Comet Chasing

One benefit of our current drought is that it ensured clear skies when I went looking for Comet Panstarrs last week. It was faint, but I managed to capture it on film CCD, mostly by boresighting the camera since while I could see the comet with the naked eye, I couldn't through the viewfinder.

Comet Panstarrs over Wellington and Makara West-Wind windfarm from Wainuiomata Hill Road lookout, 08 March 2013.

Partially eclipsed

 Image credit NASA, Nov 14 NZ Time, click to enlarge

The partial eclipse today was AWESOME. We didn't get treated to the full total thing like Cairns, but even at 76% obscuration like we had in Wellington it was spectacular. Which is good, because it will be 2025 before we get another one here anything like it :).

 Image credit Stardome

The further south you went the less eclipse you got, but to make up for it we had a perfect day, the only clear sunny day I can remember seeing an eclipse on, and this was the best I've ever seen. As not quite totality approached, there was a distinct sudden chill in the air to go with the eerie not-quite-right light level for a bright sunny day. Being able to both see and feel the eclipse was amazing.

Since direct observation with the naked eye is not an option with these things (unless you want to risk permanent eye damage, can't stress that enough), indirect viewing was in order. Around the science establishment I work at there were a few methods being demonstrated.

My attempt at making a pinhole viewer using a piece of paper on a clipboard and a piece of cardboard was successful, but unspectacular (although still cool since it was my first glimpse of the eclipse):

A colleague made a more effective one (I think the key might have been a thinner piece of cardboard to act as a lens).

Failing that you could always just use your hand, making the "OK" sign and allowing the sunlight to pass through the gap between your thumb and forefinger.

Or just find a tree, where the gaps between the leaves can be just as effective as pinhole lenses,  a phenomenon I'd heard about but never seen before today:

Pinhole viewer using just a tree (evergreen preferred) and a piece of paper:

A slightly more elaborate setup involving bigger cardboard, a tripod and binoculars also yielded good results:

Nothing was quite as good though as (safely) looking right at the sun and moon through a suitable filter, in this case a handy piece of mylar film that another colleague had thoughtfully prepared:

And this was the icing on the day for me, since when I put the mylar in front of my telephoto camera lens the result was spectacular (disclaimer, be very, very careful when you do this. Never ever look at the sun directly through unfiltered optics like telescopes, binoculars or camera lenses). With the settings adjusted you could even see sunspots (the little dots) and mountain ranges silhouetted on the moon.

One of the coolest things I've ever seen, let alone been able to photograph

It Came From Outer Space!

So after tea last night, I wandered out the front of the house with Charlotte so she could get a better look at Jupiter and Venus hanging in the evening sky. Seeing what else might be visible, I casually glanced at the rest of the sky, and promptly ran back inside for the camera, the way you do when you see something you know instantly is unusual*:

So I missed the possible once in a lifetime spectacular meteor fireball (Dang!), but did see the vapour trail it left behind, and that's pretty cool. I've seen plenty of shooting stars and a few smoke trailing meteors in my time (I know they are all technically meteors, but the ones that are more than just brief streaks of light are way cooler), and some pretty good ones at that, but this one sounds like it was quite a show.

*I've seen pics of things like this before, and instantly figured it was something going to or coming from space. The time of night and illumination of the trail meant it was way too high to be an ordinary aircraft con-trail.

New Booster Order

I know I've posted Space Shuttle booster cams before, but this one really is the shizz, great sound, some beautiful imagery and telemetry to show just how fast the thing is actually going:


The shot of the other booster trailing smoke and plummeting at about 5:47 is one of my favourites.

By coincidence the first time I watched it I happened to be listening to this, and found it a perfect accompaniment. When both are started at the same time the song syncs with the video quite nicely:


It looks and sounds good to me anyway :)

Sharing the Lovejoy

Somewhat appropriate for posting on Friday the 13th since they were once seen as portents of doom, a surprise pre-Christmas visitor was Comet Lovejoy. Surprising for two reasons: it wasn't even discovered until late November, and then it wasn't expected to survive it's closest approach to the sun.

But survive it did and as it sped away from the sun it turned into a spectacular Christmas gift for stargazers in the southern hemisphere. It was breathtaking, and well worth getting up at 4am to see.

