I'm pleased to announce the LAUNCH of my new space podcast, Cosmic Vertigo, made with co-host Alan Duffy and our amazing producer Joel Werner.
"Do you ever feel dizzy when you think about the incomprehensible scale of space? We call that feeling Cosmic Vertigo. Welcome to a head-spinning conversation between two friends who study the sky for a living."
Rest state: Alan and I cracking up (Photo: ABC/Radio National)
The three of us had a lot of fun creating this series, and I'm in awe of Joel's editing and production genius.
Dream Team: Alan Duffy, Joel Werner, and yours truly (Photo: ABC/Radio National)
Kristin was the telescope operator for the beginning of the run. Here she is with the original control panel that was installed 40 years ago! while it still looks roughly the same - systems and displays have been upgraded over the years :)
we had some time for enjoying the clear night skies while exposing with the big telescope
The Magellanic Clouds and the AAT dome. (Credit: Jesse van de Sande)
Milky Way (Credit: Angel Lopez-Sanchez)
And we may have started to write a few songs for "SAMI - then Musical" ;)
"A 2dF night at the AAT" assembles 14 time-lapse sequences taken at the 4-metre Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT) located at Siding Spring Observatory NSW, Australia. This time-lapse video shows not only how the Two Degree Field (2dF) instrument works but also how the AAT and the telescope dome move in tandem, and the beauty of the Southern Sky in spring and summer.
The video is 2min 50sec long and combines more than 4000 frames obtained using a CANON EOS 600D with a 10-20mm wide-angle lens. All sequences were taken during September and November 2011 by astronomer Dr Ángel R. López-Sánchez while he was working as the 2dF support astronomer for the AAT. The music is the song “Blue Raider” from Composer Cesc Villà's album “Epic Soul Factory”
what a fun, almost surreal evening talking with Neil DeGrasse Tyson.
pre-show with Neil deGrasse Tyson
He reminded us to "look the hell up every once in a while" and not to take evidence of science and technology in our everyday lives (phones!) for granted.
I didn't realize for the first few minutes that we were on the HUGE screen behind us on stage!
one of the best parts about spending time with neil is realising that he is constantly observing the world around him and thinking about it, questioning it, interpreting it - not taking it at face value. it's something we should all do more, as it keeps us present in the moment and prevents us from not appreciating all the amazing things around us.
dr neil degrasse tyson is one of the most recognised scientists in the world right now and he has recently embarked on an australian tour!
i'm thrilled to report that i will be hosting two of his shows: August 7th in Melbourne and August 16th in Brisbane!
there are still tickets available for each show, so if you're around, please join us!
what does hosting mean? i will pop up on stage first and welcome everyone to the event then introduce neil and invite him to the stage. he and i will then sit in a couple comfy chairs and have an hour long conversation on topics ranging from pluto to science education to alien life to the (lack of) edge of the universe!
then a few audience members will have a chance to ask him questions as well.
i'm thrilled for this opportunity and will hopefully have a full report after the events are finished. here we go...!
I published this article at The Conversation last week, reproduced here for your enjoyment :) Original article link.
Seeing the Universe Through Spectroscopic Eyes
When you look up on a clear night and see stars, what are you really looking at? A twinkling pinprick of light with a hint of colour?
Imagine looking at a starry sky with eyes like prisms that separate the light from each star into its full rainbow of colour. Astronomers have built instruments to do just that, and spectroscopy is one of the most powerful tools in the astronomer’s box.
The technique might not produce the well-known pretty pictures sent down by the Hubble Space Telescope, but for astronomers, a spectrum is worth a thousand pictures.
Visible spectra reveal huge amounts of information about objects in the distant cosmos that we can’t learn any other way.
So what is spectroscopy?
Spectroscopy is the process of separating starlight into its constituent wavelengths, like a prism turning sunlight into a rainbow. The familiar colours of the rainbow correspond to different wavelengths of visible light.
The human eye is sensitive to the visible spectrum – a narrow range of frequencies among the entire electromagnetic spectrum. The visible spectrum covers wavelengths of roughly 390 nanometers to 780 nanometers (astronomers often use units of Angstroms (10-10), so visible light spans 3,900 to 7,800 Angstroms).
Once visible starlight reaches the curved primary mirror of a telescope, it is reflected toward the focal point and can then be directed anywhere. If the light is sent directly to a camera, an image of the night sky is seen on a computer screen as a result.
