Blog of Parag

New family members

Please welcome 3 new members to our solar system. International Astronomical Union decided to bestow the status of 'planet' to three celestial bodies in our solar system:

• Ceres, the largest asteroid in the astorid belt between Mars and Jupiter


• Charon, which was considered as Pluto's moon, but it is upgraded due to its size. Now Pluto and Charon will be known as twin planets.


• Xena (aka "2003 UB313"), another icy planet like Pluto, but larger than Pluto, found in the Kuiper belt.

Here is what defines a planet according to IAU:

• The object must be in orbit around a star, but must not itself be a star


• It must have enough mass for the body's own gravity to pull it into a nearly spherical shape

Wipe out the old list of planets from your memory and commit this new one...

Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Ceres, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Charon, and Xena.

This IAU decision couldn't have been more timely. Just yesterday, we were talking about making a chart of planets for Ashwini. She wants her own telescope and we set a condition that she has to know the list of planets before she can get it.

Saturn in Beehive cluster, M44

Saturn is the bright one at bottom right.

reprocessed photo taken in Mar '06.

Spectacular astro event tonight

Don't miss the Grand Occultation of Pleiades by Moon this evening. Here is more info. Looks like weather is going to mess up my plans of viewing.

Saturn in M44

Lately, Saturn has been sitting in the constellation of Cancer. Last night, I took this photo with my 80-300mm zoom lens to capture Saturn and the Beehive cluster, M44 from Cancer. Few days ago, Saturn was even closer to the cluster, but I couldn't view it due to clouds. Because of its retrograde motion, Saturn will come closer to the cluster again later in the year.

Nikon D70; 80-300mm at 250mm; f/5.6; 1 sec

Center of the Milky Way

Have you ever wondered how our own galaxy, Milky Way, looks like? On a dark night, one can make out a swatch of shimmering cloud like Milky Way go across the sky. But, we can't see the center of the galaxy which is supposedly dense with stars and should be very bright. Our view of the center is obscured by clouds of gas and dust that is part of our galaxy. The image above is a mosaic of photos showing the center of the Milky Way, taken by Spitzer Space Telescope's infrared cameras. Click here for a higher resolution photo. The galactic center lies towards the constellation, Sagittarius and is about 26,000 light years away. We, in our solar system, truly live on the outer fringes of the galaxy.

Just think about it... Even at the speed of light, it will take us a lot more time than the period of documented human history on Earth, to reach the center of our own galaxy. There are many many billions of such galaxies in the Universe. Feel insignificant? Good. Remember that feeling next time you agonize and cry about your small little problems.

via, APOD

Astronomer detectives?

This is quite interesting. Astronomers turn detectives to pinpoint date of Ansel Adams image. If I was living in California, I would plan a trip to Yosemite on the 15th Sept, to recapture the Adams photo with my camera.

Evening sky...

It was a beautiful evening sky today. Venus, Moon and Jupiter came together close to create this spectacular view. If you missed it, try again on Wednesday evening. The configuration will be different but, they will still be pretty close to each other.

The sky was clear except for the southwest sky where these interesting objects were. I managed to get a couple of nice photos even with the clouds.

The objects in the photo are (clockwise starting from the Moon): Moon with earthshine, Spica (Chitra), Venus and Jupiter.

Perseids 2005

Early morning of Aug. 12th is going to be the peak for 2005 Perseid meteor showers. I missed last year's show because of cloudy skies and the weather forecast predicts clouds for tonight too. I am stil going to wake up early and catch a few shooting stars tomorrow morning. Hope you have clear sky wherever you are to enjoy the show.

New member of the family

Mike Brown, a professor of planetary astronomy at Caltech is one of the researchers that announced the discovery of tenth planet in the solar system. The other researchers are Chad Trujillo, of the Gemini Observatory in Mauna Kea, Hawaii, and David Rabinowitz, of Yale University, New Haven, Conn. They made the discovery in January after re-analyzing data collected over two years and it was announced to the public late last week. The new planet called, 2003UB313, is at least twice the size of Pluto and currently is 97 times further from the sun than the Earth (97 AU).

"It will be visible with a telescope over the next six months and is currently almost directly overhead in the early-morning eastern sky, in the constellation Cetus," said Brown..

