Lemon Linguine

Toot's version of the Sicilian treat 'Lemon Linguine'

On a night so cloudy that not even a 'smidgin' of a star can be seen and when even the Moon cannot be coaxed out from behind a blanket of leaden cloud, what better way to cheer a depressed amateur astronomer than to provide him with a bowl of lemon linguine flanked by roasted Mediterranean vegetables!

Toot recreated the dish with 'extras' after tasting this exotic delight for the first time, at the most excellent Sicilian restaurant, 'Il Limone' in Giardini Naxos. Toot's version is a splendid  combination of pasta, courgettes, walnuts, lemons, basil, parmesan cheese and Limoncello. The roast aubergines, cougettes and peppers are a great accompaniment. I also like to add, as a side garnish, a glass or two of good Sicilian red wine. Two or three  glasses of Limoncello completes the meal with or without a pudding or fruit.

Ode to a bowl of decent pasta

A lemon drizzle cake

"May be a very tasty bake"

And a lemon meringue pie

"An acknowledged sweet best buy"

 But although its fame is teeny

All hail the Lemon Linguine!

Credits: Toot for being an excellent cook.

The Great Red Spot

Jupiter in the early hours of the 11th February 2016 with the Great Red Spot (GRS) on the limb. Taken from our backyard using my QHY5-11 planetary camera and my 127mm Meade apo-refracting telescope with a x2.5 Barlow lens

The Great Red Spot is a meteorological feature in the Jovian atmosphere, an anticylcone of stupendous proportions that has been raging since 1878. In all probability the GRS has been in existence for much longer, with some evidence that it was first observed by Giovanni Domenico Cassini in 1665 or by Sir Robert Hooke in 1664.  As after the 17th century, there was a long break in documented observation, it is uncertain as to whether the earlier sightings were either real or related to some other shorter termed phenomenon.  I'm a big 'Hooke' fan so I like to think the 'great man' did see the 'Great Red Spot'!

The Great Red Spot can be seen on my above image sitting  in a hollow within the South Equitorial Belt on the eastern limb of Jupiter's disc. This year the GRS is much redder than  in recent previous years but it is clearly shrinking in size. In the late 19th century the Great Red Spot measured more than 40,000km across and took more than an hour to cross Jupiter's central meridian. It is currently only 16,000km wide and transits the planet's central meridian in approximately 20 minutes.

A number of white ovals can be seen in the South Temperate Belt. Like the GRS these are storm systems within the Jovian clouds.

Jupiter has a fast differential rotation. If you look closely at my image you can see that the disc is not completely circular. It is instead 'oblate' that is, its diameter measured along its equator is larger than that measured through its poles. Jupiter is a gas giant, so as it rotates-faster at its equator, centrifugal force acts to increase its diameter. The rotation is 'differential' in that the central portion (only the Equatorial Zone) moves faster than the rest (including the North and South Equatorial belts and Polar Regions).  The central zone, known as rotation System 1 has a rotational period (once around) of 9 hours 50 minutes whilst the rest of the planet known as rotation System 2 has a rotational period of 9 hours 56 minutes.  A differential of 6 minutes doesn't seem a lot but it is enough to be noticeable, with meteorological features appearing to move relative to each other from night to night.

I never tire of looking at and imaging Jupiter because it is such a dynamic world of gargantuan proportions. I
 particularly enjoy spotting the GRS. Question is for how much longer will it exist? At the current rate of shrinkage the GRS will be circular by 2040. Whatever happens, I will cease to exist before it does!  But I would like to think my grandchildren and great grandchildren might be able to point a telescope at the King of Planets and see the Great Red Spot appear around  from behind Jupiter's limb just as Sir Robert Hooke probably did  352 years ago!

Time lapse monochrome image (taken through a blue filter every 10 hours) of the GRS on the Jovian disc from the Voyager 1 spacecraft over 28 days in 1979: NASA-JPL (The fast moving  flashes and black dots in this image are caused by Jupiter's moons and their shadows)

Credits: NASA/JPL, Wikipedia and Astronomy Now

The Beehive

Canon 600D DSLR, Altair-Astro Field-flattener and 0.8x focal reducer and 127mm Meade Apo-refractor. Taken from our Backyard in February 2016

The Italian  astronomer Galileo was the first to observe this open star cluster with a telescope in 1609. Prior to this observation the Ancient Greeks recorded what they saw with the naked eye as "a little cloud". Galileo with the aid of his very rudimentary telescope was able, for the first time, to resolve the patch of nebulosity and to see a collection of stars. The Greeks and Romans saw this object as a 'manger' from which two donkeys, the adjacent stars Asellus Borealis and Asellus Australis were feeding. The Ancient Chinese saw this nebulosity as a ghost or demon riding in a carriage and likened its appearance to "a cloud of pollen blown from willow catkins".

In 1769, Charles Messier added the Beehive Cluster to his famous list of nebulous objects as M44.
The Behive Cluster has a number of diffent names and labels that are still used commonly today:

• The Beehive
• The Manger (Praesepe)
• Messier 44
• NGC2632

The Beehive Cluster can be found in the constellation Cancer 'The Crab' and contains stars with a combined mass equivalent to 500-600 times the mass of our Sun.  The cluster is between 520 and 610 light years distant and is approximately 600 million years old.  The Beehive shares an age and proper motion with the Hyades star cluster in Taurus and is therefore considered to have a common origin. Both the Beehive and Hyades clusters contain red giant and white dwarf stars.

