I listened to an interview with Ed Weiler on Diane Rehm show. He was the chief scientist of the Hubble Space Telescope from 1979 to 1998.
One of his favorite Hubble images was a 36-hour long deep-sky exposure taken in the late 90’s. The area of sky covered in that frame was about 1/100th of Moon disc as seen from Earth. That area is about 100millionth of the whole sky. In that one image more than 300 galaxies were seen. Each with billions of stars in it.
Now, I have a little better understanding of how vast the Universe really is. It is still much bigger than what I can comprehend but, I have a better way to put a scale to it. When it comes to imagining big or vast, human mind has its limitations unless it is presented with an example like this.
Another perspective on vastness of Universe can be found in my previous post, “Pale Blue Dot“.
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It is 20th anniversary of this photo taken by Voyager 1 and famously named by Carl Sagan as “Pale Blue Dot”. Read the full NPR story here. I really liked Sagan’s description of the photo.
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ’superstar’, every ’supreme leader’, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
This comes from his book with the same name: Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
. It is a good read.
In the last 20 years, Voyager 1 and 2, traveling at about 35,000 miles per hour, have moved farther away (at about 10 billion miles or 16 billion km currently) from Earth out on the fringes of our Solar system. If they look back and take a picture now, Earth will not even be seen in it.
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Finally, got around to putting all the eclipse photos together.
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Partial solar eclipse in Thane, India.
More photos below… Note the sunspots to the top right – about 2 o’clock position.
Read more…
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It was a clear cool night. Cygnus was up overhead and Sagittarius in the Southwestern sky. A perfect view of the Most dense part of the Milky Way. There were many easy targets for the telescopes. Here is a list of what I saw:
M22 and M28: Nice globular clusters in Sagittarius. M22 is the brightest globular cluster that can be seen in the Northern hemisphere.
M8 and M17: Lagoon nebula and Omega nebula in Sagittarius.
M11: Wild duck cluster, an open cluster in Scutum.
Albireo or beta Cygnus: Fabulous double star; red/orange and blue pair.
M57: Ring nebula in Lyra.
M56: Globular cluster in Lyra.
M13 and M92: Globular clusters in Hercules.
M31: Andromeda galaxy
NGC 869 and 884: Double cluster in Perseus.
Jupiter: All four Gallilean moons were visible.
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My attempt at capturing analemma. It is far from perfect and needs lot more work. It is a composite of photos taken over almost 2 years. There is a big gap in the sequence on the top right as I couldn’t take even one photo during the months of May due to bad weather. Hopefully, this image will get better as I keep adding more photos.
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Heard this unbelievable story about the original video footage from Appollo 11 Moon mission, on NPR this morning. NASA officials decided to reuse magnetic tapes and ended up erasing this historic video recording.
This reminds me of another lost video footage in a very similar manner. Back in late 70’s or early 80’s, Pu. La. Deshpande performed “वारयावरची वरात” and “एक रविवार सकाळ” on Doordarshan. It was probably some of the best TV programming ever. Doordarshan decided (hopefully unknowingly) to erase the original recordings to reuse the tapes. I found this recording (probably from somebody’s VCR recording) on Youtube. I hope this recording is available as VCD or DVD in the market. If anyone knows any information about it, please let me know or just buy it for me and I’ll pay you back.
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I have been using Meade LXD-55 8″ Schmidt-Newtonian reflector for more than 5 years. After using it a couple of times, I thought that using the go-to system took a long time to set up and I stopped using it. Also, it ate batteries and didn’t want to keep buying more when I could search and find most everything manually. Sometime last year, I bought a 12V power supply for the drive along with accessories to mount my new WO Megrez90. All those things collected dust as I continued using Megrez90 in manual mode. Last week, I got very annoyed when I couldn’t work the tripod head properly with my frozen fingers and decided to get LXD-55 out of the box again.
Last night, I set everything up very crudely with Megrez90 on the mount. I did a good job of polar alignment but didn’t bother balancing the tripod. Two star alignment worked quite flawlessly and the first object that I selected for go-to, M82 was right in the middle of the field. I was hopping from one object to next with just a couple of clicks of buttons and I must admit that it was very enjoyable. I was able to see M81, M82, double cluster in perseus, M42, M35, M36, M37, Moon and Saturn in 15-20 minutes.
Spending those 10-15 extra minutes to setup the mount was really worth it. Maybe, I had problems earlier with the heavier 8″ scope and things worked very well with the smaller refractor. That shouldn’t be the case if everything is properly balanced with counterweights. Must have been my mistake in setting things up or my memory is failing me about my earlier experience with the mount. Anyway, after last night’s fun time, I’ll be using the go-to functionality more and more.
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A better way of looking at those three Venus photos from the last post. When they are put side-by-side, the change in the appearance of Venus over the last month is very obvious. As Venus is coming closer to Earth, its overall size is getting larger but, the Sun-exposed area that we can see is getting smaller. Hence, a thinner crescent. These photos were taken over the last month at same magnification and were processed identically.
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As Venus is coming closer to Earth, its overall size is getting larger but, the Sun-exposed area that we can see is getting smaller. Hence, a thinner crescent. Click below to see photos taken last month at same magnification and processed identically.
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