Spotty

The Sun on Sunday 28th April 2013
with Sunspot group AR1726

The Sun was nicely spotty on Sunday and I managed to take this rather blurry photo of sunspot group AR1726 as it moved slowly across the Sun's disc.  Sunspots are cooler than the surrounding solar photosphere and so appear dark. They are however quite hot, being between 3000 and 4500 degrees K. The photosphere is however very very hot, approximately 5800 degrees K!  Strangely, further out from the Sun's photosphere, in the corona (the glowing solar plasma 'atmosphere' that becomes visible during a total solar eclipse), the temperature rises to over a million degrees K and that's very very very hot!

Please do not stare at the Sun as this will cause considerable damage to your retina.  On no account look at the Sun through binoculars or a telescope as such activities will cause permanent damage and most likely the complete loss of sight.  I use special equipment to view and take photographs of the Sun.

Sunspots are temporary phenomena associated with intense magnetic activity.  As we are now at 'Solar Maximum' in the Sun's eleven year activity cycle the number of sunspots visible has increased.

Active Region AR1726 is roughly 150,000 Kilometers long

The Seeliger Effect

Images taken in the early hours of the morning 28-04-2013 from our backyard

At opposition Saturn's rings brighten. This increase in illumination is known as the 'Seeliger Effect'. A superior planet, ie a planet outside Earth's orbit, is said to be in opposition when it is in a line with the Sun and Earth and nearest to Earth.

The opposition surge (sometimes known as the opposition effect, opposition spike or Seeliger effect) is the brightening of a rough surface, or an object with many particles, when illuminated from directly behind the observer. The term is most widely used in astronomy, where generally it refers to the sudden noticeable increase in the brightness of a celestial body such as a Saturn, as its phase angle of observation approaches zero. It is so named because the reflected light appears significantly brighter than predicted when at astronomical opposition. Two physical mechanisms have been proposed for this observational phenomenon: shadow hiding and coherent backscatter.

Credit to Wikipedia

Saturn Nearing Opposition

Saturn from our Backyard
19th  April 2013

Saturn reaches superior opposition on the 28th April. Superior opposition occurs when the Sun, Earth and a planet outside the Earth's orbit line up. At opposition the planet is usually at its brightest.

Sadly for this opposition, Saturn is very low in the sky and is therefore seen through more of the Earth's atmosphere. This causes the image of Saturn in a telescope to be blurred as thermal currents in the air interfere with the photons of light.

As our backyard is enclosed by buildings, I have to contend with the heat haze radiating from rooves and chimneys!

In order to capture the best image possible I used my QHY5v planetary camera and my 127mm Meade Apo -refractor operating with a 2.5x Barlow at F19.

 The planetary camera takes a AVI video clip which can be manipulated in the freeware programme AutoStakkert.  The software analyses the data in the video clip, selects the best images, stacks the data, improves the signal to noise ratio and creates a single sharpened image. The above image was finally sharpened and calibrated using Adobe Photoshop.

Saturn has at least sixty two moons, with fifty three of them named.  Through the telescope eyepiece I managed to spot four of the bigger moons including its largest, Titan.

Saturn, although relatively close as a member of our Solar System, is in fact a very long way away from us - approximately 1.2 billion kilometers.  The photons of light I collected with my telescope originally set off from the Sun, were reflected by Saturn's hydrogen and helium clouds and then returned to Earth through the vacuum of space.  The round trip undertaken by these photons, Sun-to-Saturn-to-Earth, took just over two hours!

If you would like to have a look at Saturn it will be close to the Moon on the 26th April. With the unaided eye Saturn looks like a fairly bright yellow star. You should be able to spot its moon Titan in 10x50 binoculars but to see its beautiful rings you will need a telescope providing at least 40x magnification.

With a bit of help from Photoshop I managed to pull two of Saturn's largest moons out from the dark vacuum of space!

Titan, Saturn's largest satellite, was discovered in March 1655 by Christiaan Huygens.

Rhea, Saturn's second largest satellite, was discovered in December 1672 by Giovanni Cassini.

Saturn at opposition with three moons
taken through my Meade Refractor

I took this image two weeks later at opposition. Notice  how the rings have brightened due to the 'Seeliger Effect'.

Rupes Recta

Image taken from our Backyard
on the 19th April 2013 with a QHY5v
planetary camera coupled with
 a 127mm Meade Apo refractor

The night before last was a little cold for this time of year but the sky was clear and transparent.

