Falling asleep in our cereals

 

The Total Lunar Eclipse at Totality. Canon DSLR 600d, EOS telephoto lens at f=300mm mounted on a Star Adventurer mount. Taken from our backyard in the early hours of 28th September 2015. Note the stars which, would normally be invisible in the moon's glare, are clearly visible in this image.

Last night Toot and I came home from Southend after a wonderful weekend with our children and grandchildren. We were a bit tired but wanted to see the lunar eclipse and if possible photograph it. It had been a lovely sunny day with beautiful blue skies so we thought we would stay up late, 3.00 am., to watch the moon grow dark and glow blood red.  But oh no!  The clouds came rolling in from the North Sea and one by one stars and then the moon disappeared from view.

Not daunted I set up my astro kit in our backyard and sat myself down in the dark. Every now and then the clouds would break and I would catch glimpses of familiar constellations and the 'super moon'.  In my opinion the moon always looks super and I must say Toot and I always like to go out and look at the full moon, wink at it for Neil Armstrong and call it Cosmo's moon like in the film 'Moonstruck'.

Last night the moon was at its nearest to the earth, so it appeared larger in the sky. The moon and earth form a binary system and as a consequence both the moon and the earth revolve around the common gravitational centre of their combined masses. As the earth has a mass much greater than the moon, this common point is within the earth's volume but it is not at the earth's centre.  From our position on the surface of earth, the moon appears to circle the earth but in actuality it follows the approximate path of an ellipse. It is therefore some times nearer to us (perigee) and sometimes further away (apogee).

The lunar eclipse passes through different phases. The penumbral phase occurs on either side of totality and shows as a gradual darkening, and after totality lightening, of the moons disk. During the period of totality the moon can be seen with reduced luminosity and often shows a range of colours.  These colors are created by the sunlight that passes through and is diffracted by the earth's atmosphere. The colours are predominately in the red range because red light is diffracted and absorbed less by the earth's atmosphere than light in the blue frequencies.

The early penumbral stage before totality. The image is a composite of six images which in turn were derived from six video clips taken with my QHY 5v colour planetary camera fixed to my Star Adventurer mount. The clips were taken during a longish break in the clouds. Sadly the clouds were not so kind during totality so I was unable to use this much better technique. But that's the wonder of astro-imaging and the British weather.

Anyway, Toot and I had a great night watching the eclipse and went to bed at 5.00am.after 'hot chocolates' all around.  So no wonder we were falling asleep in our cornflakes!

The Triffid Nebula, Messier 20 or NGC 6514

My image of the Triffid Nebula in the constellation Sagittarius taken with the Bradford Robotic Telescope

The Triffid Nebula is approximately 5200 light years distant and is located in the Scutum spiral arm of our galaxy 'The Milky Way'. It is a stellar nursery and a rare combination of an open star cluster, an emission nebula (red coloured clouds) and a reflection nebula (blue coloured clouds).

A nebula is a region of interstellar gas and dust. Emission nebulae are clouds of ionized gas that emit photons at a range of frequencies. They are ionised by the radiation from nearby stars. Generally, these nebulae appear reddish.

Reflection nebulae are clouds of dust that simply reflect the light from nearby stars. The dust particles of reflection nebulae usually only scatter blue light, so appear blue.

Other types of nebulae don't reflect light.  Dark nebulae such as the 'lanes' you can see in the above image are so dense that they block light from other sources, such as background emission nebulae, reflection nebulae, or other stars.

Credits: Wikipedia and the Bradford Robotic Telescope

Ageing Gracefully

The Helix Nebula in the Constellation Aquarius. My image taken with the Bradford Robotic Telescope on Mount Teide, Tenerife.