Brown is also the proud father of 23 day old baby, Lilah. Congratulations to Mike on both the counts.

Update: Many astronomers speculate that numerous other icy objects larger than Pluto likely exist in the Kuiper Belt of the far distant Solar System. If so, and if some are found closer in than 2003 UB313, it may be premature to call 2003 UB313 the tenth planet.

Saturn from Cassini

One of the prettiest photos of Saturn. Didn't know that the rings were so thin. The moons in the plane of the ring... it is quite cool.

Astro-photos

Last night was not too windy and clear. Although, I froze my fingers by the end of the 2 hour session, I was able to take some photos of the Moon and Saturn. Here they are...

The prominant crater towards the left is 'Theophilus' and the flat area to left of it, near the edge of the photo is the "Sea of Tranquility". Apollo 11 landing site is somewhere in that flat region.

Moonlit night

Two day old thin crescent of the Moon with some lingering sunlight.

A closeup shot of the same 2 day old Moon showing earthshine.

Moon on Nov. 22nd, 2004

First photo taken through my telescope using the Nikon D70. It is not great. I still need to play with aligning all the optical elements properly to get a crisp clear image. Hopefully, I'll get some time to play with it when we have clear skies.

Total Lunar Eclipse

Total Lunar eclipse on Oct 27, 2004.

Genesis crashed

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Scientists 'hopeful' for Genesis

It is sad that the parafoil didn't deploy properly and hence, Genesis couldn't be captured by the stunt pilots waiting in helicopters. It crashed in Utah desert at 193 mph (311kmh). NASA engineers are hopeful that the samples collected by the probe survived the crash without any contamination.

The $264m Genesis mission was launched in August 2001 on a journey to capture samples from the storehouse of 99% of all the material in our Solar System - the Sun.

It used collectors made of ultra-pure wafers of gold, sapphire, silicon and diamond.

These were hung outside the probe for more than 800 days, sifting space for just 10-20 micrograms of solar wind material, and were designed to be returned for analysis.

800 days to collect 10-20 micrograms of solar wind material. Wow! Considering that the space between Earth and Sun is almost perfect vacuum, it is appropriate to have taken so much time to collect so little material.

The dark side of the Moon

Lunar Farside from Apollo 11. The far side of the Moon is rough and filled with craters. By comparison, the near side of the Moon (the side we always see) is relatively smooth. The large crater is Daedalus. It spans about 93 kilometers (58 miles) and was photographed by the crew of Apollo 11 as they circled the Moon in 1969. NASA Photo, reference AS11-44-6611.
Note that the diameter given on the web reference below (30 km) is wrong.
CREDIT: Apollo 11 Crew, NASA .
SOURCE: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap030312.html
COPYRIGHT: “NASA images generally are not copyrighted. You may use NASA imagery, video and audio material for educational or informational purposes, including photo collections, textbooks, public exhibits and Internet Web pages.”

PREPARED BY Scott Sandlin in March 2004.

It is interesting that the far side of Moon is rougher and has more craters. But, if you think about it, it makes sense. The period for rotation around its own axis and around Earth is almost identical for Moon. That is why we never see the far side of Moon from Earth. The near side of the moon is always facing the earth and hence shielded from asteroids.

The photo and information about it is taken from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. This is a great online resource. Check it out if you haven't heard about it already.

Perseid meteors

Beautiful composite image of Perseid meteor showers using photos taken over 6 hours by Fred Bruenjes

Here is how he captured it...

I was blessed with decent weather and a good show of Perseids here in Ramona, California. I had my Canon 1D Mark II running with a 17-40mm F4L lens set at 17mm F4, ISO 3200, MWB 3500K, riding piggyback on an LX200. Below is a link to my composite of 28 x 30 second exposures, selected from 680 exposures taken over the course of about 6 hours. I stacked 9 exposures for the background, and then used painted masks in
Photoshop to insert the 19 exposures that had meteors.

Spicules on the Sun

Absolutely amazing picture of the Sun...

