Category Archives: Astronomy

My God, it’s full of stars!

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Artimis Stage Separation

Yesterday, after months of delay Artemis II finally launched to the moon. It will not land on but circle the moon, much like Apollo 8 did almost sixty years ago. This back to the future (or is it the past?) flight occurs against a backdrop of our latest so-called Mission Accomplished war against Iran and closer to home, there are the problems with Anne’s iPhone.

She has been complaining for days about problems with her phone. I have offered to help but have been rebuffed. Lately, though they seem to have multiplied. New problems include Google not being able to access the microphone and the calendar app not being able to add new events. When she tries, she gets an error message saying, “Calendar does not have permission to access your calendar.” I googled these errors and found online solutions.

Equipped with this advice I was able to convince Anne to allow me to assist her. Unfortunately, none of the menu trees called out by Google’s AI matched what was available on the phone. With mounting frustration, I tried calling the Apple Genius Bar to make an appointment. All I got was a lot of run around, but eventually in lieu of an appointment, their AI suggested that we reboot the phone. We did this and voilà! Like magic everything was working again.

I guess it was my bedside manner or lack thereof, but Anne was not happy with me. Words were had and at that point I wisely baled. Returning later, ruffled feathers were smoothed and peace reined over the land. Well, at least here.

iPhone Astrophotography

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Jet Streaks and Star Trails

Last night I did some stargazing and used my iPhone to take pictures of the night sky. It was a clear night, and it is only a couple of days past the new moon, so conditions were pretty good. In preparation for a night such as this I had purchased a combination selfie stick and tripod. Using it as a tripod, I could take long exposures like the one pictured here. I ran this one for about twenty minutes, long enough to see the rotation of the stars as they circle around the north pole. You can plainly see where the pole is at the center of all these arcs. At first, I thought that the straight lines that crisscross the image were satellites, but then I figured out that they must be jets. There are two tells. In the lower left corner, there are several lines that are dotted. That must be caused by the plane’s blinking lights. Most puzzling though were the hooks at the lower end of the main lines that pass nearest to the pole. For a while, I thought that these lines were caused by orbiting satellites, but the artifact of the hooked lines puzzled me. Then I figured that the hooks were from when the aircraft turned, as they lined up on either San Francisco or LA.

Later, when we were getting ready for bed, we looked to the west, out of our bedroom window and saw Orion, then Tarus with its Pleiades and Jupiter too. The sky was very dark by then. Looking through binoculars, I could see the moons of Jupiter and Orion’s nebula. The low relative humidity out west here makes the stars look so clear. It was cold by then, but the spring peepers were out croaking. In conditions permit, maybe I can do this again tonight.

Transit of Venus

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Wayback on June 5, 2012, I observed the last to occur transit of Venus, an astronomical event where Venus passes between the Earth and the Sun. It happened on a Tuesday, but not until after five, so I was already home from work. I had time to setup a telescope on the sidewalk and project the above image onto a piece of paper. Holding the paper in one hand, I snapped the photo with my other. Due of the planetary geometry this event was much easier to see than a total eclipse of the Moon. Because to the relative tilts of the orbits of Earth and Venus, these events occur in pairs, eight years apart, about once a century. Sometime later, we attended a U-City quilt show, where the pictured quilt was on display. It more dynamically captures this event than I was able to. 

Edwin Powell Hubble Stamps

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Edwin Powell Hubble Stamps

The Hubble Space Telescope, launched in April 1990, was named by NASA in honor of astronomer Dr. Edwin Powell Hubble (1889-1953). Hubble determined that galaxies (very large groups of stars and associated matter) exist outside of and are receding from the Milky Way. His work demonstrated that the universe is expanding. The Hubble Space Telescope has taken hundreds of thousands of images of astronomical objects, including the four nebulae (interstellar clouds of gas and dust) and one galaxy shown on these stamps. 

  • Eagle Nebula – NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope captured the beauty of a dramatic region of star formation This stellar nursery, known as the Eagle Nebula, features pillars of dust and gas that act as cocoons for young stars.
  • Ring Nebula – The Hubble Space Telescope peered at the Ring Nebula, a barrel of gas cast off by a dying star similar to our sun. The barrel, formed over thousands of years at the end of the star’s life, appears as a ring
  • Lagoon Nebula – Hubble imaged an eerie cradle of star formation called the Lagoon Nebula. The giant clouds of dusty gas may have been shaped by high-speed interstellar winds created in the clouds by new stars.
  • Egg Nebula – Hubble provided this view of the last gasps of the sun-like star in the Egg Nebula. The intriguing “searchlight” beams are emerging from the dying star, hidden behind the dark central dust band.
  • Galaxy NGC 1316 – Hubble captured the aftermath of an ancient collision between two galaxies. The remains of the small galaxy appear as dark clumps against the glowing core of the large galaxy, known as NGC 1316.

When my father was a boy, he used to collect stamps. I remember finding his childhood stamp albums, one domestic and the other foreign. The foreign album I always found the most fascinating of the two. Each country had its own page(s). He collected stamps in the 1930s, so Germany’s stamps were all full of swastikas and because of its inflation at that time there were a lot of them. I guess it took a lot more of their stamps to mail a letter than most other countries did. My brother “inherited” those collections. This summer, while sifting through my dad’s stuff, I discovered that he had renewed his love of philately. Aided by the postal service’s desire for revenue by selling more stamps, he had collected quite a few commemorative sheets of stamps. These one-sheet collections are too pretty to use for postage, so I guess that I will just keep them.