Its a 3D Solar System!

This is a 3D stereo post - so dig up your red/blue anaglyph glasses! You DO all have some, right? I've got a few hundred pair to give away, but can't afford postage to send them all out to you - let me know how to get them to you if you are lacking!

Anyway, this is a 2-part post! A few stereo pairs from a recent trip to Mexico and a recently released 3D data set from a spacecraft that visited a comet! The later is really incredible, and I had taken a few from the Mexican beach, so decided to combine... I hope you enjoy them. BTW, You REALLY need to have a pair of glasses near your computer! They are often used to present images from NASA craft and are also used on APOD frequently too!


The beach shots are all taken by me using a single DSLR camera (Canon 6D), and in this case, a macro lens was used for the close-up, and these first two shots here were taken with the normal kit lens. In each case, 2 images were taken with a shift between them to provide a baseline. When each is viewed with the appropriate eyeball, 3D stereo results! That is what the red/blue glasses does - allow you to see each image with just one eye for your brain to reassemble. The separation for the normal lens (above) is a couple inches, about what your eye is. For the macro, the distance between photos is less because of the magnification involved. Likely a couple centimeters is sufficient! The 3D really brings out the structure and form of objects - MUCH more clearly than a single 2 dimensional image!


One of my must-reads on the Internet
every day is a stop by the Twitter feed of planetary scientist Emily Lackdawalla. She has very similar interests to my own, and daily reposts links that I'd love to look at, from planetary and astronomical exploration, to pushing her girls into STEM, and seeing what is outraging the working scientists of the day. It is ALWAYS worth a look around! In her efforts to clearly explain the intricate details of planetary missions, both of the robotic spacecraft and the resultant data collected, new data sets are often revealed. Such was the case last week when she reposted a set from a couple years ago of the Rosetta comet mission to the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. It is an incredible data set, with details of distance, time and where on the comet the view is located. And the 3D views of this foreign landscape (a COMET!) is just incredible! There are over 1000 anaglyph stereo pairs presented, these are a couple of my favorites. I love both the wide-field ones here, with mighty jets shooting material outwards as ices melt in sunlight, as well as close-us of mighty ridges and caves that likely hide the jets in the deep shadows...


So take these in and be amazed, then go
to the link below to browse away the day!





Click here on this link to go to the Rosetta 3D anaglyph image collection!

Lights in the Sky!

Always on the lookout for topics to blog, I watch certain websites, Heavens-Above among them. A few days ago I saw there was a good pass of the International Space Station (ISS) this evening, but promptly forgot about it! Thanks to the local weatherman at 5pm who mentioned it again, I was motivated to look it up again and set up a camera.

Now if you go to the website above, the first thing it wants to know is where you live - duh, it needs to know where you are located before it starts telling you where to look. Click the "change your location" button to tell it where you live, using the search box, or the google map to locate your city. The closer you can locate your observing location, the better! For some observations, like Iridium Flares, a mile or two off makes all the difference! Anyway, for tonight's ISS pass, I got the map at left. It is a map of the full sky with north at top and south at the bottom. You can see that Venus and Mars were bright in the west and Orion high in the southern sky. The path of ISS was to skim the three belt stars of Orion, and it ends before the bright star Sirius. What happens there? Well, since the ISS needs the sun to hit it to be visible, that is the sunset point - as the ISS continues to move eastwards, it moves into the earth's shadow!


I set up tripod and tracker so that the stars would look like points, working from the back yard. My sky glow from Midtown Tucson limits my exposures to 30 seconds or so before the orange glow from sodium lights starts to color the sky. For the exposure here, I used the Canon 6D and 85mm lens at F/3.5.  Seen is the streak of the moving ISS, just grazing under the 3 belt stars of Orion. Below the belt stars is the reddish glow of the Orion Nebula, and near the bottom are the 2 stars that make up the feet of Orion. I wasn't sure how long it would take to move through the field, so used 60 second on the intervalometer, planning to stop it when it blinked out to minimize skyglow.  This shot ended up being about 40 seconds, and I had to use Photoshop to neutralize and minimize the sky glow a little.

Surprisingly, the ISS didn't "blink out" once the sun net from its vantage. Just like it stays light right after sunset here on earth, the color of the ISS took on an orange-ish tint and faded out slowly - pretty cool!