If the light is instead sent through a spectrograph before it hits the camera, then the light from the astronomical object gets separated into its basic parts.
A very simple spectrograph was used by Issac Newton in the 1660s when he dispersed light with a glass prism. Modern spectrographs consist of a series of optics, a dispersing element and a camera at the end. The light is digitised and sent to a computer, which astronomers use to inspect and analyse the resulting spectra.
The video (above) shows the path of distant starlight through the 4-metre Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT) and a typical spectrograph, revealing real data at the end.
What do spectra teach us?
A spectrum allows astronomers to determine many things about the object being viewed, such as how far away it is, its chemical makeup, age, formation history, temperature and more. While every astronomical object has a unique rainbow fingerprint, some general properties are universal.
Top shows a spiral galaxy spectrum. Bottom shows non-star-forming galaxy spectrum. Screenshot from Australian Astronomical Observatory video above
Here we examine the galaxy spectra shown in the video. The spectrum of a galaxy is the combined light from its billions of stars and all other radiating matter in the galaxy, such as gas and dust.
In the top spectrum you can see a few strong spikes. These are called “emission lines” and occur at discrete wavelengths due to the atomic structure of atoms as electrons jump between energy levels.
The hydrogen spectrum is particularly important because 90% of the normal matter in the universe is hydrogen. Because of the details of hydrogen’s atomic structure, we recognise the strong hydrogen-alpha emission line at roughly 7,500 Angstroms in the top spectrum image.
In a galaxy, only the youngest, biggest stars are hot enough to excite surrounding hydrogen gas enough that the electrons populate the third energy level, before falling to the second lowest, thus emitting a hydrogen-alpha photon.
Because of this, we know the strength of the hydrogen-alpha line in a galaxy’s spectrum indicates how many very young stars there are in the galaxy. Since the bottom spectrum shows no hydrogen-alpha emission, we can conclude that the bottom galaxy is not sparking new life in the form of shining stars, while the top galaxy harbours several hard working stellar nurseries.
In the bottom spectrum you can see a number dips. These are called “absorption lines” because they appear in the spectrum if there is anything between the light’s source and the observer on Earth absorbing the light. Absorbing material could be the extended layers of a star or interstellar clouds of gas or dust.
The absorption lines close to each other below 5,000 Angstroms in the bottom spectrum are the calcium H and K lines and can be used to determine how quickly stars are zooming around the galaxy.
In a galaxy how far away?
A basic piece of information derived from a spectrum is the distance to the galaxy, or specifically, how much the light has stretched during its journey to Earth. Because the universe is expanding, the light emitted by the galaxy is stretched toward redder wavelengths as it innocently moves across space. We measure this as redshift.
To determine the exact distance of a galaxy, astronomers measure the well-studied pattern of absorption and emission lines in the observed spectrum and compare it to the laboratory wavelengths of these features on Earth. The difference tells how much the light was stretched, and therefore how long the light was travelling through space, and consequently how far away the galaxy is.
The absorption lines ‘shift’ the farther away an object is, giving us an indication of its distance from us. Georg Wiora (Dr. Schorsch)
In the top galaxy spectrum mentioned earlier, we measure the strong red emission line of hydrogen-alpha to be at a wavelength of roughly 7,450 Angstroms. Since we know that line has a rest wavelength of 6,563 Angstroms, we calculate a redshift of 0.13, which means the light was travelling for 1.7 billion years before it reached our lucky telescope. The galaxy emitted that light when the universe was roughly 11.8 billion years old.
Australia’s strength in spectroscopy
Australia has led the way internationally for spectroscopic technology development for the last 20 years, largely due to the use of fibre optics to direct galaxy light from the telescope structure to the spectrograph.
A huge advantage of using optical fibres is that more than one spectrum can be obtained simultaneously, drastically improving the efficiency of the telescope observing time.
Australian astronomers have also led the world in building robotic technologies to position the individual optical fibres. With these, the AAT and the UK Schmidt Telescopes (both located at Siding Spring Observatory in New South Wales) have collected spectra for a third of all the 2.5 million galaxy spectra that humans have ever observed.
While my own research uses hundreds of thousands of galaxy spectra for individual projects, it still amazes me 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, many similar to our own Milky Way home.
the australian night sky never disappoints, especially when viewed from far out into the outback. a talented australian astrophotographer, greg priestley, was able to capture the milky way and the "emu" rising above uluru and kata tjuta in may 2014.
