Night Sky

I've been experimenting with my astrophotography photos, and here are the two best ones I got from my trip to Tahoe. I think I need to do a little more research on how to take different kinds of night sky photo's. At the campground the Milky Way was bright and visible, but when I tried to photograph it, it didn't show up. I had to leave the shutter open long enough to form star trails to see it, and even then it just looks like clouds (see second photo). I'd like to work on my technique a little more, and then maybe plan a trip to Death Valley or somewhere really dark and try again.

Polaris

The Milky Way

Black Holes and Time Warps

Last month for book club we read Black Holes and Time Warps by Kip Thorne. It was a behometh of a book. 500+ pages. I confess I didn't make it to the "time warps" part. I got to about page 400.
It was an excellent book in the sense that it gave a more than comprehensive history of black hole research. The book also included a pre-history as it were of astrophysics, a detailed description of the world-wide scientific community, it's complexities, and tendencies during the 1920's right up through the 1990's. It discussed Einstein, the Cold War, the Soviet versus American race to make the biggest most destructive bomb ever, and vignettes into the lives of scientists like Robert Oppenheimer, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Stephen Hawking, , Karl Schwarzchild, and Borisovich Zel'dovich.
The historical accounts were easy to read, and very interesting. The parts that actually delved into the  physics of black holes and neutron stars etc. was a little bit more difficult to get through. That being said, it's not on account of the math on which most of the subject is based. In fact, that may be the greatest triumph of this book! For as mathematical as the subject is, there were very few equations in the book. Awesome!
That being said, the concepts (on which the math is based) were pretty...out there. No pun intended. Any time you are dealing with relativity, space, time, space-time, and all that, things get pretty weird.
I can't explain everything in the book, but I'd like to relate a few anecdotes that I think every one should know about black holes. Ha ha...

Black holes and breakfast at the Cafe!

One of the most surprising things to me was that the idea of a black hole didn't come about from people looking out into space. It seems like they would have been discovered by astronomers, but that was not the case. The first inkling of a black hole actually came from calculations done by physicists in the early part of the 20th century when they mathematically tried to describe what would happen to a large star once it exhausted its fuel and began to collapse. Their calculations were telling them that  a star above a certain mass, would collapse in on itself, and then keep collapsing down to a super small, super massive point that would curve the space around it so much that it would cease to exist in the observable universe!
At the time, most physicists figured that their calculations were wrong. But as time passed it became more and more clear that it wasn't the math that was wrong. Eventually technology caught up to the equations and optical, X-ray and gamma-ray telescopes coroberated the existence of black holes.
The second, and last thing, I will try to explain is the relationship a few of the cool things concerning mass, space and time. E=mc2. But what does that mean? It means that anything that has mass (i.e. you , me, a chair, the earth, the galaxy) can be described as energy. Mass and energy are sort of two different expressions of the same thing. I'm simplifying this a bit (because of the c (which is the speed of light) squared) but that's pretty much the gist of it. How weird and cool is that?
And that the larger the mass of an object the more it can literally distort time! Black holes swallow up everything in their path, and shove it all down to a thing called a singularity. And that super massive teeny-tiny point creates a almost infinitely deep and narrow pucker in space-time that does some really freaky things. The one I will mention is that it bends space-time in such a way that if you had two people observing it, one outside the hole and one (unfortunate soul) descending into it this is how it would play out:

Space, seen from my patio.

To the person going into the hole, they would approach it, pass through the event horizon, and be strung out atom by atom into the singularity. BUT from the perspective of the person outside, it would look like they approached the event horizon, and then froze just on the edge of it forever (well, almost forever)! From the perspective of the outsider, in a less curved part of space, time moves so fast that they cannot detect even the slightest movement from their counterpart. Again, I am so...baffled by that I don't even know if I could ever hope to explain it any better than I just have.
If you find this interesting then I would highly suggest you read this book to get a more inclusive and scientific account of all the things I'm saying. If you don't, well then, know that I am NOT making this stuff up. Black holes are real, they happen, there is one at the center of our galaxy, and it warps space and time. Bwaa-haa-haa. Cool.

