Schierer Space

Optics Picture of the Day brings us this beautiful video of a circumzenithal arc that appears periodically as the high altitude clouds float by.

Have I mentioned lately how awesome the ISS is? Oh, and how you can see it from your very own personal backyard?

Oh yeah. You. Go look. Now.

PS: The fact that K’s computer is typing everything backwards isn’t making this easy to write. ?naem I tahw eeS

After a fantastic week of visible ISS passes for the east coast, we’ll be cooling our jets for a while. If you’re desparate to get a glimpse in the next few days and you have ideal horizon conditions, you might be able to catch a glimpse. The station won’t get much above 20 degrees or so from my viewing area, but yours might be a bit better.

To hold you over until later in the week, here is a image I took 7:30PM on the 15th. The station is moving from right to left in this view to the south. This is a 49 second exposure, so you can get a sense of how quickly the station is moving. Unfortunately I was about 30 seconds late starting the exposure so we don’t get a full pass. You can see from the image that the station is VERY bright. Consider how easy Orion is to pick out, and that star in the lower left is Sirius, magnitude -1.47 (the brightest star in the night sky). When you realize that the stars are essentially stationary, there are 49 seconds worth of photons burned into that spot, yet the space station is moving! You can also see the relative yellow-ish color of the reflected sunlight compared to the bright blue of Sirius.

Enjoy.

In the last week or so I have discovered that there are a lot of people in the world who don’t know how easy the ISS is to see!

If you didn’t know, or you knew but just haven’t bothered, why not!?

If I told you you could just step into your backyard and witness one of the most complex technical achievements of mankind… wouldn’t you do it!?

If you’re along the east coast of North America, the viewing conditions are almost ideal right now and tonight you can see the shuttle and ISS playing tag overhead! Many nights have two visible passes, one just after sundown, and one an orbit later (about 90 minutes). The space station is easy to see because it’s in a relatively low orbit and because it’s HUGE. After this week’s shuttle mission it will be bigger yet. There will be no debating that it is the brightest thing in the sky except for the Sun and Moon.^[1]

Want to see it? Great! For a simple set of information on where (and more importantly WHEN) to look, I recommend SpaceWeather.
On the right hand side of their main website is a link for “Satellite Flybys“. Put in your zip code and Shazam! A convenient list of readily observable satellites, times and places appears.

Go! Look! You’ll be impressed that the brilliant yellow light is really a distant outpost of humanity in space. There are real people up there and who knows, maybe they’re looking at you too.

1. And I suppose some aircraft landing lights if they’re pointed right at you. [↩]

The optical tube assembly of my ’scope is attached to the mount (and tripod) by a pair of clamps. Each clamp consists of two identical halves which bolt together on the sides forming a ring around the tube. A nice feature of this construction is that the bolt holes which are used to attach the clamps to the mount are mirrored on the top of the assembly.^[1]

So on my way home from work today, I picked up a couple of bolts and built a fairly simple jig to mount my camera ‘piggy-back’ on my telescope. What’s nice about this is the ’scope and camera are reasonably well aligned, and the scope can easily be used for guiding the camera. You may recall the suffering I went through a while back trying to actually mount my camera to the business end of the telescope. Instead, I can use the high-powered eye-piece for my scope and manually track the star with the scope.

Obviously this is still far from ideal, but I wanted to get a sense for the effectiveness before I invested in any actual hardware (beyond a few bucks at True Value).

So I mounted the 70×200mm and opened it all the way up. Here was one of my first four shots which got lucky with a meteor.

It’s actually amazing how many of my shots caught a random meteor, or satellite or other random bit of space junk moving somewhere in the frame.

Kicking the lens up to 200mm adds quite a bit of detail.

Then I re-framed to pick up the Horsehead and Flame Nebulas to the left end of Orion’s belt.

In this heavily enhanced version, you can just make out the namesake features above the noise… but you wouldn’t know that was a horse if I hadn’t told you.^[2]

Then finally, a gratuitous Pleiades shot.^[3]

1. Of course, the camera was occupied when assembled, so I didn’t think to get a snapshot with my phone or something. [↩]
2. I’ll try stacking these later to see if I can pull any more information out of them. [↩]
3. This was fairly low in the west, which lead to some pretty poor haze and Syracuse light pollution. [↩]

Comet C/2007N3 Lulin has been wandering through our neck of the woods for a few months now. It passed closest to Earth a week or so ago, but with the typical Central New York winter weather I hadn’t gotten out to shoot it until tonight. This is a 5×6s at 1600 stacked image.

