Despite feeling a bit ill, last night I ventured outdoors to try and take a few starry night photographs with my camera. It took a little fiddling, but the quality improved dramatically over the course of the evening.

Here’s my best photo of the orion nebula (around the middle star in Orion’s dagger)

Nebula!

This was taken with a 15 second exposure through my 8″ telescope. My telescope has tracking, so there isn’t any crazy star shift going on, but I think I didn’t quite have it aligned North/South so the stars fall a little bit in the image. I also had to set a timer for the camera, because just touching the camera button was enough to introduce dramatic shake into the image.

What impresses me most is the color.

Au natural

I’ve always been annoyed by deep space photography because of its false color. A scientist may decide, for example, to color a picture according to its temperature because it’s far more interesting than if you used the natural light image which, frankly, would probably be pretty boring.

Unfortunately, this had me thinking that the night sky wouldn’t be too exciting without photoshop. Thankfully, I was proven wrong. And while I hope I’ll be able to improve the focus and the shake next time around, I’m quite pleased with today’s results.

On Thursday my camera adapter arrived for my telescope. And wouldn’t you know, the next five days were cloudy. But the gloom finally parted and I quickly pulled out all the equipment for some celestial photography. This first picture shows the sun in all its glory! Actually, not quite all its glory because I can’t adjust zoom, so I couldn’t get the whole sun in a single view. Not a bad problem to have really.

The Sun! Now with Sunspot!

I did, of course, have a sun filter on my telescope. Otherwise anyone who saw this photo would immediately go blind.

Now that the sun has set, I will be returning to the great outdoors to try my hand at some planets and or stars. Stay tuned for more exciting photos!

When I read about this animation of what it’d be like if Earth had Saturn’s rings, I thought it’d be pretty stupid. But in fact, it’s fun to watch and very thought provoking.

I came up with some fun thought exercises of my own given this celestial setup:

What percentage of time would the rings block out the sun, and would that have a dramatic impact on plant life, animal sleep cycles, and evolution?

How much more quickly would we have realized that the Earth is not flat? Would Leprechauns’ pots of gold be at the bottom of the rings instead of rainbows?

The video only shows the lighted side of the rings, the other side would be dark. How strange it would be when at the winter and summer equinox your view of the rings would change from bright to dark or vice-versa. weeeird.

Given this oddity, how would rings have influenced the development of religions in general? Would they have developed differently depending on each culture’s latitude?

Cool stuff.

I’ve started reading an astronomy text book. So you’ll probably see more of these fun facts as the summer progresses.

Fun Astronomy Fact #1: It takes about 1.3 seconds for light to travel from the moon to Earth.

On Friday night a bunch of us zipped out to Rhode Island to the Frosty Drew Observatory for some star gazing. I brought my equipment, a Celestron 8″ Schmidt Cassegrain telescope. I got there around 8:30 and talked to the observatory lady. She decided to close for the evening because of looming clouds. “Bah!” I said, hoping that the hour and a half drive wouldn’t be wasted.

Tom, Mykal, and Mika showed up to join in on the fun as well. Starting off, the only real thing that I could find was Jupiter. Now, Jupiter is awesome, but it’s very elementary. Once the observatory lady left, I was worried that we wouldn’t be able to hunt anything down worth seeing. A few other folks showed up and I let them use my telescope to check out the moon and Jupiter, but really I don’t know enough about the skies to find much else.

Enter Ernie.

Ernie was an older gentleman (68ish?) with a little cap and a buttoned up shirt. He came over and asked me about my equipment and my magnification (it gets about 80x magnification). It quickly became apparent that this guy knew what he was talking about. Soon, after a few of the stragglers disappeared and it was just the five of us, the sky started to clear and Ernie began telling us where to find stuff. First he led us to a handful of double stars. These are stars that either appear to be next to one another, or stars that actually rotate around one another. The easiest to find was in the second star in on the big dipper’s handle. But then Ernie led us to more, including the beautiful pair of Albireo in Cygnus. The two stars are gorgeous in color. One looks gold and the other blue. It was awesome.

He also got us to the ring nebula, which, was extremely faint but fun to find. After exploring what we could in the hazy sky, Mika took out her camera and we tried some astro-photography. Because of the difficulty in aligning the camera to the scope, we just tried to snap some easy shots first time around.

Jupiter. Check out the sweet bands of storms that you can see on its surface. Through the telescope you can also make out four of the moons… but it’s hard to get the exposure time just right enough so that it all comes through.

Moon! This one was taken with my moon filter, a handly little filter to protect your eyes on nights where the moon shines full.

Another of the moon, this one without the filter and with a lower exposure time.

Fun!