Space: The Final Frontier

[Stan]

Just took this picture (with phone) of Orion constellation, with the line of 3 stars and other stars above and below, just above and to the right of the chimney. Very clear night sky tonight. 

[nudge]

30 minutes ago, Stan said:

Just took this picture (with phone) of Orion constellation, with the line of 3 stars and other stars above and below, just above and to the right of the chimney. Very clear night sky tonight. 

Wow, very clear indeed. Meanwhile, my night sky conditions:

[CaaC (John)+]

4 hours ago, Stan said:

Just took this picture (with phone) of Orion constellation, with the line of 3 stars and other stars above and below, just above and to the right of the chimney. Very clear night sky tonight. 

Wish I could get a clear sky like that, just looked out the flat window and all I can see is bloody sleet!!!!

Edit: Just noticed your chimney pot seems to be pointing at the Big Dipper   

Edited February 4, 2021 by CaaC (John)

[CaaC (John)+]

Quote

'Spooky action at a distance' could create a nearly perfect clock

Physicists imagine a day when they will be able to design a clock that's so precise, it can detect dark matter

Physicists imagine a day when they will be able to design a clock that's so precise, it will be used to detect subtle disturbances in space-time or to find the elusive dark matter that tugs on everything yet emits no light. The ticking of this clock will be almost perfect.

That dream may not be far off: A group of researchers has created a clock that, with some tweaks, could be four to five times more precise than the world's best clocks. To put that into perspective, if today's most precise clocks started ticking at the birth of the universe, they would be off by only half a second today; with more improvements, this new clock has the potential to be off by only 0.1 seconds. 

"Atomic clocks are by far the most precise instruments mankind has ever made by many orders of magnitude," said Vladan Vuletić, a professor of physics at MIT and senior author of a recent paper describing the work. Now, "we are pushing this boundary" further, he added...

MORE

 

[CaaC (John)+]

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Golf on the moon: Apollo 14 50th anniversary images prove how far Alan Shepard hit the ball

Fifty years ago this week, Alan Shepard famously hit two golf balls on the Moon.

The first he shanked into a crater. The second he claimed to have smashed "miles and miles and miles".

Now, while all golfers are prone to hyperbole, Shepard, who was commander of Nasa's Apollo 14 mission, could well have hit his ball that far on 6 February 1971 - despite only using a makeshift six-iron that he had fashioned out of a collapsible tool designed to scoop lunar rock samples, and which he had sneaked aboard in a sock.

FULL REPORT

 

[CaaC (John)+]

 crafty bastard!!

"despite only using a makeshift six-iron that he had fashioned out of a collapsible tool designed to scoop lunar rock samples, and which he had sneaked aboard in a sock.

[CaaC (John)+]

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Square Kilometre Array: 'Lift-off' for the world's biggest telescope

One of the grand scientific projects of the 21st Century is 'Go!'.

The first council meeting of the Square Kilometre Array Observatory has actioned plans that will lead to the biggest telescope on Earth being assembled over the coming decade.

Member states approved a thousand pages of documents covering everything from the power to open a bank account to engaging with industrial contractors.

The SKA telescope will comprise a vast formation of radio receivers.

These will be positioned across South Africa and Australia.

FULL REPORT

 

[CaaC (John)+]

Thanks to @nudge I now have this installed on my mobile a Stellarium Mobile Free - Star Map and I will be in my glory when I go outside on a clear night and scan the skies with my mobile and this is what is above us (Edinburgh/Leith) at the time indicated below in the bottom right-hand corner  

BEAM ME UP SCOTTY 

[CaaC (John)+]

Pity it's a cloudy night full of snow and I don't have any binos otherwise, I could or try and spot these above here visible about 17:35...sigh 

 

[CaaC (John)+]

I cant see it getting any clearer tonight but if it does I can (hopefully) spot these from where I live.

 

Vega

North America Nebula

Gienah

Edited February 8, 2021 by CaaC (John)

[nudge]

First attempt at astrophotography with narrowband filters. Rosette Nebula, 52 stacked images, 2 hours total exposure. 

 

[CaaC (John)+]

Quote

8 February 2021

Missing matter

5 twinkling galaxies help astronomers uncover a baryonic mystery.

