Serious Moonlight

Last night's gibbous Moon hiding in the clouds

Last night was not good for  astronomy, too much wind, too much cloud and too much moonlight. It was however wonderful to watch the Moon disappear and reappear amongst the clouds. The lack of street lighting after midnight really enhances the natural beauty of the sky. How sad is it that the people who moan the most about our Council turning off the lights are fast asleep in bed long before the stars are freed from the grip of urban light pollution?
I am very excited as Toot has bought me a new planetary and guide camera, a QHY5v colour camera from 'Modern Astronomy'.  As I am a real 'beginner' at  astro-photography, before I decided to buy a QHY5v, I asked a lot of basic questions and followed a number of relevant threads on 'Stargazer's Lounge'.  Once I decided to go for it, I ordered one over the Internet on a Friday and it was delivered the next day!  Well done and thanks to Bernard at 'Modern Astronomy'.

QHY5V straight from the box

I am hoping to use this camera in combination with my telescopes and Canon DSLR in a number of ways:
1) As a guide camera correcting errors in my telescope mount drive system.
2) As a colour planetary camera to replace my home modded web-cam.
3) As an entry level astro-cam for brighter galaxies and DSOs.
I have spent some of today loading up the camera drivers and relevant software and now I am ready to go, weather and bad-back permitting!

Serious Moonlight collected with my Canon DSLR

David Bowie
'Serious Moonlight'
Tour (Wikipedia)

With my new camera I shall be hoping to catch some 'serious Moonlight'  and who knows? - perhaps Toot might "put on her red shoes and dance the blues with me"

The Nile and the Temple Complex at Dendera

Dendera

The Nile
from Space
NASA

Toot and I are fascinated by the civilizations of the Ancient World and  have enjoyed two holidays in Egypt. Whilst we were staying in Luxor (Thebes) we visited: the 'Palace of Hatshepsut', the 'Valley of the Kings', the 'Valley of the Nobles', and the 'Temple of Khons at Karnak'. We also took a day cruise down the Nile to the 'Temple Complex at Dendera'. The 'Astronomical Ceiling' at Dendera is a great architectural feature and is a 'must see' if you are visiting the area.
.

The Astronomical or Zodiacal Ceiling (Wikipedia)

My painting of the Nile River Bank as seen from the Cruise Boat

Palace of Queen Hatshepsut (Wikipedia)

This view of the 'Palace' on the West Bank of the Nile appeared regularly at history of architecture lectures in first year studies at the Manchester University School of Architecture, which I attended in the years 1968 to 1974.  It was therefore, a real  thrill to clamber over this building when we visited Egypt for the first time in 1997.  It is said that Queen Hatshepsut fell in love with her architect, Senmut, and as a consequence, had his image painted on the inner-side of the door to her bed-chamber. It is thought that she wished to see his face first and last at sunrise and sunset.  In my thirty five years as an architect, I never had such an attentive client, well perhaps the lovely Toot!

Connections in Time and Space

Image of NGC7331 (courtesy of Wikipedia)

The spiral galaxy NGC 7331 is 350 million or so light years away, that is the light from all the millions of stars that make up this galaxy has been travelling for 350 million years to reach us.  NGC 7331 can be seen, with a backyard telescope, in the constellation of Pegasus, during the Northern Hemisphere autumn and winter. The galaxy is of a similar type, a barred spiral, and size as our galaxy, the Milky Way

Plant Fossils of the Coal Measures

Calamites (Giant Horsetail)

A - Calamites stem.   B - Calamites - 3d pith core of stem.
C - Neuropteris or similar fern like frond.  D - Annularia (Horsetail leaf whorls).  E - Lepidodendron (Impression of large stem or trunk.  F - Lepidodendron (Leafy shoot)

Lepidodendron (Arborescent Lycopsid)

I collected the photographed fossils over a period of thirty years from a number of colliery waste tips in Derbyshire and Somerset. These colossal plants, some achieving heights up to 50 metres, grew 350million years ago on levees in large tidal deltas. These plants formed the basis of large worldwide coal deposits.

Just think the light our eyes capture, when we look at NGC 7331, set off from alien stars when my fossils were living plants swaying in the warm wind, on a day 150 million years before the first Dinosaur walked on the land.

Fossil plants and fossil light inextricably connected!

Here comes the Sun!