I was worried I would have trouble spotting it in the sky. Instead I walked around a street corner on the way to my viewing spot and just about stopped in my tracks. It was unmissable, the tail measuring easily three hand-spans in the pre-dawn sky, like a searchlight beaming from below the horizon as it rose.

Some with more capable cameras than me got stunning images of it, but here is mine from a field behind my backyard on Christmas eve:
While not the most spectacular image, it does approximate well how the comet looked to the naked eye from my place. I've seen a handful of comets in my life; Halley's, Hale-Bopp, Mcnaught, and this one, which was easily the most awe-inspiring. The tail is millions of kilometers long. Charlotte got to see it too, from her bedroom window. I hope she remembers it.

As for the spectacular images, The Bad Astronomer did a good job of collating them. Check out this timelapse: The Spectacle of Comet Lovejoy

Or the Insanely Cool observatory shot

Or the one I find most wow (for a few reasons), timelapse video of cometrise from the International Space Station

I love this stuff.

Lunar awesomeness

In the past few weeks as an offshoot of it's Lunar mapping mission, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has been taking detailed images of the Apollo landing sites of 1969-72. There is a backgrounder from stuff here, with a really nice summary at Bad Astronomy here.

Here is the LRO shot of the second landing site (Apollo 12, November 1969). You can see the footprints left by astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan Bean as they conducted their explorations (picture credit NASA, click to enlarge):
And here is Pete Conrad making some of those footprints as he investigates the unmanned Surveyor 3 probe that preceded the astronauts by a couple of years (picture credit NASA, click to enlarge):
They are awesome because they are the most basic of human calling cards, and they on another world. And since there is no weather on the moon, they will be there essentially forever if left undisturbed (Transformers and Independence Day Aliens notwithstanding).

First and the Last

The thirty year shuttle era has ended, with the last glide to touchdown happening last week:


Before it did though, I snapped my own personal memento of the era, as Atlantis passed over my house a few orbits before re-entry:
I remember the very first landing in 1981. It was shown on TV late at night here, and I remember my sisters and I being got out of bed to watch. While not yet five, and having only just attended the first airshow I would remember a few weeks before, I recall saying how steep the final approach looked, and wondering why it took so long for the nose to come down after the mainwheels touched (the concept of aerodynamic braking being a few years ahead of me).


I guess my parents thought it would be a historic thing for us to watch and remember, and I'm glad they made the effort. Atlantis' pass last week was just before bedtime for Charlotte, so I got her outside and she saw it too. She described it as 'the star that was hitting the other stars' and 'Oh yes a spaceship' if prompted further. Being not quite 3 she probably won't remember it, but at least I'll be able to tell her she saw the last Space Shuttle fly.

I found this on another site and quite like it (photo credit Chris Bray):
I can relate. My generation grew up with the shuttle, and love it or hate it, for all it's costs and compromises and never quite living up to it's promise it was iconic. It had failures, but had many more moments of greatness. The aerospace world will be slightly less interesting without it.

ISS Tryptych

ISS earlier this evening from the Hutt Valley, with Shuttle Atlantis presumably somewhere nearby after undocking on the previous orbit (which was also near NZ according to the blurb). Slightly more successful this time, but not as dark a location as I would have liked (note lens flares...).


The final shot has the ISS trail fading out as it passes into the Earth's shadow. Here is where it was geographically at the time I took the photographs (image source Heavens-Above.com ) :
I tried to catch it again on it's next orbit about 90 minutes later, but it was too low on the horizon and too long after sunset to photograph. Since I had the tripod out I took a couple of constellation photos instead. I'm still figuring out astrophotography. It is a bit tricky.

Scorpius:
The Southern Cross (top of frame)with the Milky Way trailing below it:

Neat

Listening to: The Enemy Within - Concord Dawn (2010).

Take a manually operable D-SLR camera, a remote release switch, a tripod, a compass, a dark space near the house, clear skies, some patience, and the marvel that is Heavens-Above and you get this:
The pale streak is the International Space Station and Space Shuttle Atlantis currently docked to it, passing over the Pacific ocean north-east of the North Island, but just visible from Wellington.