MESSENGER to Mercury

NASA's MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging mission (MESSENGER) will lift off tomorrow to start its journey towards Mercury, the least studied terrestrial planet in our solar system. There is 12 second window at 2:16 am on 2nd August to successfully get on course to Mercury which will include a gravity pull by Venus and three Mercury flybys before getting in orbit around Mercury in March 2011. If the weather conditions don't permit launch tomorrow, fortunately, the same 12 second window occurs for the next 13 days.

Cassini in orbit

After 22 years of planning and hard work, the Cassini spacecraft is in orbit around Saturn. This begins a four-year long study of Saturn, its rings and 31 known moons. Some amazing photographs from Cassini are already coming in and can be found here.

Congratulations to the International Cassini-Huygens mission!!!

Comet Neat

Comet Neat (C/2001 Q4) was visible to naked eye for the last 2-3 weeks. Unfortunately, I could observe it only on one night (May 19th) due to consistent cloudy skies. Took out my old trusty Pentax K-1000 and loaded it with ISO800 speed film. Took several 10, 20 and 30 second exposures. The image below is a composite of 14 such photos combined using Registax. It is not the greatest, but, am happy with the amount of time I had to take the photos and atmospheric conditions.

The greenish blob in the center of the picture is the comet. There is a faint tail going up to the left side. If you look at the right edge of the photo, the tail will appear brighter. I hope to make better scans from the negatives to make this picture less grainy.

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Guess what this is...

No. This is not moon. Guess again...

This is Venus from last night. Being an internal planet, we can see a cresent of Venus just like the Moon.

Here are some pictures I took in the same session. A closeup of Moon.

Jupiter with two of its Galilean moons.

The Great Orion Nebula.

Compare this with this. Well, actually don't. It is hard to imagine that these photos depict the same object.

Hubble Ultra Deep Field

The Hubble Space Telescope has just finished taking the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF), the deepest image of the universe ever taken in visible light. Pictured above, the HUDF shows a sampling of the oldest galaxies ever seen, galaxies that formed just after the dark ages, 13 billion years ago, when the universe was only 5 percent of its present age. The Hubble Space Telescope's NICMOS and new ACS cameras took the image. Staring nearly 3 months at the same spot, the HUDF is four times more sensitive, in some colors, than the original Hubble Deep Field (HDF). Astronomers the world over will likely study the HUDF for years to come to better understand how stars and galaxies formed in the early universe.

copied shamelessly from: Astronomy Picture of the Day

Saturn on Feb. 27th, 2004

Half Moon

The Great Nebula in Orion (M42)

Nursery for new stars...

  

Check out these images of M42 taken by others. Please don't make any comparisons with my photo as it doesn't belong in the same category.

Pleiades (M45) again

Better photograph of Pleiades (M45), compared to my earlier attempt. Used the telescope driving mechanism this time to avoid the streaks caused by Earth's rotation.

The stars in this cluster are very young, only a few million years old. Long exposure photographs show nebulocity around them; the clouds that they were born from.

Moon on Feb 24th, 2004

Enlarged smaller area with craters and a mountain range at the edge of light and darkness.

Pleiades (M45)

Beautiful star cluster Pleiades (M45), enlarged through the telescope...

Moon and Venus

Moon and Venus from last night.

A look at the past

Hubble and Keck Team Up to Find Farthest Known Galaxy in Universe

An international team of scientists discovered this primeval galaxy located at a distance of about 13 billion light years. That means we are looking at how this galaxy was 13 billion years ago when this light that we are seeing left for its journey towards earth.

This amazing observation was made possible by a dense group of galaxies called Abell 2218, which is about 2 billion light years away. Its gravitational field is so intense that it acts like a lens and bends and magnifies light coming from distant and faint objects behind it that we would not be able to see otherwise.

Different colored arcs in the picture are star forming galaxies with different red-shifts caused by their distances. The red fringes showed by the outlines is the image of this farthest galaxy with the most ever recorded red-shift of 7. That puts its distance at 13 billion light years. This research has allowed astrophysicists to make a more accurate estimate of the age of the universe at 13.7 billion years, rather than the earlier estimate of 12-15 billion years.

Little Green Men

Yahoo! News - NASA Unable to Communicate with Mars Rover

Spirit project manager Pete Theisinger told a news briefing that there was a "very serious anomaly" in communications with the six-wheeled craft...