Toot and me, forever will be, 'Ship -mates, partners and pals'

Yes at last, the Sun finally came out and beamed down its warming rays for several hours upon our small but jungle-like garden. Toot baked a splendid loaf and we sat on the patio and ate a  fine Mediterranean lunch of cheese, olives, tomatoes, olive-oil, bread, basil and fruit . A full bodied red wine made a fine accompaniment and after we finished our meal we sat happily in the sunshine.


By tea-time the rain had returned and today, sadly, our sky is once more leaden grey. I am surprised the Olympic flame hasn't gone out, what with all the rain.  No wonder England is 'a green and pleasant land' -green because its gone mouldy from damp and pleasant for all the ducks swimming nearby in Oulton Broad! 
On a positive note it is much warmer with temperatures over 20 degrees C, so come on Sun!


I've just checked, 'The Flame' is still burning and currently in Lincolnshire. If you  are interested and want to follow the route around the UK taken by the Olympic Torch you can follow this link 

http://www.london2012.com/torch-relay/route/

Olympic Gold for Toot's Sour Dough Loaf with Pumpkin Seeds!

Memories of Sorrento

My watercolour of the cliffs below the Parco dei Principe Hotel.
The mornings were misty until the sun arose from behind the cliffs. 

When I awoke yesterday morning, I looked out the window and saw that the sky was grey, as it has been for many of the mornings this summer, in East Anglia.

On the wall above our bed, hangs the watercolour I painted nearly fifteen years ago, whilst on holiday in Sorrento.  As I lay there, under the duvet, I wondered if the sun was shining on the 'Amalfi Coast' and if guests at the Hotel Parco dei Principe were eating their Mediterranean breakfasts looking out over a warm and azure sea? We must 'Return to Sorrento'!

The best of Sorrento

Views from our bedroom windows

Looking north from our bedroom window, after midnight last night, I noticed the first display of noctilucent clouds  that I have seen this year.

Bearing in mind; the terrible electrical storm, hail and torrential rain, that we had experienced during the day, last night was exceptionally clear, as is often the case after rain, and many stars were visible in the astronomical twilight, which continued into the early hours of the morning.

Night clouds or noctilucent clouds are tenuous cloud-like phenomena that are the "ragged-edge" of a much brighter and pervasive polar cloud layer called polar mesospheric clouds in the upper atmosphere, visible in a deep twilight. They are made of crystals of water ice. The name means roughly night shining in Latin. They are most commonly observed in the summer months at latitudes between 50° and 70° north and south of the equator. They can only be observed when the Sun is below the horizon.

They are the highest clouds in the Earth's atmosphere, located in the mesosphere at altitudes of around 76 to 85kilometres (47 to 53 mi). They are normally too faint to be seen, and are visible only when illuminated by sunlight from below the horizon while the lower layers of the atmosphere are in the Earth's shadow. Noctilucent clouds are not fully understood and are a recently-discovered meteorological phenomenon; there is no record of their observation before 1885. (thanks to Wikipedia)

Walking through to a bedroom on the other side of my house I noticed the red super giant star, Antares (Rival of Mars) glowing orange in the southern sky and peeping above the roof tops. Scorpius can only be seen in the middle of summer at our northern latitude of 52 degrees.

Star map showing
the constellation
Scorpius (Wikipedia)

Antares (Wikipedia)

Antares is a supergiant star with a stellar classification of M1.5Iab-b.^[3] It has a radius of approximately 883 times that of the Sun;^[6] if it were placed in the center of our solar system, its outer surface would lie between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Based upon parallaxmeasurements, Antares is approximately 550 light-years (170 parsecs) from the Earth.^[1] Its visual luminosity is about 10,000 times that of the Sun, but because the star radiates a considerable part of its energy in the infrared part of the spectrum, the bolometric luminosity equals roughly 65,000 times that of the Sun. The mass of the star is calculated to be 15 to 18 solar masses.^{[10] (Wikipedia)}

Answers to 'Martian Crust': Image A is the 'Crust on a Sour Dough Loaf' and Image B is the 'Martian Polar Cap'

Time is slippery stuff

Roy Batty 'Off World Replicant' Blade Runner

                                              “All the moments will be lost in time,     
                                               Like tears washed away in the rain”

Every click of the counter records one second that has passed. Every sixty seconds one more minute has elapsed since the beginning of time. 

