say something

this design was a finalist in the say something poster project.

i like the clever way the artist makes me think of an old cliche in a completely new way.

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!

bye bye kangaroos!

back to the big city today... just as well as there are rain storms all around!

the best kangaroo moment this week happened three days ago. as i was walking along the path between the telescope and the hotel-style rooms, a couple kangaroos were sitting next to the path, mindlessly chomping away at grass. as usual, one of them looked up at me as if i was just a harmless creature passing by. but the little one startled at the sight of me and turned to bound away in haste. after one bounce, the poor thing landed on some loose brush, lost his footing and completely wiped out! i had to stop in my tracks to laugh because he looked so awkwardly funny! his head popped up instantly from his splattered position on the ground and he looked around as if disoriented. then he quickly jumped up and bounded off a few bounces in a different direction, but friend just remained still watching the whole scene, chomping away.

they're such cute little clueless creatures.

broken prominence

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

amazing photo taken by Alan Friedman.

sunset over warrumbungle park

siding springs observatory sits inside the warrumbungle national park. sometimes the sunsets over the park are incredible.

ceres

link

ceres is an object in our solar system that lives in the asteroid belt, between the orbits of mars and jupiter. ceres was discovered on 1 January 1801 and for the next 50 years, it was classified as an eighth planet in our solar system!

so what happened?

many bodies started to be discovered in the region between mars and jupiter, ceres just happened to be the first one we saw. william hershel first called them asteroids ("star-like") because "they resemble small stars so much as hardly to be distinguished from them, even by very good telescopes." planets, on the other hand, could be resolved at the time and features on some of their surfaces seen.

once it was realized that there existed an entire class of these objects, ceres was no longer considered a planet, but designated officially as "1 Ceres" since it was the first asteroid discovered.

a similar series of events recently caused the demise of pluto's status as a planet. astronomers started discovering many objects like pluto that even had the same strange orbital quirks as pluto. by the mid-2000s there were enough of these objects in the "kuiper belt" that mike brown argued, successfully, that pluto should no longer be classified as a planet.

in fact, he just wrote a book about his entire experience demoting pluto called "why i killed pluto, and why it had it coming." i'm reading this book right now and i can highly recommend it to anyone who might be interested in the story of pluto, or just generally in how astronomy/science is done.

anyway, i first started this blog around the time the IAU voted on pluto in 2006. you can read an entry about the process: here.

the elements, a song

what do you get when you combine the periodic table of videos, a song called "the elements" by tom lehrer, and brady's editing skills? watch:

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 UK Schmidt Telescope

just across the mountain from the AAT lives the UK Schmidt telescope, a 1.2 meter scope built in the early 1970s. in the photo below, the UKST is the dome on the left as seen from the catwalk of the AAT.

solid 70s construction (the tape is not part of the support structure ;)

the rooms inside this telescope dome feel like museums of old equipment and techniques in astronomy. this is the original analog mini-dome model that is still in control of moving the opening of the dome relative to where the telescope points.

while we can make much more precise measurements with digital CCD technology, there's something romantic about investigating old developed images.

nowadays, the UKST is used to survey the sky and collect velocities of 1 million stars zooming around our milky way galaxy for a project called RAVE. this robot works hard to position all optical fiber on the heavy plates in order to collect spectra of each individual star.

here's an old note i found in the dome...

rainbow bright

the first stretch of this long observing run is over. i've had a few hours of sleep, and i'm off to the town of mudgee for a couple days to relax and visit several local wineries! the last time i stopped in mudgee, i had lunch at a resturant called "fish in the bush" (tee hee ;)

clouds are generally bad for using telescopes, obviously, but they often produce interesting terrestrial phenomena. the same night we saw the moon next to venus, we also saw a brilliant morning double rainbow!

at one point, both bows stretched around to make 3/4 of a full circle. it was stunning, but i couldnt fit it all into one photo (wish i had a fish-eye lens!). i took a lot of photos that i'd like to try to mosaic together - any recommendations for software to use to do this?

in the meantime, enjoy!

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! ;)

portrait

shuttle launch from airplane

its a bird, its a plane, no... its the shuttle discovery launching into space as viewed by a passenger on an airplane!



this week the world saw the final launch of the shuttle discovery. its been a good run!

coonabarabran

just arrived at siding springs observatory for another round of observing with the anglo-australian telescope.

there isnt a whole lot of excitement during the seven hour drive through the bush to get here, regardless of whether you take the hunter valley route or the mudgee route. but i must say, i am highly amused by the place names around new south wales!

i remember driving around the UK and being utterly confused as to how anyone was supposed to know the proper way to pronounce place names. for example, Leicester is "Les-tah," Belvoir is "beaver" (i'm not joking, and made the mistake of using this pronunciation in australia. the horror!), Loughborough is "luff-buh-ruh." actually, anything with an "ough" in it is pointless to even try. just wait to hear someone say it. especially edinburgh.