Because the Moon was being lit by the Sun obliquely, I decided to try to find and photograph Rupes Recta a fault which can only be seen when its illuminated from a low angle.

Rupes Recta, also known as the 'Straight Wall', can be seen in my photograph, apparent as an almost vertical line running almost North-South (Centre-Top).

The fault is 114 kilometers long and is situated on the East bank of Mare Nubium.  The fault connects the crater Thebit D to the North with a small mountain to the South.

Although shadow makes the fault appear as a wall or cliff, in reality the fault is marked by a gentle slope of between thirty and forty degrees. From the Earth Rupes Recta is only visible one day after First Quarter or Last Quarter.

The scarp was formed in the Imbrian geological period - between 3.2 and 3.85 billion years ago!

Enlargement of area around
Rupes Recta

The Humble Bivalve (Cockle)

A plate of cockles ready to eat

Now, I really like a plate of cockles.  I've collected them from the mudflats of the Wash at Heacham Beach, I've eaten Stiffkey Blue cockles in North Norfolk,  I've dined on cockles imported from the Nederlands and I've really enjoyed these little bivalves with a pint sitting outside the cockle sheds in Leigh -on- Sea, Essex.

The traditional way to cook and eat them in England is to boil them, let them cool and and then eat them cold with a little salt, pepper and malt vinegar. Exceptionally nice!!! - Even better with a pint of 'your Finest Cask Conditioned Ale'.  If you are feeling bold you might consider having a plate of cockles accompanied by a pickled onion or egg.   I once did and as a result came over very 'Cockerney'  (Faux Cockney).  I even started walking like Dick Van Dyke in 'Mairy Popp-ins'

http://www.whoohoo.co.uk/cockney-translator.asp

Fascinating Fact: 
A 'cockle' is Cockney rhyming slang for ten pounds sterling (£10.00)

You can of course eat cockles hot. In my mind they make better 'Spaghetti Vongole' than clams!

Our supper tonight
Spaghetti Vongole
with 'cockles'

Cockles are no 'flash in the pan' as bivalves are found worldwide and have been around almost unchanged for the better part of 500 million years.

Fossil bivalves from my collection.
I found the Triassic bivalves on a beach in New Zealand
 and the Pliocene bivalves on a beach in Suffolk

Credits: Wikipedia and 'World of Fish' who provided the cockles.

'Some like it Hot'

False colour image of the Sun
 in extreme ultra-violet light
showing solar flare on the
11th April 2013 

Solar Activity is hotting up as the Sun moves closer to solar maximum in its 11 year cycle.

The largest solar flare this year was observed and photographed on the 11th of April by the Solar Dynamics Observatory.  The flare was followed  by a coronal mass ejection (CME).

A massive cloud of charged particles will hit the Earth's atmosphere this weekend providing significant 'Aurora Displays' in the far North.

Nothing to worry about, just extreme space weather, no need to take cover!





Credit: NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory

'Things that go bump in the night'

Professor Andy Parker

Last night Toot and I went to a Breckland Astronomical Society meeting where Professor Andy Parker gave a fascinating talk on the discovery of  Higgs Bosons (there could be more than one type) and the search for Quantum Black holes.


'Andy Parker is a Professor of High Energy Physics at Cambridge University, with over 100 publications on aspects of particle physics. His current research interests involve experiments to reveal new physics such as extra space dimensions, quantum-sized black holes, and supersymmetry. He is a founder of the ATLAS experiment for the Large Hadron Collider, and for 6 years he was the project leader for the ATLAS Inner Detector. He was awarded the Pilkington Prize for excellence in teaching in 1997.'




Toot and I were much impressed by Prof Parker's ability to get over complex ideas in a clear and straight forward manner.  We were also wowed by his PowerPoint slides which illustrated the scale and complexity of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Cern.

Homo Sapiens sure are smart monkeys!  Well some of them are!

Aerial view of Cern
showing the route of the
underground tunnel which
contains the Large Hadron Collider

The Large Hadron Collider is the world's longest and largest particle accelerator.

Within the tunnel is the particle accelerator in which protons are accelerated to enormous speeds and energy levels. The speeding protons are held on track by enormous batteries of superconducting magnets which are cooled by liquid helium and nitrogen and are thermally insulated by vacuum jackets. The temperature of the magnets is maintained at 2 degrees Kelvin ie. minus 271 degrees centigrade!  The insulating vacuum maintained is more rarefied than the vacuum found on the surface of our Moon!

Atlas is one of the seven particle experiments being undertaken on the LHC at Cern searching for the Higgs Bosun.