The Universe came into existence and time commenced 13750000000 years ago, that's 7231950000000000 minutes consigned to history since the 'Big Bang'.

Please note since I wrote this entry the estimated age of the Universe has been increased and now stands at  13.798 + or - 0.37 billion years.  I haven't changed my calculations for the following graphs etc.  For more information on the age of the Universe follow the link.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_the_universe

The average number of minutes one might expect as a male living in the United Kingdom at this time is 410774760. On my birthday this year I will have been alive for 33135480 minutes. "I now know how Roy Batty felt"!

Showing the relative time periods that have elapsed from the beginning of time is difficult because of the extremely large range of years involved. The graphs have been drawn with the events shown up the Y axis and time elapsed along the X axis. The numbers shown along the X axis are the powers to base 10 to which the decimal number after the point is raised. For example: time elapsed since the birth of Jesus Christ is given as 4.201 which can be transposed to 0.201 x 10000 = 2010 years.

The trouble with time is just when you think you've got the hang of it, in reality and relatively speaking, you haven't.  Sitting in my armchair,time always seems to tick-tock-tick away at the same rate but if I were in a star-ship travelling at half the speed of light, 'Time' would dilate and go more slowly than in my sitting room.

The Mathematical proof of Time Dilation

As I probably have less than 8 million minutes left, I might be best advised to volunteer as a 'Star-ship Trooper".  I must find out where Toot put my towel!

Whats in your pond?

Paramecium as imaged through my microscope

As I wished to upload moving images to this blog, I set myself the problem of finding out how to convert a mov. clip, taken with my compact camera , to GIF format. The above film of 'Paramecium' was taken through my microscope last summer. My grandson, Felix fished this little 'beastie' out of a nearby stream using one of 'Toots' jam-jars tied to a length of hairy string.

Paramecium are very common protozoans and are characterized by their jerky motion with sudden and frequent reversals of direction. They are from 100 to 350 um long and members of Phylum Ciliophora.


Phylum Ciliophora:  These creatures are called Ciliates and have hundreds of tiny cilia which beat in unison to propel the protists through the water.  Shown at left is a school classic, the Paramecium. 

 Often cilia are fused together in rows or tufts (called cirri) and are used for special functions such as food gathering.  In addition to locomotion, the Paramecium uses cilia to sweep food down into it's central channel or gullet.  Other ciliates include the Stentor, Blepharisma, Bursaria, and Vorticella.

Volvox as photographed by Felix and Papa

Volvox is a chlorophyte, or green algae. It exists as a spherical colony. Each alga member of the colony has two whip-like hairs called flagella. Individual alga are connected to each other by thin strands of cytoplasm that enable the whole colony to swim in unison.The individual alga have small red eye spots.

Why not check out what's living in your pond, lake, stream or river? From the very large to the very small, from the very close to the very far away, there is always something interesting to find out!

Martian Crust

Thanks to NASA/ JPL/Malin Space Science Systems for one of the above images

Images A and B are one or more of the following:
                                                                           1) A canyon on the Martian Surface
                                                                           2) Chocolate icing on a cup-cake
                                                                           3) The Martian Polar Cap
                                                                           4) The surface of Titan
                                                                           5) The crust on a sour-dough loaf

Answers to these and many other fundamental questions of 'Life the Universe and Everything' will be provided in future posts. Who knows? - I may even show you my banjo!

As 'Man' and 'an old architect' cannot live by Astronomy and Art alone,Toot made her second sour-dough loaf today, terrific! I am just about to sit down to tea and have crab sandwiches and salad.

Watching someone making sour-dough bread is quite fascinating. First you make the 'mother' fermented yeast mixture. Then you make your bread dough, you knead it, you let it 'prove', you slash it and then you bake it. Finally you eat it, delicious!

Thanks to Rachel and Bimbar for the Sour-dough consultancy.

Tunisian Sunrise and Sunset

Sunrise over the Chott el Djerid Salt Pan

Sunset over the Sahara Desert

Found these two photographs of the sun which I took some ten years ago on holiday in Tunisia. I thought that I might enter the 'sunset image' in the Astro-photographer of the Year 2012 competition? The photographs also reminded me of a great holiday and the excellent two day trip through southern Tunisia that we enjoyed from our holiday centre in the north. If you haven't visited this country I would strongly recommend it!  Camel riding is also a must do activity. Once you get used to the rolling action of a camel's gait you will never want to go back to a boring old pony. Suffolk is a great place but there are far too few opportunities for 'camel riding' in East Anglia.

