Our wonderful Universe

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  • Thanks Norra for those, sure is bright, isn't it?

  • That is a really helpful list, thanks Tarragon. :) :thumbup: :thumbup:

  • Just been watching the fireworks handing outside my back door and thought I would take a few snaps too:

    This fist pic is the zoomed out shot showing my back garden and neighbouring houses in the dark:

    And all the zoomed in shots:


  • how far above the unobstructed horizon - 1 hand height held at arm's length is ~5 deg

    Top tip....I really like this. Thank you :thumbup: Some good observational advice there. If I got the horizon the London landscape in the image it would have given my location away quite easily. If you look at the first image the tops of the buildings where not that far below the bottom of that image. I distinctly remember lifting the lens up a bit to not show them.

    The first image meta data ISO 800 32.3mm 0 ev ƒ/4.5 1/4

    And the last image meta data ISO 800 158.6mm 0 ev ƒ/5.6 1/4

    I wish it was a small telescope but it was just my Fuji bridge camera with telephoto lens. I have always liked Fuji cameras because they use hexagon pixels (not sure how) which makes images a little sharper. Kind of an automated anti-aliasing through the lens. I should have dug my Manfrotto out and got a steady shot. I wish I had now! The object was low on the horizon at that time in the morning but more towards south of the Thames rather than to the West. I could not see any star constellations as it was dawn light (golden hour) fast getting brighter. I have never seen any other object in the sky that bright before apart form the Moon and it was so bright that I can only assume it was Jupiter.

    What an amazing opportunity though for amateur astronomers. RIP Patrick Moore and the Sky at Night.

  • I have just been to have a flick through my photo library for some firework pics and look what I came across...

    S843503.jpg


    And here's some crappy firework pics.

    DSCN0445.jpg

    DSCN0447.jpg

    DSCN0448.jpg

    I wish I could experience the fireworks in the the Middle East right now. I love the boom in the chest that can take your breath away if your to close and the colours just add to the magical affair but it's all about big bangs for me. I've been lucky enough to have been directly underneath shells and gerbs being fired off into the sky which is the perfect spot IMO to watch a display with bits of card and wasted gunpowder raining back down on you along with the smoke and beautiful aroma of explosives. See that bottom pic...now place yourself at the bottom where the firing tubes are. It's exhilarating and an adrenalin rush. I get very excited and get a buzz from pushing myself closer and closer to the danger zone. I don't care for health and safety and happy to endanger myself.

    'Boom'.....I'm watching this stuff on Al Jezeera and I'm getting excited :P I would love to be there as an observer with a camera.

  • Friday night visibility was good but not perfect - no Andromeda Nebula. Only perfect skies allow naked eye view of the Andromeda Galaxy - the most distant object visible to the naked eye.

    Any stars in November is a rare bonus - so next time a Leonid storm is due, arrange to be somewhere else!

    (that's STORM not shower).

  • https://www.techexplorist.com/galaxy-milky-w…universe/77276/

    Fascinating. Just imagine how advanced intelligent life that formed on one of the planets in this newly found Milky Way would be now.

    We would appear rather prehistoric to them, wouldn’t we?

    Arising -

    - It's only quite recently someone decided we're in a barred spiral rather than a regular one.

    - They can't even model a regular spiral yet, so for a barred one forget it

    - Trying to classify galaxies requires wild oversimplification. You only have to look at pics of about a dozen before you realise it's futile as well as pointless.

    - The helpful pic they show is of course not the new-discovered galaxy. By definition if it's so distant as to be 'early universe', it's a red fuzzy blob.

    - Since we only have a sample of one, trying to project how/if life can form on other worlds is wild speculation.

    - The universe is they say only ~13B years old. Since our little patch alone is 5B years old, and we had to form from a previous star system, we really are 'early universe' ourselves in cosmological timescales.

    - If life out there had developed interGALACTIC travel (way beyond even star trek tech) and happened upon us, we'd be about as interesting and commonplace to them as we would be interested in a just another patch of moss on just another

    tree.

  • NASA are great at producing stunning images, all multi-exposure layered.

    I can't help feeling they rely too much on images because as soon as any interested youngster looks through an actual telescope hoping to see anything remotely like that they are in for a huge disappointment.

    On the technical side,

    This summary fails to mention that Sag C is at the heart of the galaxy (hence the densely packed stars).

    Seeing the galactic centre is 'impossible' in normal light thanks to dust in the galactic plane.

    The images nowadays are build from wavelengths that penetrate the dust.

    The 'big blob' with 30 x mass of Sun (30 M-sun) will have a very short lifetime and very supernova-y end ! (the bigger the star, the shorter its lifetime).

    When one protostar in a nursery shines for the first time, it blows away lots of the lovely dust which was gravitating into other stars.

  • And you can process the RAW images any way you wish along with various filters to add depth and colour. What we are looking at is the equivalent of a journalists story. An illusion portrayed by the artist / storyteller. Saying that it does not mean that there is nothing to be seen or learnt from the images but the true image is in the finer details...show me the negatives....the RAW image files.

  • Very much so. Nothing to diminish the huge & valuable data that is collected by multi-wavelength observations, but NASA have become masters of creating stunning single images to wow the public which in themselves are of no value.... except of course for the very real importance of impressing the public, and impressing the various agencies and benefactors that keep funding NASA.

    It's sad that it has to come down to cash, but the greater good here is the wealth of technological advances that arise as a by-product of their space exploration and research.

  • I just read the black hole article on page one.

    An expert account with one rather large gaping omission - LONG before you got anywhere near the event horizon, you would be very very dead, because you would be ripped apart by tidal forces. c.f. 'spaghettified'.

    One award winning short story deals with this phenom - 'Neutron Star' by Larry Niven.

    SPOILER ALERT

    .

    .

    .

    A rescue mission goes to recover a ship which has looped around a neutron star (less massive than a black hole - a collapsed core of a star, too large to leave a white dwarf but not large enough to form black hole).

    The crew is missing. Except that they are not missing, they are still there - they are the strawberry jam at the ends of the craft who have been pulped by the tidal forces. (How the ship itself was not torn apart is not mentioned!)

    Unlike most scifi writers, Niven at least made an effort to incorporate real physics and astronomy into his work.

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