Not the greatest shot ever, but it is the first time I have ever tried photographing something in orbit, and the ISS/SS combo was so low on the horizon I was surprised I even saw it, flat 0 deg azimuth horizons being something of a novelty around here. In the event I was happy just to see it exactly as predicted (the horse in the paddock next to me wasn't quite so buzzed), knowing I was looking at two docked spacecraft in orbit, with people in them . Getting a pic was just a bonus. Weather permitting there might be a couple more chances to get better pics of them both over the next few days.

All Good Things II

This is kinda cool. In cabin view of the final launch. I like how the guy in the middle starts grinning at lift-off (I mean really, why wouldn't you), and keeps it up even as the G loads up. Must be a hell of a ride.


Also cool is when the main engines cut off at about 9:00 and they all float forward as the G disappears. From then on it gets increasingly obvious they are in a microgravity environment. About the first thing the grinning mission specialist does is have a bite to eat :).

All Good Things

Footage of the last Space Shuttle launch ever, at about 0330 NZT this morning.

Spirit, signing off

Since 2004 there have been a couple of little robots that could exploring the surface of Mars. Robots built by people on Earth, roaming another planet (I like that I can write that and not have it be science fiction), producing images like this (courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/ASU, click to enlarge):
XKCD poignantly had this to say about the Mars Rover 'Spirit' in January 2010 when contact with it was lost. Further attempts to contact it have been unsuccessful (as described here by Stuff, and here by Bad Astronomy), and 6 years beyond it's original 90 day mission it has been officially declared dead. It is sitting there right now in martian sand, lifeless and inert, having exceeded every expectation. If there is a real-life WALL-E equivalent the rovers are probably it, and elsewhere on Mars Spirit's twin 'Opportunity' is still going strong.

Admittedly it is anthropomorphising a completely inanimate object, but Spirit's passing should be noted nonetheless. Hopefully sometime in the future someone might get the chance to go and get it.

Two minutes of work

Listening to: Modern Fables - Julia Deans (2010)

NASA compilation video of various cameras on the Solid Rocket Boosters during Discovery's launch last week. I've posted a video from one of these cameras before, but as a compilation this just has some serene and surreal moments worth sharing (in my opinion anyway). The shot at 10:10 in particular is just made of pure wow:



The boosters burn for a little over two minutes. In that time the shuttle goes from motionless on the launch pad to roughly four and a half times the speed of sound at 150,000 feet / 45km high (roughly 5500kph/3400mph and about five times as high and nearly five times as fast as your average jet airliner cruises). If you want an idea of how fast Mach 4.5 is, watch the separation at about 2:25. 15 seconds later the shuttle re-appears as a white dot in the distance, still accelerating on its way to roughly 28100kph / 17500 mph and orbit.

The shot looking back at lift-off conveys the sheer power of this system in a way the the classic side on shot doesn't. Just before the one minute mark after launch a puff of vapour is briefly visible as the shuttle assembly goes supersonic. From a standing start, and initially climbing straight up...

Another cool thing is one of these cameras has sound. From about 14:46 you can hear what it sounds like inside the booster itself. It is almost eerie, at times sounding like the machine is catching its breath after finishing its work, before the wind noise returns and becomes a roar as the booster falls back into the atmosphere, at times with its companion booster visible in the distance.

While the video is sourced from NASA, I came across it at Bad Astronomy, a blog I only started routinely reading fairly recently, and which serves up nuggets of awesomeness on a regular basis. Like these:

The Stars Above, The Luminescence Below

Looking from one moon of Saturn to another across the rings

Family portrait of the Solar System

Ice swirling around a volcano

In other news

Noted the other week the guy behind Bad Astronomy reflecting on the tenth anniversary of a certain notorious, biased, misleading piece of tabloid trash posing as a documentary being broadcast on Fox...

Moon Hoax +10

The resulting rebuttal he wrote is still on line here and looking every one of it's ten years old, but is still a good jumping off point for anyone who has questions about the hoax theory.

Nearly 36 years after the end of the Apollo programme, it's successor the Space Shuttle is also winding down. Discovery was the third shuttle to fly, and first went into space in 1984. Since then it has completed 38 space flights, and was launched for the last time last Thursday. By the time it comes back to Earth for the last time next week it will have clocked up nearly a year in space.