Shooting Towards The High Ground

It isn't as much fun to take adventurous road trips without Melinda - she hasn't felt like straying far from home with the new chemo drug, so I'm looking for fun from the back yard! I noticed the other day on Spaceweather that the International Space Station (ISS) was to make an excellent pass tonight. In fact, it was to go within 1 degree of our zenith - right over Tucson!  The map is shown at left - it was to move from the NW down towards the SE before disappearing into the earth's shadow, all this happening in a dark sky.

Normally I look for mountaintops to shoot down from - I've never tried shooting upwards with high-resolution in mind.  These days lots of amateur astronomers are imaging the ISS through telescopes, some as it passes over the disk of the sun or moon, the ultimate perhaps being Thierry Legault, who developed an autoguider to keep the image stabilized for high-resolution video.  I was thinking I wanted to use the TEC refractor, perhaps with a barlow to expand the image scale a bit more.





So in preparation to the pass this evening, I went through my collection of auxiliary optics, particularly Barlow lenses that I could adapt to camera use. The TEC by itself (140mm F/7 = 980mm focal length) is about 1 meter focal length, and I located a 2X from Explore Scientific and 5X Tele-Vue Powermate. I set up the scope in the front yard, where there is a partial view of Finger Rock up in the Catalina Mountains, about 7.5 miles away according to Google Maps. Shown at left are views by a 300mm lens, then the TEC alone and with 2X and 5X Barlow. While the ISS is physically larger than a football field, at 250 miles altitude, it is still smallish. From an examination of the various combos and resultant sharpness, I decided to go with the 2X Barlow. The 5X, while making the image larger, doesn't have any better sharpness (likely limited by daytime seeing in these exposures), and the resultant smaller field-of-view would likely make it more difficult to track the moving ISS.  The final setup is shown at right. On the telescope side I needed to add an extender to reach focus, then the 2X Barlow, then the camera adaptor.

The ISS pass was about an hour after sunset, so there was plenty of time to check focus on the moon and a few bright stars before  the Space Station made its entrance.  At left is a single frame of the moon at full camera resolution with the TEC 140 with 2X Barlow. Finally the ISS rose above some clouds in the NW, and I aimed and took a few shots at 1,000th of a second, and checked the brightness - appeared about right at the ISO of 1600 (maxed out), so kept at it, tracking the best I could manually while snapping frames. As it approached the zenith, I stopped and rotated the alt-az mount manually to pick it up again as it continued SE. It was when I first picked it up after the zenith move that I got a few frames in 10 seconds and stacked three of them as shown at right here. I'm no expert on the ISS layout, but the vertically stretched objects are the solar cells, the main spar running horizontally in this image. While not much compared to Legault's efforts above, it is a fun first step. Legault uses a 14" telescope, so stepping up in size would help in larger image scale as well as keeping exposures short. We'll see...

Latest From The Edge Of The Solar System!

I just saw the most incredible image yet from the New Horizon spacecraft, just sent from Pluto and I had to share it with someone!  Shown at left is the image, with NASA's caption reading:

Just 15 minutes after its closest approach to Pluto on July 14, 2015, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft looked back toward the sun and captured this near-sunset view of the rugged, icy mountains and flat ice plains extending to Pluto’s horizon. The smooth expanse of the informally named icy plain Sputnik Planum (right) is flanked to the west (left) by rugged mountains up to 3,500 meters high, including the informally named Norgay Montes in the foreground and Hillary Montes on the skyline. To the right, east of Sputnik, rougher terrain is cut by apparent glaciers. The backlighting highlights over a dozen layers of haze in Pluto’s tenuous but distended atmosphere. The image was taken from a distance of 18,000 kilometers to Pluto; the scene is 1,250 kilometers wide.

NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI

 

While taken mid-July, over 2 months ago, data from the close encounter is continuing to trickle down, and will continue to do so for something like a year! The gift that keeps on giving... Since this blog is limited to images only 1600 pixels wide, the original image is much larger. I won't try to add my own interpretations, nor give the details of how it was taken - I leave that to the experts - in particular, Emily Lakdawalla's excellent blog, where I first saw the original image.  She has an excellent summary describing what we are seeing and how it was taken. Be sure to read it and visit ALL the links she has on her post. Incredible stuff!

Spotlight on Pluto!

For likely the last time in our lifetime, in less than 24 hours, a space probe will be visiting an unexplored planet for the first time. Tomorrow morning, New Horizons will pass a few thousand miles from the surface of our "ninth planet" Pluto. Even though it was demoted to a dwarf planet about 10 years ago, wife Melinda is sitting across the room and she wouldn't take kindly to calling it anything other than a planet!

