produced by Brian Lynch by combining the thumbnail images from Curiosity’s Mars Descent Imager (MARDI) with the audio from the control room during landing night and a detailed timeline from Patrick Blau’s spaceflight101.com.
via Video, sound, and timeline of Curiosity's descent | The Planetary Society.
“Well, this was a nice surprise. The MARDI images from Curiosity’s descent to Mars were posted to the Curiosity raw images website several hours ago, but I didn’t notice until someone on unmannedspaceflight.com pointed out that among the nearly 300 thumbnail frames (200 by 150 pixels) there was a single full-resolution image, and it contained the heat shield far below the rover. So cool. It is still mind-blowing to think that this snapshot was taken by a spacecraft flying in the air above a different planet.”
First full-resolution MARDI frame: Bye-bye, heat shield | The Planetary Society.
My name in galaxies:
thanks to steven “the bamf” bamford at the university of nottingham, you can now write words with real images of galaxies from the galaxy zooproject! check it out…
via astropixie.
there are between 580 and 778 planets known, as of june 2012, that orbit around stars other than our sun. xkcd has cleverly shown them all to scale in this beautiful graphic.
via astropixie.
Expedition 31 Flight Engineer Don Pettit relayed some information about photographic techniques used to achieve the images: “My star trail images are made by taking a time exposure of about 10 to 15 minutes. However, with modern digital cameras, 30 seconds is about the longest exposure possible, due to electronic detector noise effectively snowing out the image. To achieve the longer exposures I do what many amateur astronomers do. I take multiple 30-second exposures, then ‘stack’ them using imaging software, thus producing the longer exposure.”
Click to access and enlarge PDF version of map showing visibility of 2012 transit of Venus. Courtesy of Fred Espenak (NASA GSFC), who provides additional transit of Venus data from NASA.
copyright nasa
Venus Transit @ 6pm June 5th
Video by NASA
Click to access and enlarge PDF version of map showing visibility of 2012 transit of Venus. Courtesy of Fred Espenak (NASA GSFC), who provides additional transit of Venus data from NASA.
copyright nasa
The SpaceX Dragon spacecraft successfully berthed with the International Space Station this morning after a long overnight approach including several unplanned maneuvers. The crew at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, concluded a long night of flight demonstrations and troubleshooting by watching astronaut Don Pettit control the station’s robotic arm and grapple the Dragon at 6:56 a.m. PDT.
ISS Welcomes SpaceX Dragon — First Private Spacecraft at Station | Autopia | Wired.com.
SpaceX Falcon9 launch
SpaceX launches Falcon 9/Dragon on historic mission – Astronomy Magazine.
From my Internet “friend” and astronomer, Amanda.
if you are in asia or north america, check the map below to see if you can witness the annular solar eclipse this sunday, may 20th!
if you are not along the path of visibility, there are several options to watch online: click HERE!
via astropixie.
Everything seemed OK this morning until I got a call from Nicki that the car battery won’t start the car even with the charger, I think I messed up the cable when I replaced it and since I didn’t re-test before finishing it up it’s my fault. Told her to just take Brian’s truck and be careful. Called Brian to let him know and ask forgiveness and he told me we had left the garage door open last night, I should be more careful, just forgot about it when we came in after messing with the car.
tiny gulf fritillary
Went out and got a few photos before it got bad or began to rain, stayed close in, checking on the Viceroy larva that are on a willow branch. The willow tree-bush is really small and looks as if it had been cut down more than once. Since it is close to a colvert I figure it may not continue to thrive in this area. There are at least 4 larvae, one large and three smaller ones. The Big Creek is getting smaller by the day, went down to the edge by the bridge that connects the greenway to our office building area and got a few photos of what I think are either small wolf spiders, grass spiders and some sort of jumping bug that looks like a crab.
Home and Nicki’s car is still BAD, I charged the battery again, it started and then about 2 hours later off the charger it wouldn’t start. Nicki walked to the store, didn’t even bitch about it so I told her we would get a battery after work tomorrow. I’m a sucker I know.
Watched True Blood, still weird. Then messed with some photos and made some zucchini for dinner.
Got to work this morning, going through my e-mail on the iPhone an noticed my Federal tax return has hit the bank. Now to pay off some credit cards and my car. I also think I’ll be investing into a new computer with Windows 7. Need to step up to a 64 bit operating system at home.
Got the Girl Scout cookies I ordered last month, immediately ate a half a box of Lemon Cremes.