By Yuanming Wang, University of Sydney and Tara Murphy, University of Sydney

We’ve all looked up at night and admired the brightly shining stars. Beyond making a gorgeous spectacle, measuring that light helps us learn about the matter in our galaxy, the Milky Way.

When astronomers add up all the ordinary matter detectable around us (such as in galaxies, stars and planets), they find only half the amount expected to exist, based on predictions. This normal matter is “baryonic”, which means it’s made up of baryon particles such as protons and neutrons.

But about half of this matter in our galaxy is too dark to be detected by even the most powerful telescopes. It takes the form of cold, dark clumps of gas. In this dark gas is the Milky Way’s “missing” baryonic matter.

In a paper published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, we detail the discovery of five twinkling far-away galaxies that point to the presence of an unusually shaped gas cloud in the Milky Way. We think this cloud may be linked to the missing matter.

Finding what we can’t see

Stars twinkle because of turbulence in our atmosphere. When their light reaches Earth, it gets bent as it bounces through different layers of the atmosphere.

Rarely, galaxies can twinkle too, due to the turbulence of gas in the Milky Way. We see this twinkling because of the luminous cores of distant galaxies named “quasars”.

Astronomers can use quasars a bit like backlights, to reveal the presence of clumps of gas around us that would otherwise be impossible to see. The challenge, however, is that it is very rare to catch quasars twinkling.

This is where the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) comes in. This highly sensitive telescope can view an area about the size of the Southern Cross and detect tens of thousands of distant galaxies, including quasars, in a single observation.

Using ASKAP, we looked at the same patch of sky seven times. Of the 30,000 galaxies we could see, six were twinkling strongly. Surprisingly, five of these were arranged in a long, thin straight line.

The analysis showed we’d captured an invisible clump of gas between us and the galaxies. As light from the galaxies passed through the gas cloud, they appeared to twinkle'

FULL REPORT
 

 

[nudge]

Alright, I think I'm getting better at this... 

 

NGC 3372 (Carina Nebula). 6 images, 30 min total observation time. Narrowband image with H-alpha, S II and O III filters, processed with FITS Liberator and PS. 

[Stan]

It's like I'm there. 

[nudge]

1 minute ago, Stan said:

It's like I'm there. 

I think I found a new hobby... Too bad it's going to be even more expensive than my single malt addiction  

[CaaC (John)+]

5 minutes ago, nudge said:

Alright, I think I'm getting better at this... 

 

NGC 3372 (Carina Nebula). 6 images, 30 min total observation time. Narrowband image with H-alpha, S II and O III filters, processed with FITS Liberator and PS. 

That's gobsmacking!!   

[CaaC (John)+]

1 minute ago, nudge said:

I think I found a new hobby... Too bad it's going to be even more expensive than my single malt addiction  

Keep the photos coming in, sooner or later I will be trying the same.

[Bluewolf]

21 hours ago, nudge said:

First attempt at astrophotography with narrowband filters. Rosette Nebula, 52 stacked images, 2 hours total exposure. 

 

1 hour ago, nudge said:

Alright, I think I'm getting better at this... 

 

NGC 3372 (Carina Nebula). 6 images, 30 min total observation time. Narrowband image with H-alpha, S II and O III filters, processed with FITS Liberator and PS. 

Well excuse me but holy fuck!!  Are they photos you have taken?? 

[nudge]

2 minutes ago, Bluewolf said:

Well excuse me but holy fuck!!  Are they photos you have taken?? 

Yes, using the remote robotic telescopes (and monochrome ccd camera with narrowband filters)... Basically rent them for a certain amount of time (control them remotely over internet), take multiple long exposures, get the data/image files of the observation, and then transform it into an actual image. 

[Bluewolf]

2 minutes ago, nudge said:

Yes, using the remote robotic telescopes (and monochrome ccd camera with narrowband filters)... Basically rent them for a certain amount of time (control them remotely over internet), take multiple long exposures, get the data/image files of the observation, and then transform it into an actual image. 

Stunning.... very impressive I have to say... when you take a hobby seriously you really can get a lot out of it.. 

[nudge]

6 minutes ago, Bluewolf said:

Stunning.... very impressive I have to say... when you take a hobby seriously you really can get a lot out of it.. 

Thanks!  

Yeah, I thought I'd just combine two of my interests and have fun with it... Really enjoying it so far; there's quite a steep learning curve, especially in terms of processing the images, and I just barely started scratching the surface of it. Love learning a lot of new stuff though!