Giving a presentation is your opportunity to share your passion about a topic with an audience and empower them to wonder "why?" about the same questions that fascinate you. When the audience walks away with a deeper understanding of something you’ve convinced them is important, they will remember you and what you gave to them.
Communicating complex science ideas does not come naturally to everyone, but is a skill that can be developed with a little practice and a few basic tips. The effort is well worth the reward the first time an audience member gasps at what you say or you see a child excitedly explaining something she learned from you to her family.
The first step, before preparing any material for a presentation, activity, or interaction with the media, is to pause and think about three simple things. Make this process a part of your routine.
1. Isolate the BIG IDEA 2. Tell a story 3. Respect the audience
I will describe these three things in more detail and then give some practical suggestions to use during your presentations later in the article.
Isolate the BIG idea
What is the main thing you want your audience to walk away from your presentation understanding? This is a single statement. Say it to yourself out loud. “I want the audience to go home understanding how big the sun is.”
It is not true that adding more facts and sharing a large list of information during the brief time you have your audience’s attention is doing them a favour. Quite the opposite! As you add more facts and numbers to your presentation, the audience will start to forget the early items, their attention will drift, and they might even lose the Big Idea, which means you’ve wasted your time and theirs.
Identify the Big Idea and then 3 key points that you will use to convey your Big Idea to the audience. The rest of your interaction with them, whether it’s 5 minutes or an hour, will be bringing the audience along the journey of understanding the Big Idea and why it matters.
Tell a story
Start your science story with a hook that will instantly grab their attention. Maybe you start by asking a provocative question that might relate to their lives. You can ask them to raise their hands if they have experienced a particular thing or ever thought about how long it takes light to travel from the Sun to Earth – at the speed of light. (Eight minutes.) You can tell a quick anecdote about a person who experienced your Big Idea and how it made them feel or how it applied to their life. Try to share the human side.
Telling the story of your Big Idea will need to be presented differently for different audiences. It's not appropriate to recycle the exact same talk or activity for everyone. You should adjust presentations and activities to make them relevant to the group you are trying to reach. Have a conversation with them.
Respect the audience
This is where you consider your audience. Remember that your presentation is not about you, it’s about your audience and what you are bringing to them. Giving a presentation is your opportunity to share your fascination about a topic, leaving an audience feeling empowered by the deeper understanding of something you’ve convinced them is important.
Be mindful of the language you use: avoid jargon, get to the point, skip the details. Jargon consists of technical terms that help experts talk to each other efficiently, but is not used in everyday conversation. To a colleague you could say the sun’s diameter is 2 orders of magnitude bigger than the Earth’s. But to a general audience you would say it’s 100 times bigger. Remember, you want the audience to understand you and the words you use.
Think about what the particular audience needs to understand your story. More visuals? Interactive participation to demonstrate a concept? Talking briefly to each other about their experience? Empathise with your audience to help them get the most out of your interaction with them.
Visualise concepts and avoid using numbers
Approximate size of the Earth relative to the Sun. Image: NASA
This type of visualisation is much more memorable for the audience than a large number. Image: NASA
As a general theme, if you find yourself writing a lot of text on a slide in a presentation, especially numbers or equations, think again. Find or create a visual way you can present the concept instead.
For instance, you could write on a slide that the Sun’s diameter is 1,391,684 km. This number has no relevance to our every day experience and is therefore meaningless, other than the audience knows it’s big. You could simply say that 100 Earth’s fit across the face of the Sun. This is a better way of sharing the size because it makes it relevant to a scale the audience knows: the Earth.
Better yet, if you’re giving a visual presentation, you can show an image of the sun from a space telescope and then insert an image of the Earth next to it at its relative size. This visualisation is much more memorable for the audience than a large number. Always minimise the numbers you share and try to visualise the concept instead.
Also be mindful of the colour choices you use on your slides. Blue text on a white background is difficult to read. Small text is impossible from the back of the room (you should use at least a 20 point font, but usually bigger). And remember that some people in the audience will be colour blind.
All content should convey meaning
The content of your slide should be useful and informative for the slide’s main point. You should not read the text (there should never be that much text on a slide!). Practice so that when you look at your slide you can recall your main point. You can use notes in any presenter tool to give yourself clues, but you (and therefore your audience) should be able to identify the main point from the visual clues. Otherwise, rework your slide or practice more!