Ordered my tickets to the Brew Your Cask Off Festival next weekend. I’ve missed the other beerfest activities so far this year and since I hadn’t gotten to the one last year (the first?) I decided I would make it to this one. I said tickets but I mean ticket (1), I have bought an extra in the past but who am I kidding here? I’ll buy that second ticket when I know I have someone who wants to accompany me from now on.
Came home and then cooked some dinner, pasta and clam sauce, with garlic.
Off to trivia and won 3rd, the regular gang, Kayla, LaurenDe, Kimberly, and Andge were about. Also the very quiet JessicaK and the very HOT brunette (tall- Chelsea – who’s mom tried to get a job @ Hooters as well) with the half shirt. They’ve had 420 since yesterday, wonderful.
Set up the camera just before I took off for trivia, had over 1000 photos waiting on the card when I brought the camera in. Mostly cloudy all evening so not many stars in the timelapse but it still may make a cool video we’ll just have to see. Downloading as I type and now to bed.
After stopping in at the T-Mac of Suwanee and having a BOTM, Terrapin Pumpkinfest, and stopping in at the Fresh Market for some groceries and some sushi I began setting up for more weak astrophotography.
I got the scope setup rather quickly this time, but I spent more time than usual doing the alignment. The Polar Alignment went rather quickly (not doing drift alignment due to time) I was having trouble using the 12.5mm illuminated eyepiece since it had too much magnification.
The next issue I had was focusing. I continued to only be able to focus manually (without the use of the cover Brian had). He told me I would have to use photos to focus due to the limited light in the camera’s viewfinder, I’ll try it again tomorrow.
Took quick shots of M31 again a larger series, then M52, M27, M56, M71 and finally M57. Tried to do M20 and M92 but they were behind the house and trees toward the west and south.
Need to try them earlier in the evening tomorrow and use the light pollution filter as well.
This little black rat snake was just hanging around in the Big Creek Greenway, amazing that I saw him at all.
Got home and cooked up some pasta with red clam sauce, took a little creative liberty with this and added more capers (finished off the small jar) and then added heavy cream instead of the wine (needed to use up the heavy cream). Tasted really good.
Watched some of the Caprica pilot and then began setting up the CG-5 Equatorial Mount for viewing/ imaging tonight.
The neighbors received a new (old) Jag via very large car carrier. Talked with Patty and her oldest daughter, not Clair but … damn forget her name now. She will be getting the old car now they have a new one. The Jag will be needing some work before it’s drivable from what I saw (may be a totaled car but looked in good condition)
Finally it got dark enough to see Polaris and I tried with a lot of trouble to finally get the mount somewhat polar aligned. Didn’t bother doing a precise alignment since I wasn’t all that worried about it. I was trying to get some shots of the comet Hartley (103P) but didn’t end up getting anything that I thought was it. Instead I imaged quickly a few of the Messier objects in the sky I could see.
namely: M39, M33, M34, M15, M76, M31, M30, M2, M73, M72, M75, M11 and M103
The comet Hartley (103P) is becoming more visible and should almost be naked eye a bit later this month. I’m going to try to capture a shot of it with the camera tonight. Maybe with the 120-300mm lens and high ISO on the D700. I should also put up the CG-3 mount and possibly the Vixen 100mm.
Took a bunch of photos put them together with the Lightroom Slideshow function in LR3 beta
Photos taken for 1sec every 10 seconds using 28mm at f/4
My brother had to go into work this morning due to some meeting that came up over the weekend. Seems they are cutting costs by laying off a bunch of folks. This particularly sucks for my brother since he has worked for the company for over 9 years and had all kinds of stock options and has bent over backwards to hopefully help the company go public, even so far as getting pay-cuts and no raises for most of his tenure. They didn’t give him a bad severance package though, not quite a golden parachute but an OK package.
I was suppose to go to dinner with BeckyT, but as is often the case she bailed the day of due to some stuff with her dog and her ex picking up his cat. I kind of figured it might go this way so I’m not particularly surprised or disappointed, although I was looking forward to some sushi.
Instead, I took out the camera and telescope, setting up the camera for a star trail shot out front and the telescope to play with drift alignment. The temperature and humidity made for a very dewy time. The scope was almost dripping and the camera lens was fogging up. Got the hair dryer out to help with the camera but the telescope lens seemed fine since it is covered. Here is the results of the over 2 hour capture of star trails.
Didn’t know where to put this so I placed it here so I could use it later.
A great tutorial video explaining it www.andysshotglass.com/DriftAlignment.html