The first thoughts of "Planet X" came from observed perturbations in the orbit of the outer planets in the late 1800s. Percival Lowell started the first extensive search from Arizona's own Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff. Hired to do the search was Illinois-born and Kansas farm boy Clyde Tombaugh, who eventually located Pluto in February, 1930. At the time, it marked the outermost, mysterious edge of the solar system, forty times the Earth's distance from the sun at over 3 billion miles (4.5 hours for radio signals to reach Earth from New Horizons!).

My first exposure to it was when I was hired as an observing assistant at the University of Iowa's 24" telescope in 1973. The previous year it had been observed by graduate student Linda Kelsey as her master's thesis, and I remember observing it visually a few times over my years there. It is a non-trivial object to observe - it is faint, about 100 times too faint to be seen in binoculars, and as a planet, it also moves. This combination means you need very good finder charts and a decent-sized telescope. Fast forward to about 20 years ago and with a borrowed 16" telescope and good finder charts, I followed it for a couple nights, showing it to the public at the Grand Canyon Star Party. But, of course, it only looked like a faint little star - only identifiable as Pluto from its motion from night to night.

Then fast forward to now. With Pluto in the news and a break in the monsoonal circulation, I decided to set up the C-14 in the back yard to try imaging it. The weather cooperated Friday and Saturday, allowing me to obtain images over an hour for each night (dodging clouds each night too), using the finder chart that Sky and Telescope provided a month or two ago. Given the light pollution in the Midtown area of Tucson, I wasn't sure what to expect, but I was barely able to starhop to where I thought the field was and took 3 minute exposures. With the temperatures in the low 90s, I used in-camera noise reduction to reduce my hot pixels, so it took an hour to take 10 of those 3 minute exposures each night. In the cropped images above, knowing now where to look, you can see the slightly blurred image of Pluto as it moved nearly 4 arcseconds in that hour.

Otherwise, I was unsure how to display the movement from night-to-night, so I have 2 possibilities, both presented here. At left I used the method I use to make anaglyph 3D images (though this doesn't make a very good 3D image!). I rotated and aligned the stars atop each other, then do the little Photoshop magic, making one image of Pluto Cyan (11 July, UT), the other red (12 July). In the image at right, the images were nearly aligned, but keeping the stars as close doubles. The singular images are the pair of Pluto images. The high temperatures and light pollution resulted in some color gradients, but otherwise I'm surprised how apparent Pluto appears in these shots from town. These images show nearly the entire frame from the C14 telescope with the APS sensor of the Canon XSi - in case you haven't spotted the images of Pluto, they are down in the lower left corner.

EDIT: After reading John's comment below, I rethought my plan not to make a gif to display the image pair. I thought I'd lost my gif-making program in a disk crash, but found another program to do it. So here it is at right, the two images blinking back and forth, just as Clyde Tombaugh discovered them (with his blink comparator) back 85 years ago. And John was right - it is a pretty dramatic demonstration of showing the motion over the course of 24 hours. As mentioned above, there is a significant gradient between the images, likely caused by shifting the field the second night to better center on Pluto.

 It was cool to be able to image it with my own equipment in the light-polluted environs of Tucson. What is also interesting is that the nearly 90 arseconds/day of motion against the distant stars (about 3 weeks of time to move the distance of the moon's apparent diameter!) is NOT due to Pluto's motion, but rather the rapid motion of the Earth in its inner solar system orbit.

So New Horizons will have its closest approach about breakfast time Tuesday, but it will be too busy taking data to send photos back in real time. I read that only one percent of the close approach data will be sent back immediately, the rest coming in over the following weeks and months. The other fact is that it is moving so fast to get there in a reasonable length of time (only 9 years total travel time), it will zip past it very quickly, about 9 miles per second. This will be no orbital mission, but rather a flyby that won't last long... Once past Pluto there are thoughts to pass other Kuiper Belt Objects, but I don't believe that has yet been yet finalized.

Until now, images have been released pretty much as soon as they come in and interestingly, amateur data reducers can manipulate the images and release them as fast as NASA! For instance, this afternoon, I found a couple stereo pairs (Using the cross-eyed method) assembled by Bill Davis of Oklahoma City, shown at left. I found this on the Spaceweather website, which for now also includes a Pluto gallery. To see the images in 3D, cross your eyes slightly to view the left image with your right eye and vice versa. You should see a center image that displays Pluto as a round globe. Another of my favorite websites would be that of Emily Lakdawalla, who blogs regularly about various spacecraft missions, and should be a regular read for anyone interested in the solar system. She provides the right amount of technical data and interpretation in normal language that is easy for most to understand.

