fires near mcdonald observatory

i studied for my PhD in austin, texas and spent several months at the mcdonald observatory in west texas. i saw many beautiful thunderstorms and even some smoke plumes during my observing stints, but never did a full-fledged wildfire threaten the safety of people nearby.

that all changed several days ago when a devastating wildfire blasted through the nearby town of ft. davis. the observatory shared this incredible photo:

shown is the 107-inch telescope, the one i've used for a cumulative 4 months or so, as viewed from the catwalk of the 82-inch telescope that was built in the 1930s!

as of now, the observatory is safe, but here is a link for info on the current texas wildfire situation. best wishes to all!

UPDATE:
the NY Times posted an article with the images below included:

flowery milky way

masahiro miyasaka shares gorgeous astrophotos among his flickr pages. as i was flipping though his images, i realized that i chose one last year for my april apparitions gallery for the Astronomy Photographer of the Year project sponsored by the Royal Observatory Greenwich.

looking forward to more great work!

found this time via luminous red nova

fun night time exposures

at the australian astronomical observatory, i work with the people behind a project called GAMA: Galaxy And Mass Assembly. my recent trips to the observatory have been to help the team collect data for the project and determine redshifts for the galaxies observed each night.

one particularly cloudy night (at least in the direction where our targets were located), we decided to have some photographic fun with long exposure images! what you see is the dome of the AAT telescope we use, GAMA, a capital greek letter "gama" in green, and the milky way galaxy with the southern cross to the left of the dome (can you spot it?)...

how did we do it?

we sat a digital camera on a tripod on the ground and opened the shutter for about 4 minutes. usually when you take a photo, the shutter opens for roughly a second and then closes again.... viola, a photo! but, you can usually set the shutter to stay open for a little longer if you want, if the target is faint and you want to collect more light, or shorter, if the target is particularly bright and you dont want to saturate the image. the trick is that you need the camera to remain very stable during the longer exposure or else the lights will form wiggly trails.

we had a slightly fancier-than-average digital camera that allowed us to expose for 4 minutes (and by "we" i mean el lobo rayato ;). there was one person up on the dome's catwalk who slowly spelled out "GAMA" (backwards) with his flashlight/torch during the exposure. meanwhile, i was standing next to the camera with my green laser pointer and i made a very quick shape of the capital greek letter gama on the side of the dome below. the rest of the 4 minutes we kept all our lights off so that the stars would come through. near the end of the 4 minute exposure, a flashlight/torch was passed over the whole dome in strips to illuminate it a bit in the shot... or else it would have been completely dark. the result came out really nice, i think!

here's another example of a long exposure photograph. this one was 15 minutes and shows the trails of the stars as they rotate around the southern celestial pole.

rainbow panorama

remember that bright rainbow that appeared last week at the observatory? i finally got the panorama together. actually, thats a lie. what i did was mention the idea of the panorama to a fellow astronomer that i was observing with and he offered to do the whole thing in photoshop ;) it took him about 30 minutes and the result is stunning (click to see a larger version)...

muchas gracias el lobo rayado!

broken prominence

@sarahkendrew spotted this incredible photo of our spotted sun and its broken prominence.

amazing photo taken by Alan Friedman.

invaders have landed at siding springs observatory!

many observatories have an all-sky camera in place to help monitor the cloud levels throughout the night. they are incredibly useful and also beautiful when you can see the milky way galaxy stretched overhead.

sometimes they have even detected critters crawling across our known universe! ;)

this photo was spotted the other night by a fellow astronomer up here at the AAT this run.

moons of many colors

i like this series of false-color moon photos created by peter cuba. you can see the full set here.

the integral of the moon and venus

just before the sun rises for the next couple days, you can see the crescent moon close to a bright venus. we had clouds for most of our observing tonight, but they cleared for just a few minutes this morning, long enough to see the spectacle in our solar system!

while out on the catwalk, i also noticed a sign in the clouds... what looked to me to be an integral sign! ;)

starry walk in the woods

(i saw this image though this link, but she doesnt give a link to the person who actually created the photo... i hate that about tumblr)

bioluminescence

photgrapher phil hart captured this incredible image of the gippsland lakes in victoria, australia in 2008.

the cause of the blue glow is bioluminescence: light produced by a chemical reaction which originates in an organism, and this case, it was an organism that lived in the lake for one summer only!

the whole, fascinating story is on his website, but i'll summarize here. fires and massive floods starting in 2006 caused nitrogen rich water with high salinity to concentrate in the gippsland lakes. after a summer of these conditions, a new species to the lake began to prosper, called noctiluca scintillans, or sea sparkle. whenever there is motion or agitation in the water, it glows more brightly!

what a strange and interesting world we live in!

what's on your mind?

link

round and round we go

via tumblr

almost planet sounio

today's APOD features a pretty incredible 24 hour mosaic taken by chris kotsiopoulos in sounio, greece. click to see full-sized image...

