Astronomy Picture of the Day is something that should be on your weekly routine, at least – it often features some pretty stunning images. Today’s (or I guess I should say, the image for Monday March 16th, since it’s late and this will probably post early Tuesday morning) is especially cool, and gains additional interest when coupled with a few other details.
Category: Astronomy
Monday color 4
For this week’s Monday color, we hearken back (not to be confused with harkening back) to 1991 I believe, during a training seminar for animal cruelty investigation being held in Nashville, Tennessee. I had some free time in the evening and was wandering around the downtown area when the sky was suffused with some very rich hues at sunset. Spotting the crescent moon in the sky, I quickly lined
Thar she glows
That was terrible, I admit it…
As comet C/2014 Q2 Lovejoy has been getting brighter, we’ve had zero visibility here, until tonight. I went out and did some searching with binoculars, finally locating it, then brought the camera equipment out to give it a shot.
Measuring sticks
I like perspective. Not just the kind used in photography, but the kind that changes the way we think about something. It’s very interesting sometimes, in that there are bare facts, and then there’s the way we feel about them, how we classify the information and relate to it. It comes up quite a bit in the spirited (read: vehement) discussions of free will which, whether
Gently, gently
I had a student yesterday (which I’ll talk about more in a later post,) which meant that I wasn’t glued to my computer watching what was going in with Philae. Philae, as you no doubt recall from an earlier post, is the lander portion of the Rosetta spacecraft, itself riding shotgun
Natural filters
I was aware of the impending partial solar eclipse, and even dug out some materials that might potentially assist in getting images, but failed miserably, on two fronts. The first was, what I had to help cut the glaring light from the sun down a manageable level for photos would only work if the light was already reduced, for instance by thin clouds or late in the day with a heavy
Too cool, part 26: You’re getting warmer
On the Astronomy Picture of the Day site for October 16, we get to see a stunning image (cropped version above) that’s unique in many ways. The Rosetta spacecraft
Oh, now he sends it!
One (or perhaps eight) more from Jim, showing the progression of the eclipse, with two curious traits.
These were taken with a fixed camera, shooting with a wider field of view than the images from the earlier post. An intervalometer was used to snap a frame every 150 seconds, and the resulting eight frames were stacked
Had my back
I was aware of the total lunar eclipse scheduled to appear last night/this morning (there’s that stupid “it changed day in the middle of the night” thing again,) but after a week of clear and accommodating weather, the front pushed in yesterday and we received solid, low overcast skies, meaning the only thing I could see was how many places nearby waste electricity by throwing
Missed it by that much
There are a few minor photo challenges that remain in the back of my head, waiting for the right opportunity to tackle them – some of them are inconsequential, hardly anything to catapult me onto the pages of National Geographic or even The Daily Mail. This is one of them.
I mentioned before that I’ve