broken prominence

@sarahkendrew spotted this incredible photo of our spotted sun and its broken prominence.

amazing photo taken by Alan Friedman.

sunset over warrumbungle park

siding springs observatory sits inside the warrumbungle national park. sometimes the sunsets over the park are incredible.

ceres

link

ceres is an object in our solar system that lives in the asteroid belt, between the orbits of mars and jupiter. ceres was discovered on 1 January 1801 and for the next 50 years, it was classified as an eighth planet in our solar system!

so what happened?

many bodies started to be discovered in the region between mars and jupiter, ceres just happened to be the first one we saw. william hershel first called them asteroids ("star-like") because "they resemble small stars so much as hardly to be distinguished from them, even by very good telescopes." planets, on the other hand, could be resolved at the time and features on some of their surfaces seen.

once it was realized that there existed an entire class of these objects, ceres was no longer considered a planet, but designated officially as "1 Ceres" since it was the first asteroid discovered.

a similar series of events recently caused the demise of pluto's status as a planet. astronomers started discovering many objects like pluto that even had the same strange orbital quirks as pluto. by the mid-2000s there were enough of these objects in the "kuiper belt" that mike brown argued, successfully, that pluto should no longer be classified as a planet.

in fact, he just wrote a book about his entire experience demoting pluto called "why i killed pluto, and why it had it coming." i'm reading this book right now and i can highly recommend it to anyone who might be interested in the story of pluto, or just generally in how astronomy/science is done.

anyway, i first started this blog around the time the IAU voted on pluto in 2006. you can read an entry about the process: here.

the elements, a song

what do you get when you combine the periodic table of videos, a song called "the elements" by tom lehrer, and brady's editing skills? watch:

invaders have landed at siding springs observatory!

many observatories have an all-sky camera in place to help monitor the cloud levels throughout the night. they are incredibly useful and also beautiful when you can see the milky way galaxy stretched overhead.

sometimes they have even detected critters crawling across our known universe! ;)

this photo was spotted the other night by a fellow astronomer up here at the AAT this run.

moons of many colors

i like this series of false-color moon photos created by peter cuba. you can see the full set here.

the UK Schmidt Telescope

just across the mountain from the AAT lives the UK Schmidt telescope, a 1.2 meter scope built in the early 1970s. in the photo below, the UKST is the dome on the left as seen from the catwalk of the AAT.

solid 70s construction (the tape is not part of the support structure ;)

the rooms inside this telescope dome feel like museums of old equipment and techniques in astronomy. this is the original analog mini-dome model that is still in control of moving the opening of the dome relative to where the telescope points.

while we can make much more precise measurements with digital CCD technology, there's something romantic about investigating old developed images.

nowadays, the UKST is used to survey the sky and collect velocities of 1 million stars zooming around our milky way galaxy for a project called RAVE. this robot works hard to position all optical fiber on the heavy plates in order to collect spectra of each individual star.

here's an old note i found in the dome...

rainbow bright

the first stretch of this long observing run is over. i've had a few hours of sleep, and i'm off to the town of mudgee for a couple days to relax and visit several local wineries! the last time i stopped in mudgee, i had lunch at a resturant called "fish in the bush" (tee hee ;)

clouds are generally bad for using telescopes, obviously, but they often produce interesting terrestrial phenomena. the same night we saw the moon next to venus, we also saw a brilliant morning double rainbow!

at one point, both bows stretched around to make 3/4 of a full circle. it was stunning, but i couldnt fit it all into one photo (wish i had a fish-eye lens!). i took a lot of photos that i'd like to try to mosaic together - any recommendations for software to use to do this?

in the meantime, enjoy!

the integral of the moon and venus

just before the sun rises for the next couple days, you can see the crescent moon close to a bright venus. we had clouds for most of our observing tonight, but they cleared for just a few minutes this morning, long enough to see the spectacle in our solar system!

while out on the catwalk, i also noticed a sign in the clouds... what looked to me to be an integral sign! ;)