Sun-spots

England would be a great place to live if it wasn't for the weather! Dawn on the morning of the 'Transit of Venus' should have been a clear, bright summer's morning but instead was a grey rain soaked affair. Sadly no chance of the glorious photos of Venus and the Sun appearing above the horizon "Rising from the North Sea" Botticelli like in sublime magnificence. Toot awoke at 4.30am, looked out the bedroom window at the torrential rain and decided to let me sleep on in the warmth of my bed! The weather has been so bad that today gale-forced winds up-rooted a tree in our back-garden. "Oh to be in England now that summers here"

Anyway, in May and in preparation for the transit, I practiced taking photos of the Sun and sun-spots using my old ETX RA90 with a homemade Baader white light filter and my Lumix compact camera. So here are the best of them. Waste not want not!

Enlarged view of a sunspot

The June 2012 Transit of Venus as imaged in Hydrogen Alpha light
courtesy of NASA

The Solar disk with sunspots

The Moon

A composite of three images of the Moon on the 28th May 2012 taken through my 127mm refractor.
The enhanced colour reflects the differences in mineral makeup of the Moon's crust 
(the colour information was added from an image taken some time ago using my ETX90 RA)

As the atmosphere was reasonably stable I decided to capture HD video clips at higher magnification using my Lumix compact camera fixed to my refracting telescope. The clips were then split, aligned and stacked using Registax 6 and the final images sharpened and enhanced using Photoshop.
The areas A and B were selected for enlargement as they were more or less on the terminator and showed interesting detail.

The darker area in the triangle formed by the Crater Archimedes and the mountains Hadly and Bradley exhibits a number of volcanic features including a 'Dome' Putredinis 4 which can be seen clearly in image A.

Image A with labels

Image A: Montes Appennius

u

This NASA image shows the Apollo12 Lunar module over the crater Ptolemaeus. The small crater below and to the left of the space-craft is the crater Ammonius and the larger crater to the right is Herschel.
On board the Lunar module piloted by Alan Bean was the Mission Commander James 'Pete' Conrad. The Lunar module landed in the Sea of Storms (Oceanus Procellarum) on the 19th. of November 1969.
I was twenty years old when this mission was accomplished, the last person to walk on the Moon did so in 1972 when I was twenty three, I'm sixty three years old now and it begs the question as to whether I shall be alive to see the next man or the first woman to walk on the Moon!

Image B with labels

The crater Ptolemaeus is approximately 153km across and 2.4 km deep. Its floor has been flooded with a basaltic lava and a number of 'Ghost craters' (ie.craters that have been flooded with lava but still show an impression of their rims) can be seen in Image B.

Image B: Crater Ptolemaeus and associated craters

Image C: Colour saturated image highlighting the different mineral make up of the surface

Saturn the 'ringed planet'

Saturn as photographed from our garden in May 2012

Our wireless-router had to be replaced and as a consequence, we have had no Internet-Broadband connection for almost three weeks. The lovely Toot says that for several days after the router failed I displayed all the classic symptoms of Internet-Blog withdrawal! A tired listlessness, sweaty palms and a predilection for 'Bilge Talking.'  We are now back on line, so for those that care, I shall once again be posting a steady stream of information about the comings and goings in the Cabine.

In the last two weeks,we have had a few clear days and nights when I have been able to use my telescopes to sweep the 'Suffolk skies'. I have to say I was surprised at being able to capture the above view of Saturn using the HD movie setting on my Lumix compact camera. The technique applied involved attaching the camera to a telescope eyepiece using a bracket (afocal method) and focusing the image of Saturn on the LCD screen by adjustment of the focus knob on my 127mm refracting telescope. The size and intensity of the image was adjusted using the manual zoom on the camera.  I captured a two minute film clip which I converted from mov. to AVI format using the freeware RAD video BINK converter. The AVI clip was then split, aligned and stacked using the freeware Registax 6 and the resultant Tiff image was  finally sharpened and adjusted using Photoshop.

Saturn spinning silently in the velvet black of space

I have to say that I still get a buzz when I see Saturn through the eyepiece of my telescope. In my opinion it's a real show stopper!