals, educators, and specialists in the aesthetic and cognitive perception of images. The group asked to questions to guide their study:
How much do variations in presentation of color, explanatory text, and illustrative scales affect comprehension of, aesthetic attractiveness, and time spent looking at deep space imagery?
How do novices differ from experts in terms of how they look at astronomical images?
Data to answer this question was taken from two groups; The first was an online survey taken by volunteers from solicitations on various astronomy websites and included 8866 respondents. The second group was comprised of four focus groups held at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
To analyze how viewers viewed color, the web study contained two pictures of the elliptical galaxy NGC 4696. The images were identical except for the colors chosen to represent different temperatures. In one image, red was chosen to represent hot regions and blue for cold regions. In the other version, the color scheme was reversed. A slight majority (53.3% to 46.7%) responded saying they preferred the version in which blue was assigned to be the hotter color. When asked which image they thought was the “hotter” image, 71.5% responded that the red image was hotter. Since astronomical images are often assigned with blue as the hotter color (since hotter objects emit shorter wavelength light which is towards the blue end of the visible spectrum), this suggests that the public’s perception of such images is likely reversed.
A second image for the web group divided the participants into 4 groups in which an image of a supernova remnant was shown with or without foreground stars and with or without a descriptive caption. When asked to rate the attractiveness, participants rated the one with text slightly higher (7.96 to 7.60 on a 10 point scale). Not surprisingly, those that viewed the versions of the image with captions were more likely to be able to correctly identify the object in the image. Additionally, the version of the image with stars was also more often identified correctly, even without captions, suggesting that the appearance of stars provides important context. Another question for this image also asked the size in comparison to the Earth, Solar System, and Galaxy. Although the caption gave the scale of the SNR in lightyears, the portion that viewed the caption did not fare better when asked to identify the size revealing such information is beyond the limit of usefulness.
The next portion showed an image of the Whirlpool galaxy, M51 and contained either, no text, a standard blurb, a narrative blurb, or a sectionized caption with questions as headers. Taking into consideration the time spent reading the captions, the team found that those with text spent more time viewing the image suggesting that accompanying text encourages viewers to take a second look at the image itself. The version with a narrative caption prompted the most extra time.
Another set of images explored the use of scales by superimposing circles representing the Earth, a circle of 300 miles, both, or neither onto an image of spicules on the Sun’s surface, with or without text. Predictably, those with scales and text were viewed longer and the image with both scales was viewed the longest and had the best responses on a true/false quiz over the information given by the image.
When comparing self-identified experts to novices, the study found that both viewed uncaptioned images for similar lengths of time, but for images with text, novices spent an additional 15 seconds reviewing the image when compared to experts. Differences between styles of presenting text (short blurb, narrative, or question headed), novices preferred the ones in which topics were introduced with questions, whereas experts rated all similarly which suggested they don’t care how the information is given, so long as it’s present.
The focus groups were given similar images, but were prompted for free responses in discussions.
<
p style=”padding-left: 30px;”>[T]he non-professionals wanted to know what the colors represented, how the images were made, whether the images were composites from different satellites, and what various areas of the images were. They wanted to know if M101 could be seen with a home telescope, binoculars, or the naked eye.
Additionally, they were also interested in historical context and insights from what professional astronomers found interesting about the images.
Professionals, on the other hand, responded with a general pattern of “I want to know who made this image and what it was that they were trying to convey. I want to judge whether this image is doing a good job of telling me what it is they
wanted me to get out of this.” Eventually, they discussed the aesthetic nature of the images which reveals that “novices … work from aesthetics to science, and for astrophysicists … work from science to aesthetics.”
Overall, the study found an eager public audience that was eager to learn to view the images as not just pretty pictures, but scientific data. It suggested that a conversational tone that worked up to technical language worked best. These findings can be used to improve communication of scientific objectives in museums, astrophotography sections of observatories, and even in presentation of astronomical images and personal conversation.
Earth and Moon from 114 Million Miles.Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington
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A new image to add to the family photo album! The MESSENGER spacecraft is working its way to enter orbit around Mercury in March of 2011, and while wending its way, took this image of the Earth and Moon, visible in the lower left. When the image was taken in May 2010, MESSENGER was 183 million kilometers (114 million miles) away from Earth. For context, the average separation between the Earth and the Sun is about 150 million kilometers (93 million miles). It’s a thought provoking image (every one of us is in that image!), just like other Earth-Moon photos — Fraser put together a gallery of Earth-Moon images from other worlds, and this one will have to be added. But this image was taken not just for the aesthetics.
This image was taken as part of MESSENGER’s campaign to search for vulcanoids, small rocky objects hypothesized to exist in orbits between Mercury and the Sun. Though no vulcanoids have yet been detected, the MESSENGER spacecraft is in a unique position to look for smaller and fainter vulcanoids than has ever before been possible. MESSENGER’s vulcanoid searches occur near perihelion passages, when the spacecraft’s orbit brings it closest to the Sun. August 17, 2010 was another such perihelion, so if MESSENGER was successful in finding any tiny asteroids lurking close to the Sun, we may hear about it soon.
