Jason Nishiyama @evilscientistca@octodon.social
Teacher, astronomer, political scientist and father.
From astronomy outreach last night, the Baker-Nunn telescope.
The Moon from last night. This was made from a mosaic of images from a Meade LPI webcam-type imager. The image processing for this was rather involved.
Betelgeuse is the brightest star in Orion and is seen as the reddish star near the top centre of Orion in this image. It is a red supergiant star near the end of it's life and if it replaced our Sun would extend past the asteroid belt. It will die as a supernova.
Stars that are fusing hydrogen into helium fall along the line that goes from upper left to bottom right on the HR Diagram. This is known as the main sequence. Once the hydrogen in their core is spent, stars evolve up and to the right of the diagram.
From last night. The open cluster M67.
Last night's Moon.
Stephan's Quintet is a cluster of 4 galaxies with a fifth galaxy closer and in the line of sight. It is one of the first compact galaxy groups discovered.
Galaxies form clusters. This image shows part of the Virgo cluster. Close examination shows several galaxies.
Another Rothney Astrophysical Observatory Baker-Nunn shot. This time of M31- The Andromeda galaxy. M31 is the closest large galaxy to our Galaxy that basically looks like our Galaxy. A mere 2 million light years away, M31 will collide with our Galaxy in about 4-5 billion years.
What's nice about the 0.5m Baker-Nunn telescope at the Rothney Astrophysical Observatory is that it's a wide field telescope, images about 4 degrees on a side.
This particular image is interesting since the BN was never designed for colour work. This was done using theatrical gels over the aperture.
This Planck image of the microwave background radiation shows what the universe looked like about 380000 years after the Big Bang. This is as far back as we can look as prior to this point the universe was too hot for photons to move around.
M34 is an open cluster in the constellation of Perseus. As an open cluster it is a group of young stars starting to drift into the Galaxy.
The planet Uranus was the first discovered by telescope. It was discovered in 1781 by William Herschel.
This is the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. With the exception of 3-4 foreground stars every object you see in this image is a galaxy.
M57 - The Ring Nebula - is one of only 4 planetary nebulae on Messier's famous list.
Sun spot number is often used as a proxy for solar energy output as the Sun’s output tracks the SSN reasonably well.
Sunspots are cooler areas on the Sun's surface where the Sun's magnetic field becomes twisted. Sunspots occur in 11 year cycles and are an indicator of solar activity.
The Sun. The dot is the Earth to scale.
Now the Moon looks a bit monochrome, shades of grey, however if you exaggerate the colour in Photoshop you can see that different regions have different colours.