Maybe, it found something/someone that broke it. Did the last transmission show any little green men? I know its not a laughing matter, but couldn't resist.

"There is not one single fault that explains this," Theisinger said, adding that mission scientists had worked throughout the night on scenarios ranging from a major power failure to a software or memory corruption.

I hope it is not running Windows.

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Jupiter

   

My telescope

I use a 4MP Sony digital camera DSC-S85 for taking the astronomy pictures. It is attached to the beast in this picture. It is a 8" F/4 Schmidt-Newtonian Telescope on a motorized LXD-55 German equitorial mount. This is a pretty decent setup for lunar and planetary photography.

Moon

The big crater in the top left corner is Bullialdus, the double crater in the top right corner is Gassendi. The center of the picture shows a 150 Km long mountain range called Montes Riphaeus. Two big craters below the mountain range are Lansberg and Reinhold.

Took this picture back in October, but didn't get around to finding the names from the Moon atlas.

Postcard from 105 MM miles away

One of the first few photographs sent back from the surface of Mars by the latest NASA rover Spirit.

Spitzer Space Telescope

The Spitzer Space Telescope was launched into space from Cape Canaveral, Florida on 25 August 2003. This was the last telescope of NASA's Great Observatories program. It is the fourth member of this family, which consists of Hubble Space Telescope for visible light, Chandra X-ray Telescope and Compton Gamma-ray observatory. The picture on the left is taken by the Spitzer sometime in November of one of my favorite objects, M81. The three images at the bottom are taken at three different frequencies ranging from 3.6 to 24 microns. The big image is a composite of all three and the inset is taken in visible light.

Consisting of a 0.85-meter telescope and three cryogenically-cooled science instruments, Spitzer is the largest infrared telescope ever launched into space. Its highly sensitive instruments give us a unique view of the Universe and allow us to peer into regions of space which are hidden from optical telescopes. Many areas of space are filled with vast, dense clouds of gas and dust which block our view. Infrared light, however can penetrate these clouds, allowing us to peer into regions of star formation, the centers of galaxies, and into newly forming planetary systems.

Because infrared is primarily heat radiation, the telescope must be cooled to near absolute zero (-459 degrees Fahrenheit or -273 degrees Celsius) so that it can observe infrared signals from space without interference from the telescope's own heat. Also, the telescope must be protected from the heat of the Sun and the infrared radiation put out by the Earth. To do this, Spitzer carries a solar shield and will be launched into an Earth-trailing solar orbit. This unique orbit places Spitzer far enough away from the Earth to allow the telescope to cool rapidy without having to carry large amounts of cryogen. It carries 360 litres of liquid Helium which wil last through 5 years of operation.

Lunar Eclipse

Didn't get a
chance to view the eclipse on Saturday, although there were no clouds
in the sky. Was busy with something else. Here is a nice composite
photograph of the eclipse from APOD.

More Saturn

A couple more images after more processing. The image on the right is a composite of 27 frames.

Saturn on Oct. 19, 2003

This is from the first round of processing with 6 images. More Saturn images to follow soon...

B-flat Black hole The numbers

B-flat Black hole
The numbers in this article are just astounding... This supermassive blackhole is 250 million light years away. The frequency of the sound is 1 cycle per 9.5 million years. Whoooa!

After observing the Perseus galaxy cluster for 53 hours in August 2002, the Chandra X-ray Observatory revealed ripples in the hot gas that fills the cluster. These ripples appear to be sound waves that would register as a B flat if we could hear the deep tone. The team that discovered the waves determined their frequency by calculating the speed of sound in that environment and measuring the distance between wave crests. The frequency is about one cycle (or wave) per 9.5 million years or so; corresponding to a B-flat note about 57 octaves below "middle C" on a piano.

Two views of Moon

Two views of Moon from Sept 6th, 2003

Beautiful double star from Cygnus.

Beautiful double star from Cygnus. Red-orange and blue pair. It is an optical double, which means that they are not physically connected to each other, but, seem very close because of our perspective.

