Sunil's Astronomy Blog

Some more of my astrophotography

2009-05-16T22:21:00.006+05:30

In one of my previous post, I gave some astro photographs that were taken during our star gazing session. I hope you enjoyed them. This time I want to put some more photographs taken during last winter time. So, its going to be winter constellations like orion, taurus, cannis major. Interesting this about these photographs is that these photographs are taken from the terrace of our building. I did not have to go to an isolated to place to take the photographs.

Last time when I posted the pics, I used gimp to mark the shape of the constellations. I did not know how to draw lines & circles in gimp. They are very basic shapes and I wonder how come there is no direct support to draw them. I used simple hand drawing tool and drew with my hand & mouse. I looked ugly but I couldn't help at that time. Now, I learnt how to draw lines and simple trick to draw circles. Now the pics are more cute. Have a look at them. My astro-photography album is at http://picasaweb.google.com/sunilvirus/Astrophotography

Orion:

Canis Major:

Vrishab (Taurus)

You can find new astronomical objects

2009-05-02T00:21:00.001+05:30

I came across this interesting project named 'Galaxy Zoo' in a podcast by 'scientific american'. It is an online collaborative project where people can volunteer to identify characteristics of galaxies. The idea behind this project is that humans are much better at pattern recognition than computers. Pat yourself on the back!. It is impossible or very tough job for computers to identify all characteristics of a photographs what humans can do it with ease. This project already has more than 2,00,000 volunteers. These people had done jobs that would take years for the computers and the astro physicists in matter of months.

The job of human volunteers is very simple. Each volunteer will be presented with pictures of galaxies. The volunteer has to identify if the galaxy is elliptical or spiral, if it is rotating clockwise or anti-clockwise, if ther is a bulge in the center, how many number of spiral arms are there etc. You can even say if the galaxy looks odd. For reliability, the same picture is shown to multiple volunteers. So, one need not fear that he/she will jepordize the project by making a wrong choice.

With the help of a volunteer, the scientists have identified a new object called "Hanny's Voorwerp", which was not known earlier. Now, they are spending more time on unravelling the mystery behind this new object, which they think is a gas cloud heated by jet stream from a black hole. They named the new object on the name of the volunteer. Cool! isn't it ? See the green object in the image below.

Go grab you pie!

Star gazing night in pune

2009-04-27T00:49:00.007+05:30

We attended a star gazing session organized by jyotirvidya parisanstha in pune on 24th April (Saturday) night. It was a nice session. The session started at around 8pm in the night and lasted through early hours of 4am Sunday. We saw a bunch of summer constellations and stars. The session started with a walkthrough of the constellations. It was followed by telescopic viewing. We saw M44 beehive cluster, mizar(vasishta & arundati), Saturn with its rings etc. Later in the midnight there was quiz and then one more round of telescopic viewing. Then we had presentation sessions with power-point and planetarium software. It ended with last round of telescopic viewing where we saw Jupiter and five of its moons.

Some of us attend one of their sessions previously during winter in november. We saw a bunch of winter constellations at that time. With this session during summer, we covered all the 12 zodiacs in the sky. Unfortunately, clouds played some spoil sport. We couldn't see a hell lot of stars. In summer the night sky is pointed towards the galactic center. So, we should be able to see a lot of stars with the naked eye.

One more reason for me to be happy is that I did some astro-photography. Don't think big, I just took some pictures with my camera. Last time I tried to do this during the winter session, my batteries malfunctioned and I couldn't take any photographs. Now, I took two sets of batteries!. I wanted to take photograph of star trail but clouds spoiled my plan. Here are some pictures of constellations that I captured (Click the pictures for bigger version).

Saptarishi (Ursa Major)

Tula (Libra)

Vrischika (Scorpio)

Dhanu (Saggittarius)

E-Merlin: Super-Telescope

2009-04-22T11:08:00.005+05:30

E-Merlin is the worlds most powerful radio telescope array till date. It is a network of seven radio telescopes in UK, interlinked with optical fiber channels which can carry a bandwidth of 4Ghz. The combined data that will be generated by the network is around 200Gbps. The limitation with the previous systems is that they loose lot of sensitive information when each radio telescope transmit the data to the data center over microwave transmitters. With the optical fiber interlink, very less data is lost. Astronomers quote this development as "moving from a dial-up internet connection to a broadband connection". They will be able to do in one day what would have previously taken them three years.

The technology being developed for this project paves the way for much bigger project called "Square Kilometer Array(SKA)". It is a network of thousands of radio telescopes spread over thousands of kilometers with a collection area of 1 million square meters. It is being planned to be hosted in Australia or South Africa.

There is a nice article from BBC explaining e-Merlin in non-technical terms. If you want a more technical information you should go to e-merlin main page. Time for a related video...

Why a new blog ?

2009-04-11T19:00:00.004+05:30

Astronomy is one of my fascinating subjects. What adds to my interest is the fact that we know very less compared to what we do not know. There is lot to be explored and explained in the filed of astronomy. Ofcourse, it will be a continuing effort for man to understand the intricacies of nature. Once we look far into the skies, it will be daunting to know how insignificant we are. May be we will be like a drop of water in the ocean on earth.

I mostly do not leave a chance to know more about astronomy. I should agree that I know very little about astronomy itself. I never felt that I could write a blog. Recently I decided to build a telescope on my own, right from the optics(mirrors). Now, I think I can write about my experiences during the telescope construction. (I did the same thing when I sat to hack my iphone using the hardware method. It gave birth to my other blog gadgetsandyou). I can share the pitfalls that I fell into and it might help the people facing the same situations.

I will also try to keep this as my astronomy dairy updating about astronomy related events that I am invovled. I should be able to share some of the interesting articles that I come across. As I said earlier, I am a novice in this area. So, my posts will be in plain english without going into too much of technical depth. This should help beginners like me.