The Higgs Bosun is a vibration in The Higgs Field.  At ambient energy levels Higgs Bosuns cannot be detected and that's why the LHC is required to provide the enormous energy necessary to create them.  It is the Higgs Field that through interaction with other particles gives all matter mass.

Schematic showing the Atlas Experiment in the LHC loop

Particles are accelerated around the LHC loop and are made to smash into each other (collide) in the Atlas experiment.  A number of different types of detectors wrapped around the point of collision are used to detect and infer the creation of exotic basic particles.  Millions of collisions are created and monitored to detect a small number of particles which behave like Higgs Bosuns.

Atlas 3D schematic (note the size of people to scale)

The inner detector being installed at the centre of Atlas

A simulated detection of a Higgs Bosun

As the presence of particles behaving like Higgs Bosuns is difficult to detect above background 'noise' the experimental collisions have been repeated millions and millions of times and data gathered has been analysed to identify statistically relevant events.

The detection of  Higgs Bosuns
at about 125 GeV can be inferred
by the blue coloured signal
shown by this graph

Credits: Wikipedia, The Atlas Collaboration Cern and The University of Cambridge Department of Physics Cavendish Laboratory.

For more information see:
http://www.atlas.ch/

Serious Suspension

Clifton Suspension Bridge
Isambard Kingdom Brunel

The act of suspension is not as easy as it may seem.

Take Isambard Kingdom Brunel  probably the greatest entrepreneurial engineer ever born in the United Kingdom........ and yet...

Mr Brunel

When it came to holding up his trousers, (pants for my American readers), this superlative engineer had to resort to sticking his hands in his pockets and holding on tight.  If he could only have removed his hands from his pockets, just think what greater engineering exploits this man could have achieved!

The act of 'keeping them up' should not be underestimated and for the more ample gentleman this can be an undeniably difficult trick to pull off.

Of course Superman,  the Man of Steel, uses a belt.  This is all very well for the well honed figure of a super-hero where the waist is both smaller than the chest or hips.  For the larger and often older man, the waist dimension can often exceed the hip measurement.  In such cases and under the influence of belt tension, gravity and the undulating movement of subcutaneous fat excited by walking, the belt can, unbidden, move inexorably south.  Unfortunately in such circumstances the belt takes said trousers with it.  In a public arena, it is hard to retain any sense of dignity with your trousers around your ankles.

The answer to this conundrum is of course 'braces', (suspenders for my American readers), however not ANY braces.  Braces can look cool, I always liked  the way 'Mork' wore them in 'Mork and Mindy' and James Taylor looked great on the Album Cover of 'Mudslide Slim and the Blue Horizon'.

It doesn't look cool when on sitting down the rear clips of your braces detach from your trouser waist band, fly up your back and hit you in the middle of your bald-head.  Only useful if you want to do an impression of Mikhail Gorbachev with his trousers falling down.

Having taken this journey of embarrassment I can confirm it gets a cheap laugh almost every-time but I suggest unlikely to amuse her Majesty if you were receiving a Knighthood!

At this point I wish to declare that I have no connection with any manufacturer or purveyor of braces.

I do however wish to thank Mr Aidan Sweeney for introducing me to and providing me with the BEST braces I have ever possessed plus exceptional customer service!
 
Not once since attaching these Rolls Royce of braces to my trousers have they become detached and the livid marks inflicted upon my forehead by lesser products are healing up nicely.

http://www.aidansweeney.co.uk/products/4-wide-extra-extra-long-extra-strong-trouser-braces

 

Misplaced Architecture No 16

Falling Water (on tap)

"The physician can bury his mistakes, but the plumber can only advise his client to plant vines"

 Credit: Original base image Wikipedia

Space Flotsam and Jetsam

Last night was cold but clear.  As I was a bit tired I didn't set up my telescope but instead took a number of photographs of the sky using my Canon DSLR mounted on a camera tripod.  I used a selection of new and old lenses but was limited to 5 second exposures  -  otherwise the rotation of the earth would smear out the stars into lines as they appeared to revolve around the pole-star 'Polaris'.

When I downloaded the images to my laptop I noticed the tell-tale lines created by either faint meteors, satellites or space junk (bits of rockets,boosters and spent fuel tanks etc).

These two images show separate areas of the constellation Ursa Major- The Great Bear, with two different trails created by who knows what?

Fractal Penguins

How many ways can you stack a penguin?
No 7 In  Fractal bubble foam.