It’s passing by the Beehive Cluster (M44) which makes the image a bit more interesting. Lunin is the pale green splotch in the lower left of the image.

I obviously need to learn more about stacking images, because somebody posted this shot of 14×10s at 800 on the same camera. Obviously, his is a much more interesting image. That shot is obviously tracked, where mine is not. Also, the skies would be darker in Wyoming than here particularly with the first quarter moon out tonight. Maybe I’ll run out and try some shots with his settings…

After midnight update…
Well I did go out and try again, but I think the haze was worse now than before. In any case I stacked a bunch of 10s 800ISO exposures and enhanced the result heavily. The tail is now clearly visible, but it’s far from a pretty picture.

Back in January I mentioned that one of my images was going to be published online. The image originally appeared (not counting this blog) on SpaceWeather and will now be appearing in an Selenology Today article about the upcoming LCROSS mission to the moon. The image is on page 72 of Issue # 13. The reference is to opportunities to image the vehicle during its journey. Apparently there will be a fuel dump early in the mission, which is what my picture is of.
The Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) will be launched with the upcoming Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) mission. The LRO will be sent to the moon with an Atlas V rocket and a Centaur booster upper stage called the Earth Departure Upper Stage (EDUS). The launch is currently scheduled for late April (2009). LCROSS itself is a small satellite which will remain attached to the EDUS and guide it to lunar impact. Just before impact, EDUS will separate, decelerate and image the impact of the spent booster. The objective is to image the ejecta from the collision and determine how much frozen water may be present in the polar craters.

If you’d like to know more, I recommend at least reading the introduction. As published in the magazine, the article is over 100 pages long and I haven’t taken the time to read the whole thing myself. The sections about the LCROSS mission itself (section 5, page 52) and the conclusion (section 9, page 102) are certainly worth your time even if you have only a casual interest in astronomy/space missions. Check out the animation links at the end of the article also.

Admittedly, this is a fairly obscure online journal, but it’s still neat to have captured an image worth using as a reference in an article like this. The lesson is: keep those eyes (and cameras) looking up, you never know what you might see.

Remember that shot I got of the Atlas-Centaur fuel dump?

Well, I just received an email from an astronomer who wants to use the image in an article. He’s submitting his article for publication in an online journal. I’ve given him permission (of course), but it’s nice to know that the shot was useful/unusual enough to warrant inclusion in his article.

Hopefully he’ll let me know if his article is approved, as I’d like to share more details about the relevance of the image. I obviously don’t want to interfere with his article submission by discussing it.

Most of you probably know that I dabble in astronomy and photography, both have strong roots in the physics of optics. An offshoot of these hobbies is my fascination with the world of atmospheric optics. Atmospheric optics includes many common phenomena that are familiar to most people such as rainbows and sunbeams^[1]. It also includes some truly bizarre and rare light shows that have been recorded only a few times in places like Antarctica.

SpaceWeather.Com, a site about stargazing, auroras, satellites comets and other general news about cool things in the sky, has posted a short article that has me floored. Its about some Finns who decided to generate some artificial halos and arcs with a halogen lamp. {smack} Why didn’t I think of trying that!? Apparently snow-making equipment produces high quality, very consistent ice crystals perfect for this sort-of thing. There is some video included with the article including a short 6MB snippet which gives you an idea what these ‘fake’ halos look like superimposed on the blowing snow. You can check out more pictures and longer videos on their website.

1. Technically known as “sun rays” or “crepuscular rays“. [↩]

Space-X, which has received mucho accolados (!?) from this blogger, has just announced that they have won a NASA contract for resupply of the space station after the shuttle’s retirement. This will make use of their really massive Falcon 9 booster which is yet to make it’s maiden flight. The first pieces of the first Falcon 9 are just arriving at the Cape now for launch early next year. Serious heavy lift capability with built in redundancy not seen since the Saturn boosters developed 40 years ago.

Edit: It’s worth mentioning that a similar contract for cargo services to ISS was also awarded to Orbital Sciences Corp. for the same period. This is another big success for commercial access into space.