Picture of Mars taken on

Picture of Mars taken on early morning of Aug 25, 2003. The image on the right is the prediction of how Mars would look like at the time, when I took the picture. The southern ice cap (at the top of the image) is very clear, and the light and dark areas also match with the predicted map. This image is a composite of 4 pictures taken through 8" Meade LXD-55 using Sony DSC-85 at f/2.5 and exposed for 1/50 sec. Here is a link to some nice Mars pictures from Hubble space telescope. Even with a larger telescope it is hard to take a good clear picture of Mars from Earth, due to all the atmospheric disturbances. This picture is one of the clearest and sharpest taken from earth.

Close encounter on August 27th, 2003:
Distance from Earth: ~56 Million Km or 35 Million Miles.
Apparant size: 25 arcsec.
Brightness: -2.9
Last instance of such close encounter: 60,000 years ago.
Next close encounter: ~283 years later.

Today's Mars Picture Better than

Today's Mars Picture
Better
than yesterday. But, still not great. Moon was too close and too
bright. It is only going to get better everyday as Mars comes closer
and closer. The southern polar cap is clearly visible on the top.

My first Mars photoTaken through

My first Mars photoTaken through
Meade 8" LXD-55 using a Sony DSC-S85 afocally attached to 12.5mm Plossl
eyepiece (about 65X). It is pretty bad. Not even focused properly.
Could get only one frame before the battery in my camera died. Hope to
have better luck tomorrow.

Mars is coming closer: The

Mars is coming closer: The Numbers
source: NASA
Close encounter on August 27th, 2003:
Distance from Earth: ~56 Million Km.
Apparant size: 25 arcsec.
Brightness: -2.9
Last instance of such close encounter: 60,000 years ago.

My first DSO picture

M13: The great globular cluster in Hercules.

Jupiter

A couple of pictures of Jupiter from May 2003.

.......
Overexposed to see moons.......Shorter exposure to see surface details.

M13 was at the

M13 was at the zenith last night around 11pm. It was just beautiful even through the old Newtonian. Tonight, I should take out Meade LXD55 and observe this gem in the night sky. Here is a little description about it:

Discovered by Edmond Halley in 1714. M13, also called the 'Great globular cluster in Hercules', is one of the most prominent and best known globulars of the Northern celestial hemisphere. It was discovered by Edmond Halley in 1714, who noted that 'it shows itself to the naked eye when the sky is serene and the Moon absent.' According to Charles Messier, who cataloged it on June 1, 1764, it is also reported in John Bevis' "English" Celestial Atlas.
At its distance of 25,100 light years, its angular diameter of 23' corresponds to a linear 165 light years. It contains several 100,000 stars; Timothy Ferris in his book Galaxies even says "more than a million". Towards its center, stars are about 500 times more concentrated than in the solar neighborhood. The age of M13 has been determined by Sandage as 24 billion years and by Arp as 17 billion years around 1960; Arp later (in 1962) revised his value to 14 billion years (taken from Kenneth Glyn Jones)

Also observed M57. It was very small and fuzzy. Should be better through the new telescope. Here is a little description about M57:

Discovered by Antoine Darquier de Pellepoix in 1779. The famous ring nebula M57 is often regarded as the prototype of a planetary nebula, and a showpiece in the northern hemisphere summer sky. Recent research has confirmed that it is, most probably, actually a ring (torus) of bright light-emitting material surrounding its central star, and not a spherical (or ellipsoidal) shell, thus coinciding with an early assumption by John Herschel. Viewed from this equatorial plane, it would thus more resemble the Dumbbell Nebula M27 or the Little Dumbbell Nebula M76 than its appearance we know from here: We happen to view it from near one pole.
The mass of the nebular matter has been estimated at about 0.2 solar masses, the density at about 10,000 ions per ccm (cm^3). Its chemical composition has been determined as follows: On each Fluor (Fl) atom, the Ring Nebula contains 4.25 million atoms of Hydrogene (H), 337,500 Helium (He), 2,500 Oxygene (O), 1,250 Nitrogene (N), 375 Neon (Ne), 225 Sulfur (S), 30 Argon (Ar) and 9 Chlorine (Cl) atoms. It is expanding at 20 to 30 km/s, and approaching us at 21 km/s.