This pic of the Moon and Venus conjunction was taken on New Year’s Eve 2008.
Always look up!
Happy New Year, and welcome to the International Year of Astronomy! (saw this on APoD)
túrána hott kurdís by hasta la otra méxico! from Till Credner on Vimeo.
Accessible Science
Want to do space science, but don’t have a billion dollar spacecraft, or an 80-m radio telescope in your backyard? Check out SpaceHack.org. There you’ll find a variety of resources and projects especially suited for the armchair scientist!
Solar Videos
Here are some nice videos of the Sun as taken by my honors student using our 12″ Meade, a Meade electronic eyepiece, and an H-alpha filter. The wind was brutal, so the images are rather shaky.
This first video highlights the granulation in the photosphere, and the glow of the chromosphere evident above the photosphere when looking at the edge of the solar disc.
This clip shows a small prominence arching above a small sunspot group that had already rotated out of view.
New CCD Pics
First of all, the photos below were not taken by me, but by my honors student this semester. So far, the images have been pretty good, given the level of light pollution here in the middle of town. All of these images were aquired using our 12″ Meade SCT and an SBIG ST-8XME Camera and an SBIG CFW-8 filter wheel. The first is a color image of Jupiter. The red filter we have is a bit too broad and has a higher transmittance than the green and blue filter.
The next image is of the Great Cluster in Hercules, M13. This image is the combination of multiple short exposures co-added to yield a single, more detailed image.
This last image is a mosaic of five images to create a single image of the 1st Quarter Moon. …ok, slightly past 1st Quarter. The image was taken using our blue filter.