"Images taken at night compose the top half of the picture, with star trails lasting as long as 11 hours visible. Contrastingly, images taken during the day compose the bottom of the image, with the Sun being captured once every 15 minutes. The image center shows a Little Prince wide angle projection centered on the ground but including gravel, grass, trees, Saint John's church, clouds, crepuscular rays, and even a signature icon of the photographer -- the Temple of Poseidon. Meticulous planning as well as several transition shots and expert digital processing eventually culminated in this image documenting half of the final two days of last year. "

go to the APOD site and scroll over the image for more details of the image!

partially eclipsed sun rising

the partial solar eclipse that occurred on 4th january 2011 was not visible from my part of the world, unfortunately. but many people achieved some fantastic photos of the event, including this shot featured on APOD today taken in austria by robert pölzl.

lucky for us earthlings, there will be another 3 partial solar eclipses and 2 total lunar eclipses in 2011! most of them are visible from rather remote places on the globe, but i'm sure some folks will venture to take photos for the rest of us!

the next total solar eclipse takes place on 13th november 2012 and will be visible from the very north of australia! i'll absolutely, positively be there! anyone else?

eclipsed moon rising

i hope many of you got to see the total lunar eclipse which only rarely ever occurs on the solstice! i decided to enjoy the longest day of summer by heading to the harbour bridge and watching the rising of the eclipsed moon.

as the sun set behind me, i watched the shadow of the bridge extend over the neighborhood where i now live! you can actually see my new home in this shot, but you have to know where to look...

while waiting for the moon to rise, i watched boats flow past the opera house.

and then finally a tiny peak of the eclipsed moon!

there were only a couple other people on the bridge watching the eclipse, which kind of surprised me, but i guess it shouldnt. there were two ladies next to me taking photos of the opera house and they finally asked me what i found so exciting about the moon. it didnt look red, as it normally does during a nighttime eclipse, so i guess it just looked like a normal crescent moon to someone who didnt know it was supposed to be full tonight!

the moon slowly filled up as the sky grew darker.

and then the moon finally popped behind some clouds as it escaped earth's shadow and i reached the end of the bridge.

wish my camera was able to get a bit more detailed images of the moon, but it does a decent job for a little point and clicker.

happy solstice everyone!

galaxies, galaxies everywhere!

this is the sort of image that really makes me appreciate studying the universe every day.

on its own, the photo below shows a gorgeous image from the hubble space telescope that reveals incredible details of the spiral galaxy NGC 4921, which lives 320 million light years from earth. the fuzzy light from this galaxy is created by hundreds of billions of unresolved stars whose glow blurs together to produce the overall shine.

to create the above image, 50 separate exposures through a yellow filter and 30 more through a near-infrared filter were combined so that the total exposure times were approximately seventeen hours and ten hours respectively. thats a lot of telescope time on one galaxy! with that much time, you can see a lot of unexpected details in the background.

in fact, look at this zoomed-in bit of the image above... (click to enlarge)

nearly every single one of those small smudges is an entire galaxy harbouring hundreds of billions of stars and gas and dust and probably a supermassive black hole in the middle. incredible. there is SO much out there in the universe!! i'm very grateful that i can sit here in my earthly smallness and think about it and admire it.

timescapes: rapture

tome lowe has been traveling around the southwestern part of the US for the last many months (a year almost?) with a huge haul of equipment to record timelapse shots for his upcoming feature film, timescapes, to be released next year.

his past work was gorgeous, but the production footage below shows that he is really revolutionizing this technique. i absolutely love the scenes that follow in the frame of our milky way galaxy across the sky, showing the earth in the foreground moving past. i've never seen the universe filmed in such a way. stunning work!

TimeScapes: Rapture from Tom Lowe @ Timescapes on Vimeo.

views from mauna kea

as this observing run on mauna kea draws to a close (tonight is my last night), i share another round of views from the volcano.

i never really get tired of these sunsets.


the nearly full moon is on the rise.


just a short hike from the telescopes takes you to that actual summit of mauna kea (on the right of the photo above, and shown below). some brave folks marched over to see the small monument built by hawaiians.


clouds in front of the sun can create some really interesting shadows and rays. when taking this shot, the sun was setting behind me and i couldnt see it at all thru the thick cumulus clouds.


below is an early morning photo with the sun rising behind me. the telescopes from right to left are the NASA infrared telescope facility (IRTF, where my old undergraduate professor is currently observing, small universe), the two keck telescopes (the biggest mirrors on the mountain), the japanese suburu telescope, and the submillimeter array. the little island peaking out of the clouds on the right is maui!


this is a sunrise view of the cabin at 9000ft where sleep happily greeted me after a 14 hour work night.


if you click to see the full photo below, you can see some telescope domes on the top of mauna kea! its rare to be able to see the peak from the ever-cloud-covered town of hilo.


aloha!

astro timelapse montage

i cant get enough of these landscape and sky-based timelaspe films! this one comes from mike flores on vimeo.

Timelapse Montage from Mike Flores on Vimeo.

temporal gallery

this month's gallery for the royal observatory greenich's astronomy photographer of the year challenge was chosen by stuart, who writes the astronomy blog.

my favorite from his temporal gallery was this photo by thierry legault. aside from the necessary timing and technical skills required to capture the ISS just as it passes in front of the sun, the foresight to catch the ISS with the shuttle atlantis docked (on the left) is brilliant! this was the final space flight for atlantis before it was retired.


the clarity of the silhouette is stunning.