That's all cool, but really just an excuse to show this cool video of Discovery's final launch as seen from a passing airliner:

Not quite catching the moon

So after the nearly full moon in the last post, it then clouded over for the better part of a week, denying the oppourtunity to photograph the full and waning moon. I'll just have to try again next month.

It has been a busy week, mostly aviation related due to an airshow over the weekend (photos to come in the next few posts). Still moon related though, A link to this was passed on to me today, and I liked it so much I thought I'd share it. It is pretty much self explanatory, and it works beautifully (even if the moon at 0:39 is upside down to my southern hemisphere eyes):


Also moon related is this little thing I found. You know how all the moon landing-hoax theorists go on about the whole thing being filmed in a soundstage? Well Michael Bay has done pretty much just that for the new Transformers movie:


Aside from the obvious (to me anyway) accuracy fails with the Apollo spacecraft, and the clever (if misleading) use of real footage, it is remarkable how Bay's depiction of the astronauts looks almost nothing like the real footage, in more ways than are obvious. Not that I would expect accuracy or realism from a Bay movie, but it is an interesting theory tester, and hopefully might convince a few hoax proponents of the lunacy (pun intended) that the hoax theory is. On the other hand, it might inspire a whole new wave of people who don't know any better to fall for the poorly researched, utterly discredited non-science woo that sadly still undermines one of our greatest acheivements.

The really big spacecraft that could

The Voyager spacecraft in the previous post mass less than a metric ton, but to get each of them them on their way from the surface of the Earth required a Titan-Centaur rocket weighing around 630 tons. In contrast the Saturn V (V said as 'five') rockets used to get the heavier Apollo hardware off the ground for the moon missions in the 1960's and 70's massed around 3000 tons each at launch, most of the weight being fuel. There is an excellent wiki page on the Saturns here.

At lift off, the first stage (of three, the Saturn being essentially three rockets put together sequentially) generated more than 7 and a half million pounds of thrust. Even the most powerful jet engines have thrusts measured in thousands of pounds only. I came across this video the other day which shows and describes what happens when all that thrust hits the launch pad, filmed during the Apollo 11 launch in 1969:

As filmed the sequence is only 30 seconds long, but when you are shooting at 500 frames per second you get a lot of room for slow motion, hence the 8 minute clip length. The narration is a bit dry, but full of cool info about what is happening on screen. The first stage seen here would fire for nearly three minutes before being jettisoned with nearly empty fuel tanks (that held nearly 2,000,000 litres of propellants). By that time the Saturn V would be nearly 70 km high and travelling at nearly 2.5 km per second, at which point the second stage would take over. Ultimately only the third stage carrying the actual payload and astronauts would reach orbit.

Couple of points for perspective: There is another 360+ feet/110 metres of rocket assembly above what is visible in frame. For Wellingtonians a comparable reference is the TV mast on Mount Kaukau, which is about the same size. Each of the rocket exhaust nozzles visible from about the 2:00 minute mark is 12 feet/3.8 metres across. The Saturns were epic vehicles on a scale not seen before or since.

The little spacecraft that could

The original Star Trek had the Enterprise on a 5-year mission of exploration and discovery. Which sounds like a long time, but not compared to a pair of its real-life equivalents, which despite not being human, are possibly the greatest explorers of all.

The Voyager 1 and 2 probes have been on task for so long they accomplished their primary mission more than twenty years ago. 33 years after beng launched, they are still discovering things in places people can't get to. Together with their immediate predecessors, among others the Pioneers (wiki), and their subsequent followers they represent one of those amazing technological accomplishments that has been taken for granted and almost forgotten about. To put it another way, the Voyagers accomplished something in my lifetime that had been dreamt about for centuries, if not millenia in their explorations of the outer planets.

Initially planned only to explore Jupiter and Saturn, they were designed for a five year operational life. Due to the planetary alignments at the time, and a carefully planned trajectory that used the various planet's gravity to not only attract the probe, but bend them and boost them on their way to the next encounter, a 'Grand Tour' was on. With the Voyagers still going strong it was decided to extend the programme and exploit the opportunity to explore Uranus and Neptune as well. Pluto wasn't part of the alignment so missed out, but the New Horizons probe is on its way there now.

