Posts Tagged ‘space’
Chaos overhead, the Flaming Star & the Tadpole
Located in the Perseus arm of our Milky Way, the Flaming Star and Tadpole nebula appear in the constellation of Auriga (the Charioteer). The roundish one to the right is called the Tadpole Nebula (IC 410). The spiral one on the left is called the Flaming Star Nebula (IC 405). They seem deceptively close. The Tadpole is the larger of the two at 100 light years across and is 12,000 light years away. The bright region of the Flaming Star is 5 light years across and 1500 light years away. The two are over 10,000 light years apart. These are a result of 4-5 hours of integration across three nights in early Feb, right after the full moon. At least one of the nights, the sky was awash in moon-light.
Since the last shoot of Rosette Nebula in late January, we had opened up the mount and tightened up the screws that control the worm gear and as a result, we had less trouble with guiding. There wasn’t anything we could do with the bright moon. There are so few clear days in the Feb that we didn’t want to miss the chance. I suspect that the signal to noise ratio didn’t improve with longer integration.
Incidentally, the brightest star in Auriga constellation is Capella. In Hindu mythology, Capella is the heart of Brahma, the creator. Hindu mythology also recognizes Auriga as the charioteer!!! I wonder how these astronomical mythologies cross polinated between the Greeks and Indians.
Cosmic loneliness
Today’s story is not about philosophical loneliness, it is about the practical one, the one at cosmic scale.
“Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of Earth taken on February 14, 1990, by the Voyager 1 space probe from a distance of over 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles), as part of Family Portrait series of images of the Solar System.” –Wikipedia
In the Pale Blue Dot photo, a medium size 666 x 659 pixels, Earth is less than a pixel (0.12 pixels), suspended in a beam of sunlight. This photo was taken at the request of Carl Sagan, who wanted the Voyager to turn around as it passed Neptune’s orbit and picture earth. He went on to speak about this photo, “Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.” Thirty four minutes after that photo in 1990, the Voyager I camera was permanently turned off. Carl Sagan wrote his book Pale Blue Dot in 1994 and he died in 1996 at 62, battling a rare bone marrow disease.
It has taken me 30 years to truly understand what Carl Sagan meant when he said “That’s home”. And that only happened when we found our passion to capture photons from these far off light sources.
Read the rest of this entry »First photograph of a nebula
There are probably a million photos of galaxies and nebulae that look astounding. So why take another one, an amateur one at that?
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Locomotoring 