Once in a...

Tomorrow there will be a "blue moon" which only means that it is the second full moon to occur within the same month. Despite the saying, blue moons are fairly common, and not really very blue. Ironic hu?  According to astrophysicist, and all around awesome dude, Neil DeGrassee Tyson, a they happen on average once every 2.3 years. So not so rare. But you know what would be? A photograph of TWO blue moons at the same time! There will be two at my house tomorrow night, and I'll be there with camera ready! Stay tuned for the photo of this amazing celestial convergence!

Persied Meteor Shower

I tried my best to catch the meteor shower this past weekend, but I wasn't much impressed. I took a nap, and had my BF wake me up at 11:00, so I could go out and look. I spent an hour outside and saw 6 meteors, only two of which were really bright. I tried to set my camera up, but there were so many lights (since I just went outside my apartment) that all my photo's were washed out, and none of them caught any of the meteors. Lame. Not that it isn't cool to see a meteor, but I have always seemed to have better luck with the Leonid showers in late November (I think). Oh well, it was worth a try.

A Universe From Nothing

Last month's book for book club was called A Universe from Nothing by Lawrence Krauss. It was an interesting book, one of those astrophysics type where half of what you read you can't quite wrap your brain around, and the other half seems like it should be physically impossible, but apparently it's not.
Our book club was undecided about whether they loved it, but we are a pretty critical bunch, and I think over all it was a pretty good book. And ,since it was fairly short, I'd recommend it to those of you that are interested in the history of the search for dark matter and energy, and the origin of the (our) universe as well.
One of the biggest questions in cosmology is what produced the Big Bang? Most of us generally think in terms of cause and effect, and it only makes sense to us that if there was a Big Bang it had to come from somewhere, and be made out of something that was there before...only it's turning out that may not be true.
(See, this is what I mean about seeming physically impossible!) It certainly isn't true on a quantum scale where in the empty space between quarks (which make up protons and neutrons) particles pop into and out of "thin air" all the time! (The photo below was borrowed from a website called omnispace.org and if you click on the link below the image you can see a gif file animation that's pretty amazing!) That was one of the most interesting things I learned from this book. That empty space isn't really empty at all. WTF? Right?!

Click here to see animation!

So the idea is, if it can happen at a small scale, then why not on a scale the size of the universe? The only thing that seems to matter is that the total energy of the universe must always remain at zero, which apparently does.That might seem counter-intuitive too, but it's not once you begin to think about it. Stephen Hawking likened it (loosely) to making a hill out of dirt. In order to do that you must dig a hole of equal mass. So even though the hill might be high, it is balanced out by a hole equally deep. You are not bringing anything into the system or taking anything out of it either, you are just sort of shuffling it around. Yet still you appear to "make" a hill where there once was none. And so it might be with the universe. There was nothing needed, no outside cause to make the Big Bang, as long as the total energy remained at zero.
Now you might be thinking "Well, where does..."dirt" come from? Where does the system that totals zero energy come from?" And that's where it gets a little tricky. Because maybe the answer is that it comes from nowhere. Just like the particles and antiparticles that appear between quarks, so might our universe be. How could that happen you wonder? No one is exactly sure yet, but many think they are close. And it's all based on solid science, and observation (which the book goes into detail on, things like the Cosmic Background Radiation, and gravitational lensing etc...)
Part of it though, depends on which theory you buy. And each involves ever more complex physics . There is M-Theory and multiverses, string theory and so on, all of which can only truly be understood through some pretty hair-raising mathematics (and so becomes quite difficult for a lay-person such as myself to understand). It also depends on how you think the universe will end: with a"Big Crunch" or a "Big Freeze"? Will the universe collapse in on itself and form a giant black hole encompassing everything? Or will all the galaxies keep moving farther and farther apart until space cools, and all the starts die out? Does it even matter? Well, certainly not for us, or our grandchildren, or the rest of the human race, or any other living thing on our planet, or our sun, or our own home-sweet Milky Way galaxy. But for some distant future galaxy and  civilization it might. Krauss says in a mere trillion years (if the universe keeps expanding as it is now) those aliens will look up at the night sky and only see the stars from their own galaxy. If they develop the technology to gaze father out into the universe they will see....absolutely nothing.