I was a bit young to catch the Jupiter and Saturn fly-bys between 1979 and 1981, but remember the Uranus (1986) and Neptune (1989) encounters well. Two of the encounters nicely co-incided with my birthday. The scientific knowledge pay-off was enormous, both in expanding and confirming what was previously known or thought, and providing completely new discoveries and questions as well. Voyager 1 was deflected off the tour route to explore Saturn's moon Titan, but Voyager 2 completed the tour, performing way beyond expectations, and still transmitting data to this day. It's awesome for a machine designed and built in the mid 70's and about the same size and weight as my car.

I'm bringing this up now because Voyager 1 has now apparently reached one of the boundaries that separate the Solar System from interstellar space (story). Space being really really big, it is expected to take another few years to cross it, even travelling at 17 kilometres per second.

Voyager 1 is currently about 116 Astronomical Units from Earth (1 AU being the average distance from the Earth to the Sun). To put it another way, it takes a little over 8 minutes for light to get to us from the Sun. To get to Voyager 1 right now that same light will take more than 16 hours, with the Sun now appearing merely as an extra bright star rather than the disc we are familiar with. There are roughly 63,241 AU in a Light Year. And that isn't even moving beyond the front door in interstellar terms. When you start to look at numbers like this it quickly becomes apparent just how almost incomprehensibly vast the universe is. The next time either of the Voyagers will be within a couple of light years of a star will be in around 40,000 years from now.

Contact was lost with the last Pioneer a while ago, but the Voyagers are expected to remain in communication for another fifteen years or so. They are already the farthest flung human artifacts, and could potentially outlive humanity itself. If any machines could be argued to have souls, these travellers out in the cold and silent dim should surely qualify. With the main mission accomplished most of their systems are powered down now to extend the life of those still in use. Before the cameras on Voyager 1 were shut down for the last time in 1990, they were turned back toward home.

The result was the 'Family Portrait' image (wiki background, and detail). Earth, and all it's history, everything you have ever experienced, and everyone you have ever known, measures less than a quarter of a pixel across :)

This is interesting

Verrry interesting.....

http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/photos-x-37b-robot-space-plane-landing-101203.html

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/12/secret-space-plane-touches-down-as-twin-readies-for-launch/

This platform/vehicle has kind of snuck under my radar a bit; I don't know as much about it as someone in my line of interests perhaps should. I wonder what they planning for it, remembering that a certain number of Space Shuttle missions also carried classified military payloads, and there hasn't been any white-world platforms with comparable abilities since the SR-71 was retired (black-world on the other hand is anyone's guess, depending largely on whether or not you believe things like the Aurora or Black Manta actually exist, or if they are smokescreens for something still secret). This thing as far as I can tell represents a generational change in space based surveillance capabilities, with much more flexibility and usefulness than traditional satellites. We may even find out a bit more about it in ten or twenty years depending on what it gets used for (it is a safe bet that this will have real airtight classification applied to it rather than anything Wikilieaks can get its hands on). Then again we may not. A lot of the SR-71 mission related stuff is still secret, and that platform has been retired since the mid 90's.

Amusing and Reassuring

I have enjoyed following this for the last few days:

Stuff technology blogger lists 7 videos supporting the Moon landing hoax conspiracy and rightly gets flamed for it in the comments section (linky).

It's amusing for its own sake (most epicly when the author of the first video debunks his own work as an intentional hoax of a hoax), but also reassuring to see so many commenters go into bat against the insult to learning and reason that the hoax theory is.

Shuttling down

29 years after the first launch, the era of the Space Shuttle is drawing to a close, with two launches remaining before the system is retired.

It is still a marvel able to impress though. I came across this video recently showing just a tiny part of what each launch involves:

Time lapse of Shuttle being prepared for launch (link)

For all our modern faults, its pretty wondrous to me that we live in an age where something like this can be taken for granted. The bit where the gantry picks the shuttle up, rotates it and moves it up, down and around blows my mind. I know that building is big (it was built to assemble the Saturn V rockets for the Apollo moon missions), but to see it illustrated like this shows you just how big.