Practice your presentation
Even the most experienced presenters take time to rehearse what they will say before they say it in front of an audience. Give yourself a confident start
Memorize your opening and closing lines - they make the most impact. Really practice the introduction to give yourself a confident start and allow yourself to relax into the rhythm of the presentation. Your closing line will also make a strong impact. Practice your final summary statement and then afterwards thank the audience for their time and attention. This gives the audience the helpful cue that you are finished and welcomes them to applaud.
The shorter the talk, the more you need to practice
Memorising every word of an hour-long talk is time consuming and not practical. When giving a 50-minute presentation, practice by going through each slide one-by-one and recalling the main point.
When giving a 10-minute talk, practice at least 5 times. When giving a 5-minute talk, practice enough times that you finish in 5 minutes every time without saying “um.”
Ask for feedback
Practice your talk in front of friends, colleagues, or mentors and listen to the constructive criticism you receive.
Record yourself
It is challenging and can feel embarrassing to watch yourself speak, but the practice is so useful! You might find that you need to look up at your audience more, or that you say “um” too often, or you make a clicking sound with your tongue that you didn’t realize you made. You’ll notice your posture and whether you talk too fast, or discover that you do a very strange thing with your hand while you talk! This is a tough but rewarding practice.
Stick to time
It is disrespectful to the audience and makes you look unprepared if you go over time. The audience will become restless when you speak longer than the time allocated and they will not retain the information you rush to fit in at the end. It is important to practice your presentation so you can stay to time and leave your audience feeling inspired and respected.
Use technology wisely
When deciding how to present to a certain group, it is not a question of “How can I use this fancy new technology?” You know your Big Idea and the three key facts you will use to tell your story. Now identify which technology will best help unfold this story. It’s finding the most appropriate tool for the job.
You can use the technology to put cues in your talk that only you can see to remind yourself to take a breath and speak more slowly or to regain your audience’s attention when you notice it inevitably drifts.
Human beings have attention spans of roughly 10 minutes, and probably less than 20% of the audience will be paying attention at any given moment. This means it will be helpful for you to remind the audience of your main points throughout your presentation or try a few other tricks.
To regain the audience’s attention, change your focus every few minutes: vary the tone of your voice, use audience participation, , use the keyboard’s "B" key to provide a blank screen and bring attention back to you (try it out, it works!).
Speaking with young students
Young students are an active audience and they will be very eagre to share their stories with you! They want to show how something you’ve said relates to their life or how their mom read them something in a book once that kind of sort of relates to the topic. While being interactive with the students by asking them to raise their hands or vote throughout your presentation is useful, they will want to stop you during the presentation and ask questions, which often turn into long-winded stories once they’ve been given the attention.
An option is after you introduce yourself, tell the students that you know they’ll have a lot of interesting questions and stories to share with the group, and they will get a chance, but you have so much exciting material to get through that they should wait until the end of the presentation to ask questions.
Then at the end, start at one side of the room and hand a student an object (either ask the teacher for an object, or bring in something related to the topic). The student can ask ONE question, or not, and hand the object to the next student. This way every student gets a chance to share if they want, and you don’t accidentally call on the same student who keeps raising his hand while neglecting a potentially shy student unwilling speak up. Only a few students will pass the object without commenting.
This works for a classroom of up to 30 students, but will take at least 20 minutes. If you have an hour with the group, talk for 30 minutes and then begin this activity. If the group is a lot bigger, it won’t work. If the students are older than about 11 years old, they usually have the attention span to handle a 45 minute presentation with a few questions at the end.
Talking to media
Always make a list of three things you want to convey to the journalist. Practice saying them out loud before the interview. Also write down a few items that you do not want to talk about if such items exist. If the journalist asks those things you can say “I prefer not to comment on that at this time.” Or “That is not relevant to the results I’m presenting today, so I won’t comment now.” Or even “That is not my area of expertise, so I won’t comment on that.” You can suggest other scientists who are experts in the area, if you want, or you just leave it and wait for another question. Or you can start talking about one of your three main points again.
Relax and enjoy
Finally, if you’re feeling particularly nervous before a presentation or interview, stand up, stretch your arms up out to the corners of the room and look up at the ceiling. Take a few deep breaths in this powerful posture. Also, a tall stance with broad shoulders will give you more confidence as you’re speaking.
Remember – have FUN! This is your opportunity to share your passion with an audience eagre to hear about it and understand why it’s important and so exciting to you.