It's amazing what kind of opportunities we have these days, thanks to the internet and technology in general. 

[CaaC (John)+]

Quote

8 February 2021

Moon work

Humans’ looming return to the lunar surface has set scientists thinking.

With NASA gearing up for a possible return to the Moon as soon as 2024 (and other countries not far behind), scientists are ramping up efforts to find the best ways to make the best use of a permanent or long-term Moonbase. 

High on the list, of course, is collecting Moon rocks, especially in areas far from the six Apollo landing sites. One of these is near the rim of Shackleton Crater, which has been selected as the leading candidate for NASA’s upcoming Artemis Moon-landing program, says Jahnavi Shah, a graduate student at the University of Western Ontario, London, Canada. 

The 21-kilometre-wide crater, whose rim nearly touches the lunar South Pole, is of interest for a number of reasons, Shah said last week at a virtual meeting of the International Committee on Space Research. 

One is that its high rim is an extremely good place to get reliable solar power. Another is that craters in that region have permanently shadowed depths believed to host “cold traps” that retain water and other volatiles that may be of use to the fledgeling base.

But there are also some particularly interesting rocks, Shah says, many within walking or rover range of potential landing sites. These, she says, could not only supply clues to how the lunar crust formed but to how the Moon’s interior differentiated. They could also provide clues to the formation of the 2,500-kilometre-wide South-Pole Aitkin Basin, the Moon’s oldest and largest impact structure, and one of the dominant features of its far side.

But these aren’t the only type of rocks researchers at a lunar base could study. Astronaut-scientists could also to drill beneath the surface to find layers of rocks that have been buried for varying lengths of time, says Ian Crawford, a planetary scientist at Birkbeck College, UK.

By studying how these rocks were influenced by space radiation when they were on the surface, he says, it could be possible to trace the history not only of the solar wind, which would have smashed into them when they were on the surface, but to trace the varying levels of extrasolar cosmic rays to which they were exposed.

By collecting rocks from many such layers, from many different dates in the past, he says, scientists could trace the history of these processes for billions of years, charting the evolution both of the Sun and of our galactic neighbourhood. 

“It would be a lot of work,” Crawford says, but that’s why it is particularly appealing for a Moonbase. “It’s the kind of thing that would require a large science structure on the Moon.”

Other proposals have nothing to do with rocks. 

Jean-Pierre De Vera of the German Aerospace Center, Berlin, for example, notes that it’s possible to send “micro-greenhouse” cubes to the Moon, looking to see how plants and microbes grow under lunar conditions—and by extension, under less-harsh Martian conditions. That would be useful not only for refining the search for extraterrestrial life but for testing plant-based life-support systems for future, larger colonies.

Other scientists note that a Moon base is an extremely good platform for studying both the Earth and the Sun. 

In the case of the Earth, says Shaopeng Huang of Shenzhen University, China, the goal would be to study the Earth’s energy budget by measuring how much sunlight it reflects and how much heat energy it emits in the form of infrared radiation. 

By doing this, Huang says, we can leverage a Moon base to further our understanding not of the Moon, but of ourselves, particularly in regard to climate change. “A lunar outpost will allow global-scale records of the Earth’s energy budget, which is critical to our understanding of the working of the climate system,” he says.

At the same time, Georgia de Nolfo, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Maryland, US, notes that a Moon base provides an extremely good platform for studies of neutron emissions from the Sun, from well outside the sheltering effects of the Earth’s magnetic field. These, she says, can help us understand the processes powering solar flares.

It would be possible to do this by sending instruments close to the Sun, de Nolfo says, but the type of instruments needed are large and heavy, and the Moon is closer and easier to reach. 

Not to mention that, if things go according to NASA’s plan, we are going to be back there very, very soon.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/exploration/moon-work/

 

 

[CaaC (John)+]

OVERVIEW - SOLAR SYSTEM

[nudge]

A new one... 

Southern Pinwheel Galaxy (M83, NGC 5236), a spiral galaxy about 15 million light-years away. 6 images, 5 minute exposure each, 30 min total observation time. Broadband (RGB) filters, therefore the image is true colour!

 

[Stan]

Anyone else find it weird/fascinating that the images we see now - like that Pinwheel Galaxy - is an image that is approx 140tn miles away from us?! It's hard to get your head around.