Venus, the Moon and Aldebaran the bulls eye

Looking west over the garden fence. The crescent Moon with earthshine illuminating the remainder of the earth facing surface and sitting just above the orange supergiant star Aldeberan (alpha tauri). Venus shining brightly above my neighbour's television aerial.

When I went to put some dishes in the dishwasher I noticed the crescent moon through a west facing window.  I quickly located the wherabouts of my DSLR and managed to capture not only the moon but also Venus and the star Aldebaran. I braced the telephoto lens of my camera on the top of my neighbour's fence and handheld an exposure of 1/15th of a second. No mean effort for a shakey old man!

Ganymede - largest moon in the solar system

Jupiter at 21.00 UTC on the 14th April 2015 - taken with my 127mm Meade Refractor and Canon 600D DSLR camera.

Jupiter's largest Galilean moon, Ganymede can be seen in the above image as a small black dot, transiting Jupiter's disc.  Io, the innermost and volcanically active Galilean moon,  can be seen just to Jupiter's lower left.  Europa can be seen further out.   I could see Callisto further out still but this moon was outside the field of view captured by my camera.

Completing an orbit in roughly seven days, Ganymede participates in a 1:2:4 orbital resonance with the moons Europa and Io, respectively. It has a diameter of 5,268 km (3,273 mi), 8% larger than that of the planet Mercury, but has only 45% of the latter's mass. Its diameter is 2% larger than that of Saturn's Titan, the second largest moon in the solar system. It also has the highest mass of all planetary satellites, with 2.02 times the mass of our Moon.

  

Ganymede has a magnetosphere, which implies the presence of a liquid iron core. The moon is comprised of silicate rocks and water ice and has a surface pocked with impact craters,. It is also considered likely that Ganymede hosts a subterranean salt water sea which along with Europa's subsurface ocean may harbour primitive extra terrestrial life.

Ganymede - Credit NASA Galileo Orbiter

Credits: Wikipedia and NASA

The Grey Seal Colony at Horsey Gap Norfolk UK

 

Normally grey seals come to Horsey Beach to breed and stay between November and February.  This year is exceptional in that the seals have come in much greater numbers and have stayed at the beach throughout March.


The grey seal is one of the largest marine mammals found in the waters around the United Kingdom and approximately half the world's population are found in Britain.  The Horsey Colony is located at one of the  most accessible mainland sites and is where you may see grey seal pups in family groups.

Toot and I spent a great morning with four of our grandchildren walking through the marram grass and along the beach. We saw literally hundreds of seals swimming in the North Sea and sunbathing in a 5 mete wide strip of sand next to the breaking surf.  We observed them and they observed us.  Interesting and interested mammalian family groups ! 

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

Eclipse the Movie

I really enjoyed the eclipse so I decided to make a movie from the still images I captured on the morning of the 20th of March 2015 from a field just outside Holbeach Lincolnshire UK.

I also discovered that my camera had captured a sunspot. How good is that!

Chasing the Eclipse in Lincolnshire

Gedney Church on the Horizon with the eclipse well underway in fog and cloud - composite image

 Toot  checked the weather forecast for Lowestoft last night - heavy cloud to midday!  So it was an early morning call at 4.00am and off to Lincolnshire our potential window on the partial solar eclipse. When we arrived at our chosen viewing site, just around the corner from 'The Chestnut Tearooms' in Holbeach, it was 7.30 am and the weather was not promising. It was very cold, a bit foggy and clouds stretched from horizon to horizon. I set up my tripod and camera with a telephoto lens at f=300mm. protected with a mylar film white light filter.  Ever so slowly the clouds thinned and the fog lifted.  By the time the moon covered 85% of the solar disc the sky was clear other than a little high level haze.

Toot and I had a great time, the photographer from the local paper took our photographs in front of my camera/tripod and afterwards we had a nice breakfast at the tea rooms.

Early days before the clouds parted

Eclipse maximum

Images taken at various times during the eclipse

Thanks Toot for a great day!  We should sleep well tonight!

Dawn on Ceres

The individual images which make up this fascinating animated picture were taken in February by NASA's space probe DAWN.  It shows the asteroid Ceres in greater detail than has ever been seen before.  The two glowing 'eyes' in the large crater just above the equator are real and not some camera artifact. The burning question is 'what are they'?