Amanda Bauer is a Research Astronomer and Outreach Officer at the Australian Astronomical Observatory. She was named among the Top 5 Under 40 Australian researchers and science communicators in 2015 and was a Fresh Science finalist in 2013. She has been invited to give science communication talks at Gemini, dotAstronomy 5, Harley Wood Astronomy Winter School. Follow Amanda on Twitter @astropixie
Resources
Watch Amanda describe her research and why it’s relevant in 30 seconds in this Radio National video produced as part of Top 5 Under 40.
last night the skies over a lot of australia and new zealand glowed - the aurora australis. this photo was captured in perth, western australia by colin legg.
you can also see the milky way shooting across the sky and the large magellanic cloud - a small irregular galaxy smudged just at the top of the red glowing gas.
I've been out at Siding Spring Observatory for the last week observing galaxies for the SAMI survey with the 4-metre Angle-Australian Telescope (AAT). Here's the story.
arrive at siding spring observatory and hope to see crisp blue skies above the telescope dome.
check the instrument hardware
plug the optical fibres into SAMI field plates. each of the silver ones will look at individual galaxies. the orange ones look at sky.
hope that you get to go for a ride with SAMI at prime focus (spot the astronomer!)
take a walk around the catwalk to enjoy the view of the warrumbungles and check the sky
get comfortable in the control room, where you will spend most of you waking hours for the next many nights. (there are a lot of monitors around!)
check the software to make sure it works (SAMI uses python mostly)
check software that talks to the instrument (SAMI) on the telescope
take some calibration frames and look at the raw data to check that it looks ok.
once the sky is dark and the stars are shining in the all-sky camera, focus the telescope and start collecting photons!
enjoy seeing those squiggles in SAMI raw data - gas in a distant galaxy! Each horizontal line is a single spectrum ("rainbow fingerprint") from a different place across the face of a galaxy. The very bright white streaks are cosmic rays, while the vertical dotted lines are glowing gas in Earth's atmosphere. squiggles show gas doppler shifted as it swirls around the center of the galaxy far, far away.
a quick reduction of SAMI galaxy data! each bundle on the right covers a single galaxy and has 61 individual optical fibres looking at a different spots across each galaxy. the left shows a quick reduction of the spectra collected from the light in each fiber. the squiggly lines show gas emission in the galaxy (hydrogen, nitrogen and silicon here). a single exposure points at 13 galaxies for a total of 800 spectra!
replug the fibres in the SAMI field plate in the spooky light of the middle of the night.
start to get goofy in the wee hours of morning by noticing you blend in with the couch.
and again the next night, unintentionally!
take a walk around the mountain during the days to get some sun and enjoy the views!
adding it all up, this observing run was 5 nights long, during which we collected new data for 84 galaxies! that means we have 5,124 individual spectra. woohoo!
the SAMI run continues for another five nights, but my shift is finished and i drive back to sydney tomorrow. time to get back on a day schedule.
I'll be participating in Astronomy in the Park this Friday at Centennial Park in Sydney. I'm giving a talk around 8pm and then the star-gazing begins! Let me know if you're interested - I can give you a ticket discount code.
i'm staying in the southern hemisphere this year for the holidays, which is a change of plans due to still recovering from surgery. i've been house-sitting for some friends who live on one of sydney's lovely northern beaches. i've been taking advantage of the ocean side pool because i am finally able to swim a few laps again! the water is cold and salty, but the activity feels great after a couple months necessary rest.
hope you all have a wonderful holiday season and manage to get some necessary down time with family and/or friends.
for the three eclipse visible in australia this year, geoff sims (beneath beyond) managed to rush away from most clouds to film each event! he gorgeously captures australian landscapes, cloud motions, and lunar and solar eclipses in this time-lapse video.
- Total Lunar Eclipse (April 15th) near Byron Bay - Partial Solar Eclipse (April 29th) on the edge of the Blue Mountains - Total Lunar Eclipse (October 8th) near Lithgow
the final eclipse shown, which took place last wednesday evening, was happening when i busted my knee playing soccer. more news on that after i visit the sports medicine doctor tomorrow. my guess: not good at all :(
i've been working to launch an AAO YouTube channel and guess what - it finally happened! our first instalment is a new time-lapse video from AAO's Angel Lopez-Sanchez filmed at siding spring observatory.
please enjoy "the sky over siding spring observatory" and subscribe to the AAO's YouTube channel to keep up to date with the video releases i'll be posting once a month or so. topics to be covered include: what is a spectrum, a short documentary about observing, how we re-aluminize the 4-meter telescope mirror, the construction of a new $18 million dollar instrument, and possibly a ukulele rock video ;) stay tuned!
here's a video i created in about the last 24 hours. it has been a fun little project with a hack day feel :)
it shows scenes from one night observing galaxies with the 4-metre Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT) at Siding Spring Observatory in New South Wales, Australia.
all of the footage was taken with a GoPro camera and edited together with imovie.
enjoy!
