Very Large Telescope, Very Stunning Time Lapse Video

 From:
Oh, what the heck. After posting the video earlier showing the Earth rotating around the sky, I might as well show you the original video, since it really is so beautiful. This time lapse shows the sky spinning over the Very Large Telescope observatory in Chile, one of the finest observatories in one of the darkest sites on the planet.

[Set the resolution to 720p to see it properly unenpixelated.]

A couple of things I want to point out: at 1:10 into the video, you see the Milky Way rising majestically over the mountains, and you can see a faint, whitish glow stretching diagonally across the field of view, at an angle to the galaxy. That’s called the zodiacal light, and is caused by the reflection of sunlight by dust in the plane of our solar system. It’s probably due to eons of collisions grinding asteroids into dust; they tend to orbit the Sun in the same plane as the planets. It’s actually a disk of dust, but since we’re in it, we see it as a line across the sky. It’s pretty faint, and you need dark skies to spot it.

I also love the shots of the observatories shooting orange lasers out their domes (here’s a gorgeous hi-res photo of it). They’re fending off attacks by the Goa’uld, Ori, and Wraith using those to help counteract atmospheric distortion; the laser hits a layer of sodium atoms high in the atmosphere and causes them to glow. This creates a bright artificial star in the telescope’s view, which jiggles and wiggles as the atmosphere roils. The way the "star" moves can be counteracted by the telescope, sharpening up the image it makes. This tech, called adaptive optics, has revolutionized high-resolution ground-based astronomy. It has also given the VLT the ability to make incredibly sharp and gorgeous images; see for yourself.

Don’t forget to watch the companion video to this, too. It’ll change your perspective. Literally.
Video credit: Stéphane Guisard and Jose Francisco Salgado/ESO.

'Supermoon' Photos from Around the World: March 19, 2011

by Tariq Malik,
Managing Editor
from: SPACE.com

Click here for the Full GALLERY: http://www.space.com/11178-supermoon-photos-2011-skywatcher-images.html

Washington MoonriseCredit: Tim McCord

Skywatcher Tim McCord of Entiat, Washington caught this amazing view of the March 19, 2011 full moon - called a supermoon because the moon was at perigee, the closest point to Earth in its orbit - using a camera-equipped telescope.

Info about Perigee Moon: http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/03/18/nasa.moon/index.html?hpt=C2

Click here for this Amazing 25 Full Gallery of the SUPERMOON

Seriously jaw-dropping picture of the Sun

Need your slice of awesome today? Then check out this truly astonishing picture of a detached prominence off the limb of the Sun:



Holy wow! Click to ensolarnate. And I mean it: you want to see the bigger version of this.

This picture was taken by Alan Friedman, who is no stranger to this blog: his picture of the boiling Sun last year was hugely popular, and so amazing I featured it as one of my top pictures of 2010.

And with this he’s done it again… and maybe even topped it.

Alan used a filter that lets through only a very narrow wavelength of light emitted by hydrogen (called Hα for those of you keeping track at home), so this tracks the activity of gas on the solar surface. He also inverts the image of the solar disk (makes it a negative) to increase contrast. Somehow this adds a three-dimensional quality to the picture, and reveals an amazing amount of texture. I swear I had a rug in my bedroom growing up that was this texture (though somewhat cooler and less burny).

The scene-stealer is that detached prominence off to the left. That’s the leftover material ejected from the Sun by an erupting sunspot (you can see other sunspots in the picture as well). The gas is ionized — a plasma — and so it’s affected by magnetic fields. The material follows the magnetic field of the Sun in the explosion, lifting it off the surface and into space. Sometimes it falls back, and sometimes it leaves the Sun entirely. In this case, Alan caught some of the material at what looks like the top of its trajectory.

The beauty of this picture belies its violence and sheer magnitude: the mass of material in a prominence can easily top 10 billion tons! As for size, see that dark elongated sunspot near the base of the prominence, just to the right of the bigger, speckly one? That spot is roughly twice the size of the Earth.

Yegads.

Making this even more amazing, these images are taken with a 90mm telescope — that’s a lens not even 4 inches across! Superior optics, a good mount, and a steady hand can do wonders.

You really need to go and see the rest of Alan’s photography at his site, Averted Imagination. His photos of the skies are surpassingly beautiful.

NASA and Microsoft Let You Explore Mars Like Never Before

By: Stan Schroeder
From: http://mashable.com/

Microsoft Research and NASA have teamed up once again and brought the “most complete, highest-resolution coverage of Mars available” to WorldWide Telescope. Microsoft’s app lets you explore space either through a zoom-and-pan interface or guided tours.

This imagery is the handiwork of a group informally called the Mapmakers, led by NASA’s Michael Broxton. Their job is to take satellite images from Mars and elsewhere in our solar system, and turn them into maps.

