Jason Nishiyama @evilscientistca@octodon.social
Teacher, astronomer, political scientist and father.
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.
As an aside a few months after discovering Uranus William Herschel saw the nebulae caused by dying stars and since they reminded him of how Uranus looked, he called them planetary nebulae. We've been stuck with that name ever since even though PN have nothing to do with planets.
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.
The Earth wobbles on its axis, with the axis describing a circle on the celestial sphere about once every 26000 years. One upshot of this is that the pole star slowly changes over time. Right now it's Polaris, in about 8000 years from now it will be Deneb, in 12000 years Vega.
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.
The Moon from last night. RGB image from 11 each R,G, and B images at 1/1000s exposure. 0.2m f3.9 Newtonian telescope.
Open clusters are groups of stars that were formed together in the more recent past. They are just now beginning to spread out into the Galaxy. (M11-Wild Duck cluster shown)
The Sun gets it's energy from hydrogen atoms in its core being forced together to form helium atoms. During the reaction a small amount of the mass is converted into energy.
M78 is a nebula in Orion. It is a reflection nebula, that is we see it because it is reflecting light from some nearby stars. As the gas and dust of the nebula preferentially reflect blue light the nebula appear bluish.
M42 - the Great Nebula in Orion is a large star formation region. It is fairly close, only about 1500 ly away.
The iron in iron meteorites was forged in the cores of massive stars. The meteorite itself is a remnant of the iron core from either a planetesimal or planet that formed in the early solar system that was then destroyed by a collision.