And, of course, the New Horizons mission has its own website, so you can check it for the latest data yourself! Have fun - we'll learn some spectacular things the next few days!

Eye in the Sky!

I've certainly extolled the virtues of Heavens-Above - the website that predicts the location of virtually every satellite that is circling the Earth.  While the bright visual ones are easy to spot, if you have a particular little satellite you want to follow telescopically, you can find positions of those too.  And besides objects that circle the earth, you can also plot out sky maps for any time and date, as well as make finder charts for comets and asteroids and find out information about other solar system objects.  It is a great resource!  Just enter your location by city name or from Google Maps, make sure you enter your time zone correctly, and you should be ready to go.

Thanks to the heads-up provided by a TAAA member earlier today, I saw that the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) would be making a favorable pass over Tucson tonight shortly after 1900 (7pm).  Heavens-above provided a map where it would appear in the sky.  You can also print out a ground track, the positions on the globe that it passes over.  Interestingly, the HST's orbit is inclined 28 degrees to the equator, the same latitude of Cape Canaveral, Florida where it was launched.  It takes a lot of extra work to launch a satellite into an inclination different from your launch point's location.  As a result, it NEVER passes directly over Tucson, which has a latitude of 32 degrees.  The best you can do is a situation like tonight where it gets about 51 degrees high to the south - as reflected in the ground track, it passes us well to the south, but thanks to its relatively high orbit (550km, about 330 miles), it is still easily seen.  The circle on the ground track at right indicates where it would be visible.  I just checked, and if we had been observing from our home in Illinois, HST would only have been about 12 degrees over the southern horizon - a big difference in appearance!

Of course, to see it, it needs to be mostly dark at the observing location, but the HST needs to be still lit up by the sun and that was the circumstance tonight.  Looking at the sky plot at left, you can see where the track stops at the left side below the constellation Leo - that is where it enters the Earth's shadow.

I decided to try photographing it from the back yard with a tracking mount so at least the stars wouldn't be trailed.  Since the Hubble would be passing through Orion, not far from Rigel and the Orion Nebula, it was a natural to try getting those in the images too.  Of course, it always takes longer to set up gear than you think it does, and just about the time I finished focusing the lens I happened to look up and it was right there about to enter the field!  I quickly snapped the picture, but it was only set to 15 seconds - shown here at left is the cropped part of the image that shows the trail of HST with Rigel at lower right and the Orion Nebula at left center.  The focal length of the zoom lens was set to 85mm, and F/3.5.  Unfortunately there were some think clouds in the field, but that is nothing new - we've had at least thin clouds for seemingly months!

So spotting the Hubble was a great success!  It won't be many years that the Hubble will have another failing reaction wheel or something that will knock it out of commission.  While there have been several servicing missions over the decades, with the retirement of the Space Shuttle, the opportunity to repair or upgrade HST is over.  The 6.5 meter James Webb Space Telescope is not a direct replacement and is still years from launch, so it will be sad to see Hubble end, though it will likely continue to circle the Earth in its orbit for a long time.  In the meantime, hopefully some day it will clear again here in Arizona, without the moon, and with my schedule allowing me to get out to a dark site.  Until then, these little back yard excursions will have to do!

The Prodigal Son Returns, But...

The Prodigal Son returns, but we no longer speak its language...  The story came from the always interesting blog of Emily Lackdawalla a few days ago.  The spacecraft known as the International Sun/Earth Explorer 3 (ISEE-3), launched in 1978 and repurposed in 1983 to study a pair of comets, then named the International Cometary Explorer (ICE), is returning to Earth's vicinity.  She reports that though a dozen of 13 instruments continue to operate, and it still has maneuvering fuel, at NASA's investigation into a possible repurposing of it, Goddard Spacecraft Center indicates we can no longer communicate with it.  Obviously the standards for radio signals has changed in those decades and the hardware needed to upload information to the spacecraft was retired and surplused in 1999.  The cost to rebuild new hardware to speak in an obsolete standard was determined to be too high to consider. 

So while it listens for instructions as it approaches the Earth, we won't be able to talk to it.  Interestingly, if it is ever recovered, NASA has already donated it to the Air and Space Museum, but that would require extraordinary effort as well.  As a long-term fan of spaceflight, it is sad to see it happen, but I'm amazed it hasn't happened before.  How many of you can download software for your computer from 3.5" floppies which was the standard just 15 years ago?