Yes, it sounds like every geek’s dream job, and having a name that sounds like something from a William Gibson novel doesn’t hurt, either. Director of Microsoft Research’s Earth Dan Fay has worked with Broxton to turn these images and maps into an immersive new experience for the Worldwide Telescope.

“NASA had the images and they were open to new ways to share them. Through the WorldWide Telescope we were able to build a user interface at WWT|Mars that would allow people to take advantage of the great content they had,” Fay says.

As far as what kind of imagery you can expect here, one example is a new dataset from the University of Arizona’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE), which is a remote-sensing camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. These images are taken in an incredibly high resolution — each image is a gigapixel in size — and the team took all 13,000 HiRISE images and stitched them onto one map. This map, says NASA, is the “highest-resolution map of Mars’s surface ever constructed.”

WorldWide Telescope is available as a desktop application or a web client (which requires Microsoft Silverlight) over at www.worldwidetelescope.org.

E-Merlin "Super-Telescope" Switched On

By Rebecca Morelle
Science reporter, BBC News

The Lovell telescope at Jodrell Bank dominates the Cheshire landscape

The first stage of the switch-on of one of the world's most powerful stargazing systems has got under way.

Seven radio telescopes around the UK have been linked with optical fibres, allowing scientists to probe deeper into the Universe than ever before.

The new data-link upgrade has replaced the older microwave technology that once connected the telescopes.

Tim O'Brien, from the e-Merlin project, said: "It will be a revolution in terms of what we can do with our astronomy."

Astronomers at Jodrell Bank say that the e-Merlin array will be fully operational later this year.

Radio telescopes work by collecting radio waves emitted from objects many light-years away, allowing scientists to look deep into the cosmos.

But a single telescope - even one as huge as the 76m-wide Lovell telescope at Jodrell Bank in Cheshire, where e-Merlin's headquarters is based - is limited in terms of what it can see.

So astronomers combine the power of several telescopes spread over a wide area, in essence creating the effect of a giant "superscope".

For the last 20 years, seven telescopes that are spread across UK have been joined together in this way to form an array.

However, the older microwave technology that once connected them was only able to return a fraction of the data that was being recorded.

Dr O'Brien, who is head of outreach at Jodrell Bank and a senior lecturer in astrophysics at the University of Manchester, told BBC News: "It's like using a very narrow pipe to transfer information - and in fact, with microwaves, most of the signal we pick up at the radio telescopes never makes it back to Jodrell Bank."

It is like moving from a dial-up connection on the internet to a broadband one Dr Tim O'Brien

Over the past six years, a huge project has been underway to swap the older microwave links for hundreds of kilometres of optical fibre cables, which are buried beneath the ground.

These thin "pipes" can carry reams of data, and scientists believe they will give the e-Merlin telescope array a new hi-tech lease of life.

Dr O'Brien explained: "It is like moving from a dial-up connection on the internet to a broadband one.

This telescope in Cambridge forms part of the e-Merlin array

"It means we will now be able to get all of the signal back from the telescopes. We'll be able to do in one day what would have previously taken us three years to do."

This extra data will allow astronomers to see objects in the Universe in much finer detail than was previously possible, and it will also enable them to study parts of the cosmos that have never been seen before.

Professor Simon Garrington, director of the e-Merlin project, said: "This combination of a boost in resolution and sensitivity will allow a whole community of scientists in the UK and around the world to address some of the key questions in astronomy today.

"These questions cover the whole range of astronomy, from the formation of Earth-like planets to the physics that governs how stars of different types are formed."

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Sir Bernard Lovell on building his iconic telescope

In 2007, the iconic Lovell telescope at the Jodrell Bank Observatory, which forms a key part of the e-Merlin array, celebrated its 50th anniversary.

Sir Bernard Lovell, who founded Jodrell Bank, told the BBC that the longevity of the observatory and the string of discoveries it has led to has continued to surprise.

He said: "It is astonishing that despite all the new developments and all the new instruments that have been designed, the Jodrell telescope still has such an important use."

Funding struggles

The road to getting the e-Merlin project up and running has not been problem free.

Last year, e-Merlin, along with a number of other high-profile physics and astronomy projects, were put at risk thanks to an £80m shortfall in science funding.

However, it was given a last-minute reprieve after the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) agreed to continue funding it.

e-Merlin is a forerunner for the Square Kilometre Array

In the coming years, Jodrell Bank is set to become the headquarters to an even bigger project.

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA), which will be based in either Australia or South Africa, will link thousands of telescopes spread over thousands of kilometres, creating a system 50-times more powerful than anything we have now.

Scientists say the technology developed for the e-Merlin array will be key for developing the SKA.

The e-Merlin project has been funded by the STFC, Northwest Regional Development Agency, the University of Manchester, the University of Cambridge and Liverpool John Moores University.