Cassiopeia
Famous all summer long (and into the winter), Casseopeia is one of my favorites. I will just show off this picture and then let it speak for itself. This is the resulting stacked and color-adjusted image of 50+ images taken over the course of about 20 minutes. Again, no tracking was used so the individual pictures were pretty short.
Next time, I am going to get the Time Machine out and see what we can do while actually tracking something up there…
Sometimes, I just aim the camera and take a picture. Sometimes, the picture is great. Sometimes, it’s trash. This is one of those times. Continue reading »
Altair is a very bright star just under 17 light years away. It’ s one of the three stars of the Summer Triangle. It’s part of the “face” of the constellation Aquila the Eagle. It’s also the main subject of the first image taken with my new DSLR and then stacked, adjusted, and prettied up to look good.
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Look straight up for ten seconds on a good, cloudless, moonless night. Then close your eyes. Now do it 99 more times. Now take the best parts of the best 70 views you remember and turn it into a picture. That’s called “stacking.”
Astropotamus has been absent this summer from the Time Machine. This is due, in part, to being busy, but also because it’s somewhat frustrating to take image of the heavens with the camera that I put at the end of the Time Machine. Luckily, I just bought a new one.
M104, the Sombrero Galaxy, is a fine sight through our Time Machine. Unfortunately, our Time Machine doesn’t do well in the rain, and so we haven’t gone outside to see it, nestled in the constellation Virgo. Maybe this weekend…
In the meantime, if you want to see a wonderful image of it, check out this one from the ESO, the European Southern Observatory.
Do you know how big one square centimeter is? Point your index finger at your eye. The end you see is about a square centimeter. Do you know how big 65,000,000,000 is? It’s 6.5E10 in scientific notation. It looks big. Considering that there are about 1E19 atoms of air in a cubic centimeter of air at sea level, 65,000,000,000 starts to look small. But what if I said that every second, about 65 billion solar neutrinos pass through every square centimeter of the Earth that is aimed at the sun? Seems like a pretty big number now, doesn’t it?
Lots of songs have been written about the rain. Few, if any, have been written by Astropotamuses. I am thinking about doing that. It would sound a lot like someone crying softly in the darkness. April has been the wettest on record for our area, and it shows no signs of stopping. Almost six inches of rain has fallen, and most of it comes out of the sky – right where I want to be pointing my Time Machine. As such, we’re on hold for a while until we get this rain thing straightened out. Please excuse the delay.
Have you heard the expression “drink in the beauty” of something? As in, take it in? absorb it? bask in its glow? Well, “drink in the stars” may not be 100% accurate, but did you know that there are complex molecules in interstellar space, including alcohol and other hydrocarbons?
Time Machines do their best work at night. If you’ve ever slept in a tent, you know that dew does, too. Which is why dew is the enemy of every Astropotamus. We use all sorts of things to get rid of it when it shows up. Mostly hair dryers and big tubes on the end of our Time Machines. Sometimes we use electric heaters like you have on your car’s rear window. In the end, it’s all about physics.