Credits: Information from Wikipedia

Jupiter in 2016

Jupiter and 3 of its moons just before midnight on the 10th February 2016. Imaged from our backyard using my 127mm Meade Refractor and my QHY5-11 Planetary Camera. From top right to bottom left the moons are: Ganymede, Io and Europa.

The earth's upper atmosphere was not particularly steady when I took these images so the detail in the cloud belts is not particularly good.

Jupiter is currently in the constellation Leo and is visible from the early evening. It appears to the naked eye as a very bright star.  Biinoculars reveal four of its brightest moons, Ganymede, Io, Europa and Callisto.

When I look at Ganymede and Europa I wonder if there is life in the sub-surface oceans that are believed to exist below their icy crusts.

127mm Meade Refractor and my QHY5-11 Planetary Camera.

From time to time, we all need a little guidance

Alnitak, the Flame Nebula and the Horsehead Nebula: From our backyard: Meade 127mm. Apo refractor, Altair-astro field flattener and 0.8x reducer, imaging camera Canon 600D SDSLR, all on a NEQ6 PRO mount guided with a QHY5-11 camera. 10x3min lights and 3x3min darks at ISO800

Alnitak  is a multiple star several hundred parsecs(approx 1250 light years or 1,1762,000,000,000,000 kilometres away) in the constellation Orion.  It is part of Orion's Belt along with Alnilam and Mintaka, and has a Bayer designation of Zeta Orionis (ζ Ori) and a Flamsteed designation of 50 Orionis.
The primary star is a hot blue supergiant with an absolute magnitude of -6.0 and is the brightest class O star in the night sky with a visual magnitude of +2.0. It has two bluish 4th magnitude companions, one finely resolved and one only detected interferometrically and spectroscopically, producing a combined magnitude for the trio of +1.77.  I was pleased that my telescope camera set up could resolve one of the two bluish companion stars which you can see clearly in the above image just to the left of Alnitak at 9 o'clock. The stars are members of the Orion OB1 association and the Collinder 70 association.

The Flame Nebula, designated as NGC 2024 and Sh2-277, is an emission nebula  It is about 900 to 1,500 light-years away.
The bright star Alnitak (ζ Ori), the easternmost star in the Belt of Orion, shines energetic ultraviolet light into the Flame and this knocks electrons away from the great clouds of hydrogen gas that reside there. Much of the glow results when the electrons and ionized hydrogen recombine and release photons. Additional dark gas and dust lies in front of the bright part of the nebula and this is what causes the dark network that appears in the center of the glowing gas. The Flame Nebula is part of the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex, a star-forming region that includes the famous Horsehead Nebula.
At the center of the Flame Nebula is a cluster of newly formed stars, 86% of which have circumstellar disks^. X-ray observations by the Chandra X-ray Observatory show several hundred young stars, out of an estimated population of 800 stars.  X-ray and infrared images indicate that the youngest stars are concentrated near the center of the cluster^.

The Horsehead Nebula, also known as Barnard 33, is a dark cloud of dust and gas within the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex, where star formation is taking place. This stellar nursery, as it is known, can contain over 100 known kinds of organic and inorganic gases as well as dust; some of the latter is made up of large and complex organic molecules.
The red or pinkish glow originates from hydrogen gas predominantly behind the nebula, ionized by the nearby bright star Sigma Orionis. Magnetic fields channel the gases leaving the nebula into streams, shown as streaks in the background glow. A glowing strip of hydrogen gas marks the edge of the massive cloud, and the densities of nearby stars are noticeably different on either side
The heavy concentrations of dust in the Horsehead Nebula region and neighbouring Orion Nebula are localized, resulting in alternating sections of nearly complete opacity and transparency. The darkness of the Horsehead is caused mostly by thick dust blocking the light of stars behind it. The lower part of the Horsehead's neck casts a shadow to the left.  The visible dark nebula emerging from the gaseous complex is an active site of the formation of "low-mass" stars. Bright spots in the Horsehead Nebula's base are young stars just in the process of forming.

The above image is my first attempt at long exposure astro-photography using my new acquired QHY5-11 planetary and guide camera. Thanks to Stark Labs for the excellent freeware 'PHD2 Guiding' which made this possible. Thanks also to Olly Penrice for the demonstration last year of the process involved and to Toot for sanctioning the purchase of the camera.  As they say "my cup runneth over".

I did have a moment of panic when suddenly the guide camera lost the guide star. "oh no", had my new camera stopped working on its debut evening?  Had the mind numbing cold of  a raw Lowestoft night drained the number crunching capacity of my frost covered Dell laptop?  None of the above.

Instead, as the earth spun on its axis, the guide star had apparently dropped below the roof of my house! 

I finished the night taking some videos of the planet Jupiter and went to bed at about 3.00am on the 11th February, a tired but happy old man. 

Two of my images of Jupiter taken just after 1.00am on the 11th February 2016 .127mm Meade Apo- refractor with 2.5x Barlow lens and QHY5-11 planetary camera. The atmosphere was not particularly steady so images not as sharp as might be on a better night.

Credits: Wikipedia for written information.