apparently a common mispronunciation of Loughborough, especially among australians, is "looga-burooga." having done some driving around this part of australia, it's clear that a lot of place names maintain their aboriginal origin and are pronounced mostly phonetically. so if the word has a lot of letters, like coonabarabran, you just take your time, pronounce all the letters, and it sounds exactly as it looks. or, in true australian fashion, you just shorten the word. so instead of saying the 5 syllables of coon-a-bear-a-bran every time, you just say coona.

coona is the closest town to the observatory and also happens to have one of the best names i've encountered yet! but on the drive today we also passed by dunedoo, wallerawang, cullen bullen, and marrangaroo :)

what confuses physicists?

sixty symbols continues its series of videos answering viewers' questions. in this installment we were asked "what parts of physics confuse you?" the short answer: a lot!

the big bang explained

thank you SMBC for giving a plausible explanation of the cause of the big bang :)

TropFest: Den Sista Galaxonaut

originating in sydney nearly 20 years ago, TropFest is the world's largest short film festival. last night was the screening of the finalists and the official voting for a winner of this year's competition. there were a lot of people in sydney's domain park, yet i was impressed by how quiet they were when the films were playing.

there were 16 finalists. the short films were not anywhere near the amateur quality i was expecting - they were impressively professional! here are my two favorites, neither of which won, unfortunately.

The Maestro
Directed by Adam Anthony



Den Sista Galaxonaut
Directed by Alexander George & Tyrone Lindqvist

upsidedown or not: orion is always there

so true...

abstruse goose

my blackberry is not working!

ronnie corbett and harry enfield star in this cute sketch from the one ronnie show from BBC.

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)

determining redshifts

determining how far away an object in the universe is from the earth is one of the most difficult tasks astronomers face, and also one of the most important. because the light from distant objects is the only signal we know how to receive from them with current technologies, we need to know how far away they are in order to determine how intrinsically bright they are. once we know that fundamental piece of information we can start to deduce all sorts of funky and interesting information about them!

there is a series of ways that astronomers use to determine distances to celestial objects, which is described as the "cosmic distance ladder." if an object is sufficiently far away (more than a few million light years - a criterion satisfied by all galaxies in the universe except andromeda and the little guys in our local group), we can measure its redshift. the cosmological redshift is a measure of how much a wavelength of light from a distant galaxy has stretched due to the expansion of the universe since the galaxy's stars emitted the light that is finally now reaching earth. whew! go read THIS for an explanation of redshift if you want...

in order to determine a solid redshift, you have to know how far light from a galaxy has shifted in wavelength. the best way to do this is to look at the galaxy's spectrum to identify specific spectral features (e.g. hydrogen, oxygen, etc...) whose patterns are all shifted to longer wavelengths. when i was at the telescope last week, we were observing spectra of 400 galaxies an hour (in clear weather) and then determining their redshifts as we went. here are some examples of the practice in action...

someone in the collaboration expanded a fancy little bit of code that shows the galaxy spectrum (in white) and allows one to display template spectra of well-known galaxy types (green) shifted to the potential redshift of the observed galaxy. (click image to enlarge). the X axis (horizontal) shows the wavelength scale (the discrete energies of the photons received by the telescope) and the Y axis (vertical) shows the amount of photons received at each of those discrete wavelengths.

to determine the exact redshift, you match as many features as you can, like the overall shape of the spectrum, the well-known dips (like calcium H and K that are very close to each other at about 4500 angstroms in the above spectrum), or the more obvious spikes ("emission lines"), if you happen to get strong ones like in the example below.

some galaxies have spectral features that are very strong and easy to identify, but others look noisy and its not obvious at all if there are any features. to be absolutely sure of a redshift, we can take a guess at the redshift and then look more closely at several regions where there should be spectral features if they are present in the galaxy and if the galaxy is at the guessed redshift.

its amazing to sit back and think that each one of these spectra are composite collections of light created by hundreds of billions of stars gravitationally bound together in a single swirling galaxy, probably not unlike our own milky way home. but i have to admit, when every singe hour of observations produces a collection of 400 galaxy spectra to determine redshifts for, my eyes feel exhausted and strained at the end of a long night at the telescope!

luckily during our recent observing run, we had quite a few people in the telescope dome (note the unusually high female to male ratio :)

and we could therefore be a bit more leisurely during our redshifting sessions!!

valentine's forecast

via central illustration

but dont despair because...

if you need some nerdy valentine love, check out this video where the chemists of the period table of videos produce the "perfect perfume."



also, check out the cards produced by stephoodie or previous valentine's posts here and here. thats enough about the hallmark holiday for this year.

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!