Star Trails: Yosemite NP

For my birthday I decided I wanted to spend the weekend camping in Yosemite National Park. It's what I did last year, and I find that communing with nature, drinking beer and smelling like a campfire are just the things to ease the sting of becoming another year older. 

This year specifically I was looking forward to trying my hand at photographing star trails. They are basically just photos where you leave the shutter open for a really long time, so the stars produce "trails" as they move across the sky. (Well, actually it's us that are moving, but you get what I mean.)It's hard to do in the city because the ambient light gets in the way, but nighttime in high Sierra is perfect!

 It took quite a bit of preparation to get everything ready. I had to buy a special clicker that plugs into my camera and allows me to snap photo's without touching the actual camera and shaking it. I had to do quite a bit of research on line about the settings for my specific camera, and I had to stay up late to actually take the photos. Finally, and this was the most trying of all, I had to be PATIENT, while I waited to see if all my effort worked! I took a total of 6 photos,but only two came out. Two didn't work because I was too impatient. One was because I didn't have the right setting, and one was because some other campers walked right in front of my camera while I was in the middle of a photograph and their flashlight washed the whole thing out. But I am so pleased with the couple I got that I don't really mind the rest. And maybe that's how photographing star trails goes? Anyway, here they are!

(The light on the trees is from all the camp fires that were scattered all around.)

Happy Summer Solstice

Scientific Diagram depicting the orientation of the earth to Sun
during the Summer and Winter Solstice. (Not to scale;)

Today is officially the "longest" day of the year. Actually to be more accurate it's the longest daylight of the year, but whatever right? It's pretty amazing either way. I sometimes wonder how much more productive I would be over the course of my life if it was light everyday till 9:00 pm!  But how does this event come about? What are the "nuts and bolts" of the solstices?
Well, as we all know the earth is tilted a little as it spins on it's axis. This results in the Northern Hemisphere being tilted toward the Sun in the summer, and away from the Sun in the winter which is the whole basis for why we have seasons. (This also explains why the seasons are reversed in the Southern Hemisphere).
So the solstice is the day in which the sun is the farthest "north" relative to the earth. Or maybe you could say it's the day when the northern end of the axis is pointed most directly at the Sun.
For more information please refer to the highly scientific attached diagram that I drew.
Another interesting thing to think about on this glorious day of sunshine is that it is the Winter Solstice in Antarctica right now, and there are hundreds of thousands of penguins huddling together in the cold and dark, trying to keep their eggs safe and warm until the Sun returns and brings spring with it. And I hope they are doing OK. It's not easy being a penguin.If you have never seen the movie March of the Pengiuns I absolutely recommend it. I think I will watch it tonight. It might seem odd,  to end the longest day of the year with thoughts about the shortest but I think it is a great way to really enjoy both, appreciate the cycle of the seasons (and the fact that we have seasons at all!) and "tune in" to the beat of our awesome planet! But whatever you decide to do, I hope it's pleasant and filled with sunshine!
Happy Summer Solstice everyone!!!

Venus Transit

I was able to capture a few photo's of Venus this afternoon as it crossed in front of the sun.  It was really neat. These celestial gymnastics will not occur again until 2117, so I wanted to make sure I caught it. Once again my camera performed awesomely. The reason the photos are red is because I used every filter I had to try to cut down the brightness, including my red filter. I also put the brightness all the way down to the darkest it would go. Even then I had to wait  for the sun to go behind the clouds a little so it wasn't so bright in order to see tiny Venus. For the last couple photos (the one above and the last two) I discovered if I used my hand or a piece of paper to shade the lens just the right amount I could see Venus. It's always a bit of an experiment when I try photographing new things. The above is my clearest photo, I think you can even make out a few sun spots! But some of the shots with clouds looked more artistic and pretty cool too. Enjoy!