Planetary nebulae are the remains of stars that once looked a lot like our sun. When sun-like stars run out of their hydrogen fuel, they fuse helium instead, get hotter and puff out their outer gaseous layers. Once the helium for fusion runs out, these same layers are heated by the very hot and dense original star core.  These cores are called white dwarf stars.  Our own sun, after it leaves the main sequence, will first become a red giant star and then, some five billion years in the future, blossom into a planetary nebula. Once a star becomes a white dwarf  all nuclear fusion ceases and the star radiates its residual heat slowly to space until it finally becomes a black dwarf.  The White dwarf star starts off very very hot and consequently it is estimated that the journey from white to black dwarf  for an average star may take as long as 10 billion years.  As the Universe is 'only' some 13.7 billion years old it is unlikely that there are many if any black dwarf stars currently anywhere in the cosmos.

Image I created in APS by overlaying my image with data provided by the Spitzer Infrared Space Telescope

The intense ultraviolet radiation from the white dwarf star heats up the expelled layers of gas, which shine brightly in the infrared.  In this image: blue shows infrared light of 3.6 to 4.5 microns; green shows infrared light of 5.8 to 8 microns; and red shows infrared light of 24 microns.  The red color in the middle of the eye denotes the final layers of gas blown out when the star died. The white circle in the very center is the glow of a dusty disk circling the white dwarf star (the disc itself is too small to be resolved and is probably about the same size as the planet earth).

Credits: Bradford Robotic Telescope, NASA/JPL-Caltech and Wikipedia

Three Degrees of Separation

Don't you just love Science and Technology?

My above graphic shows the route taken by the photons of light from Pluto at the edge of our solar system, 4.67 billion miles or 7.5 billion Kilometres, to our home in Oulton Broad. This represents only half the journey.  These photons had already travelled from our Sun out to Pluto to be reflected back towards Earth.  Plucky little transcendental massless particles!

I created the following image from the data set I received from the Bradford Robotic Telescope.

Combination of two images taken on two nights approximately 5 days apart which shows Pluto moving along its elliptical solar orbit infront of the more or less static backdrop of stars in the Constellation Sagittarius.

Now I'm sharing the impact of those photons with the peoples of the Earth via the Internet.  How fantastic is that?

Credits: NASA, The Bradford Robotic Telescope and Wikipedia

The 'Blob' from outer space

The Pleiades or 'Seven Sisters' taken with the Bradford Robotic Camera on Teneriffe

But what of the 'Blob'?  Well just look at the following enlargement of a part of the above photograph!

The black 'Blob'

Credit: Bradord RoboticTelescope and the University of Bradford.

M31, M32 and M110 Galaxies in the constellation Andromeda

Image taken in our backyard with my Canon 600d DSLR fixed to my new Altair Astro 66mm Lightwave refractor mounted on my star adventurer mount.

The photograph below shows the the full frame taken by my camera and from which the above images were taken and enhanced using a number of different software packages.





Not bad for a little 'scope' with only a 66mm.objective lens and a focal length of 400mm. Astounding when you realise that M31 and its gravtationally bound sibling galaxies are on average 2.5 light years distant or put another way 23,651,321,000,000 kilometres away!

The Sculptor or Silver Dollar Galaxy

The Sculptor Galaxy or NGC 253. Image taken with the Bradford Robotic Telescope on Mount Teide, Teneriffe.

Vey pleased with my free trial of the remote Bradford Robotic Telescope up Mount Teide on the island of  Teneriffe. I downloaded the data via the internet this morning and after some manipulation with the software FITS Liberator and APS put together the above image.

The Bradford Robotic Telescope against the peak of Mount Teide in Tenerife

Credts: The University of Bradford and Wikipedia Organization University of Bradford Location(s) Tenerife, Canary Islands Coordinates 28°17′54″N 16°30′34″W Coordinates: 28°17′54″N 16°30′34″W Altitude 2400m Wavelength Optical Built 2002 Telescope style Schmidt-Cassegrain Diameter 35.5cm Focal length f/5.3 Mounting Equatorial Dome Half Sphere

University of Bradford

Tenerife, Canary Islands

28°17′54″N 16°30′34″W Coordinates: 28°17′54″N 16°30′34″W

2400m

Optical

2002

Schmidt-Cassegrain

35.5cm

f/5.3

Equatorial

Half Sphere