SAMI is the Sydney Australian Astronomical Observatory Multi-object Integral Field Spectrograph, a brand new instrument on the 4-meter AAT. Integral field spectroscopy allows a unique view of how stars and gas zoom around inside distant galaxies because we collect dozens of spectra across the entire face of each galaxy.
The new technology includes the bundles of wires shown in orange and silver which plug into the metal plate. In the silver cords are 61 optical fibres! One bundle points at a single galaxy and captures its stars and gas swirling around in 61 different spots across the face of the galaxy! There are 13 of these galaxy hexabundles, making the survey uniquely efficient.
The new technology has been designed to fit inside the original photographic plate base structure built in the 1970s. It looks solid, doesnt it? I like all the manual dials, and there's even an eyepiece!
The only negative is that after observing with one configuration for 4 hours (in a series of 30 minute exposures), we have to climb into the cage in the middle of the night to manually unplug and replug a different plate. It's an active observing campaign!
This footage was shot on the night of 27 April 2014, the 40th Anniversary of the first starlight ever collected by the AAT.
i'm observing this week with the 4-metre AAT telescope at siding spring observatory in NSW, australia. we're using SAMI - the Sydney-AAO Multi-object Integral Field Unit. so far the SAMI Survey has observed almost 700 galaxies with this unique technology - the biggest collection of galaxies to date observed with integral field spectroscopy. exciting!
tonight provided a spectacular stormy sunset, then a little bit of observing before the clouds really thickened. so i took some photos.
we have to climb in that little space to plug all the bundles into the metal plate.
hanging out with SAMI at prime focus
the new technology includes the bundles of wires shown in orange and silver which plug into the metal plate. in the silver cords are 61 optical fibres! one bundle points at a single galaxy and captures its stars and gas swirling around in 61 different spots! there are 13 of these galaxy hexabundles, making the survey uniquely efficient.
the new technology has been designed to fit inside one of the original base structures built in the 1970s. it looks solid, doesnt it? i like all the manual dials, and there's even an eyepiece!
the only negative is that after observing with one configuration for 4 hours (in a series of 30 minute exposures), we have to climb into the cage in the middle of the night to manually unplug and replug a different plate. it's an active observing campaign!
the necessity of plate-plugging in the middle of the night makes me very excited for the development of new AAO technology: the starbug micro-robots, which zoom around a plate (of glass) to position themselves independently and very quickly!
taking a road trip tomorrow to siding spring observatory. it's a pleasant ~7 hour drive across a fair chunk of australia!
from sydney to coonabarabran!
i'll be up during the nights for the next week observing for the SAMI survey. i also plan to update that front page as, weather permitting, we will observe the 700th SAMI galaxy this week! that's more galaxies with integral field spectroscopy (IFS) than previously observed by all other surveys combined! IFS allows a unique view of how stars and gas zoom around inside distant galaxies because we collect dozens of spectra across the entire face of each galaxy.
hopefully i'll have time to write more throughout the week!
after a disappointing start, with a cloudy eastern horizon and a lovely sunset on the western horizon, the eclipsed moon finally rose above the clouds and sat right underneath the star spica and to the bottom right of mars!
i was not impressed by the clouds on the horizon blocking the rising moon.
unimpressed by clouds
it's fascinating to watch the regrowth of the warrumbungles since the fires swept through SSO 16 months ago. here is the view as the sunset's colours were intensifying.
regrowth in the warrumbungles
clouds do make for the most beautiful sunsets, even if they are bad for most attempts at astronomical observation.
sunset from the catwalk around the 4 metre AAT telescope
finally the clouds thinned and i captured a quick view of the lunar eclipse. the sun's light scattering through earth's atmosphere is why the sky is blue, why sunsets look red, and why the moon looks red during a total lunar eclipse.
the eclipsed moon, spica above, and mars to the left.