The DAWN spacecraft is using its 'Ion Drive' to spiral  into low orbit around Ceres so more detailed images and analysis will soon be available. Whats for sure is Ceres is significantly different from Vesta the last asteroid visited by DAWN. Vesta is a dry lifeless cratered rock whilst a number of indicators hint at the presence of vast quantities of water below the surface of Ceres.

My guess is the 'bright eyes' are created by sunlight reflected from the shiny surface of water ice but who knows, they could be an enigmatic message left by some alien life form who visited our solar system aeons ago?  Wouldn't it be great if it were the latter rather than the former?

Credits:\NASAJPL-Caltech UCLA MPSDLRIDA
 

 Update 26th April 2015

I was interested to see the recent NASA post of a cylindrical map projection of coloured images taken by the Dawn probe in March 2015 and just prior to entering orbit around Ceres. The coloured images indicate changes in surface rock types and mineralogy.  I have taken and processed similar images of our moon to show variations in mineral morphology. You can see the crater with the two bright spots. I wondered whether the increased light reflective nature of the surface in this area is related to the presence of glassy rock?  Micro glassy spheres were found by astronauts when they visited our moon and I have some Obsidian samples, a naturally ocurring volcanic glass. Obsidian forms when felsic lava extruded from a volcano cools rapidly with minimal crystalisation.  Of course glass like materials can also be formed when rocks are melted by the impact of meteors e.g the tektites found on earth in the viscinity of impact craters.

Dawn is now in orbit around Ceres and has commenced detailed scientific investigations on April the 23rd, so my above wild speculations may or may not be found to be correct!

This map-projected view of Ceres was created from images taken by NASA's Dawn spacecraft during its initial approach to the dwarf planet, prior to being captured into orbit in March 2015.

Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

The King 2015

The Planet Jupiter and three of its Galilean Moons: a composite photograph of several images taken with my QHY5v planetary camera attached to my 127mm Meade Refractor with a 2.5 x Barlow lens

Jupiter is a giant gas planet. Its atmosphere is made up of mostly hydrogen and helium gas, similar to our Sun. The planet's surface is covered in thick red, brown, yellow and white clouds.  Jupiter is a very windy planet. Wind speeds range from 192 mph to more than 400 mph. The temperature in the clouds of Jupiter is about minus 145 degrees Celsius . The temperature near the planet's center is much, much hotter. The core temperature may be about 24,000 degrees Celsius. 

 Jupiter has an extremely powerful magnetic field.  Deep under Jupiter's clouds is a huge ocean of liquid metallic hydrogen. As Jupiter spins, the swirling liquid metal core creates the strongest magnetic field in the Solar System. At the tops of the clouds (tens of thousands of kilometers above where the field is created), Jupiter's magnetic field is 20 times stronger than the magnetic field on Earth. The interaction  between Jupiter and its inner moon Io creates am immense power source that generates radio signal bursts at 25MHz.. I might try to record these signals using the LVST.

For more information about the Lowestoft Very Small (radio) Telescope (LVST) follow the link:

http://missbissuk.wix.com/lvst

The Planet Jupiter has just passed opposition and is shining brightly, high in Northern Hemisphere skies for much of the night.  Having been proper poorly with 'man flu', the telescope has remained in its case and Jupiter has shone upon our backyard ignored.  On the 21st of February I could resist  the call of the 'King of the Planets' no longer.  My telescope, placed upon its mount, tracking and pointed at Jupiter collected the light which had traveled from the Sun and had been reflected back off the Jovian cloud tops.

 

Various meteorological features may be seen in my images Jupiter's upper atmosphere:

• The Northern and Southern Polar Regions and their associated Northern and Southern Temperate Zones
• The North and South Equatorial belts (The dark red/magenta stripes running across the disc)
• The Northern Temperate Belt (The thin dark stripe above the North Equatorial Belt)
• The  Northern  Tropical Zone (The thick white stripe between the Northern Equatorial Belt and the Northern Temperate Belt)
• The Equatorial Zone (The thick white stripe between the Northern and Southern Equatorial Belts)
• The Southern Tropical Zone (The white stripe below the Southern Equatorial Belt)
• The Southern Temperate Belt (running directly below the Southern Tropical Zone)
• The Great Red Spot an enormous anticyclone (on Jupiter's eastern limb on the southern edge of the Southern Equatorial Belt)
• 3 or 4 white/pink ovals, anticyclonic storm systems, disrupting the flow of the Southern Temperate Belt
• Blue and white festoons in Equatorial Zone

 Credits: some text NASA