The Astronomy hobby thread

[Eric Hahl]

More shots from recent nights.

The Flaming Star nebula...



A 3 panel panoramic of the Cygnus area...



The Heart...

[masraum]

Related, and very cool what this kid did.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/this-18-year-old-recreated-the-entire-universe-in-minecraft-180980940/








Below is not the entire text of the article, just excerpts.

This 18-Year-Old Recreated the ‘Entire Universe’ in Minecraft

From the video game’s blocks, he built galaxies, a nebula, a black hole and the solar system

Though the expansiveness of the universe may be daunting to some, 18-year-old Christopher Slayton decided to embrace the vastness rather than be intimidated by it. For nearly two months, he analyzed structures in outer space and recreated the cosmos from the virtual cubes that make up the video game world of Minecraft.

Slayton, who graduated high school in the spring, researched black holes, assessed the various hues of Saturn’s rings and looked at images of Earth to build the universe—block by block—on his computer, reports April Rubin for the New York Times.

The teenager documented the project on his YouTube channel, where he goes by the username Chris DaCow, and shared the building process on a viral Reddit thread.

After all the effort to re-create the universe, “I realized even more how beautiful it is,” Slayton tells the Times.

or the sun, Slayton used the “brightest blocks in Minecraft” and even included solar flares to make the star “feel alive with fire,” he says in the video. As he moved on to creating a cluster of galaxies, he hiked to the top of a mountain with a friend and set up a telescope in an attempt to observe the real-world collections of stars, gas, dust and planets that he sought to replicate.

“We were surrounded by the cosmos, millions of stars right before our eyes,” Slayton says in the video.

[Eric Hahl]

Going to be few and far between for new astro shots from me. We had lots of hazy skies from forest fires recently and now the rain has started. Probably will only see maybe 10 clear nights for the next 8 months here in the Pacific NorthWET.

[flatbutt]

Time for me to start on the permanent pier.

[Eric Hahl]

Originally Posted by flatbutt

Time for me to start on the permanent pier.

Nice!

[flatbutt]

I was out viewing my favorite object Orion when I saw what looked like a trio of lights staying rather stationary. After some cogitation I thought" ah! geo-stationary sats". So I hit cloudy nights and found this. What a mess.

https://www.cloudynights.com/index.php?app=core&module=attach&section=attach&attach_rel_module=post&attach_id=2193363

[flatbutt]

[Pazuzu]

Originally Posted by flatbutt

I was out viewing my favorite object Orion when I saw what looked like a trio of lights staying rather stationary. After some cogitation I thought" ah! geo-stationary sats". So I hit cloudy nights and found this. What a mess.

https://www.cloudynights.com/index.php?app=core&module=attach&section=attach&attach_rel_module=post&attach_id=2193363

Unfortunately that link only sends us to the picture. What is the story, is that Starlink?

[masraum]

Originally Posted by Pazuzu

Unfortunately that link only sends us to the picture. What is the story, is that Starlink?

Nah, not starlink. Starlink are LEO satellites. What FB saw and then discovered is that there are a TON of geostationary satellites that ring the equator. He didn't realize quite how popular (and limited) the GEO orbit is which means that it's really packed with satellites.

[dewolf]

Originally Posted by masraum

M51! Love it.

https://science.nasa.gov/tadpole-galaxy-hubble


It's amazing to me, that this picture of a galaxy has so many other random galaxies in the background. The extent of the universe is mind bogling.

What is even more mind numbing is that one day, it will all be dark. The last star will eventually stop burning.

[doug_porsche]

repeating what you already know...

https://www.space.com/comet-c2022-e3-ztf-visible-naked-eye-january-2023

A comet not seen in 50,000 years is coming. Here's what you need to know
By Joe Rao published 1 day ago
This may very well be the last time that C/2022 E3 comes our way again.

[masraum]

Originally Posted by doug_porsche

repeating what you already know...

https://www.space.com/comet-c2022-e3-ztf-visible-naked-eye-january-2023

A comet not seen in 50,000 years is coming. Here's what you need to know
By Joe Rao published 1 day ago
This may very well be the last time that C/2022 E3 comes our way again.

Very cool, fingers crossed.

I wish I'd been more engaged when Hale Bopp came to visit in 1997. I did see it, but didn't really take the time to really observe it. I remember it being spectacular even in my heavily light polluted area.

[masraum]

I debated where to put this, but I ultimately decided this would be a better spot than the random pics thread. We may appreciate it more, but it'll probably get fewer views.

This amazing shot, captured by Joshua Rozells, is a composite stack of 343 photos blended together.
The author says: “In late January, I went out to the Pinnacles, Western Australia, to shoot a star trail. Upon reviewing my photos, I noticed an unusually large number of satellites in my photos; there were satellite trails visible in almost every single photo from over 3 hours of shooting. Instead of trying to get rid of them for a star trail, I decided to put the satellite trails together into a single image to show how polluted the night sky is becoming.”
Image Credit: Joshua Rozells (Instagram: @joshua_rozells)

[Eric Hahl]

Cool shot!

[flatbutt]

Originally Posted by masraum

I debated where to put this, but I ultimately decided this would be a better spot than the random pics thread. We may appreciate it more, but it'll probably get fewer views.

wow fortunately there are tools that imagers can use to remove those trails. You probably don't get all that many in a three hour exposure but Eric would know better.

[Eric Hahl]

About every third frame of mine has a streak in it but never in the same place. The software calls them outliers and removes them.

The software compares the frames and removes the streaks of satellites, meteors, airplanes, etc.

Its super easy and takes no work on my part.

[masraum]

This is interesting.
https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/the-james-webb-space-telescope-is-finding-too-many-early-galaxies/

Images and spectra from the James Webb Space Telescope suggest that the first galaxies in the universe are too many or too bright compared to what astronomers expected.

Evidence is building that the first galaxies formed earlier than expected, astronomers announced at the 241st meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, Washington.

As the James Webb Space Telescope views swaths of sky spotted with distant galaxies, multiple teams have found that the earliest stellar metropolises are more mature and more numerous than expected. The results may end up changing what we know about how the first galaxies formed.

Speaking as part of the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) collaboration, Jeyhan Kartaltepe (Rochester Institute of Technology) reported Webb’s views of galaxies when the universe was between 500 million years and 2 billion years old.


This image — a mosaic of 690 individual frames taken with Webb's Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) — covers a patch of sky near the handle of the Big Dipper. This is one of the first images obtained by the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Survey (CEERS) collaboration and contains several examples of high-redshift galaxies with various morphologies, including a surprisingly high fraction of disks.

Previous studies, such as those done using the Hubble Space Telescope, had suggested that as we look back toward a younger universe, the stable rotating disks of today give way to more chaotic shapes, representative of the violent mergers that built up the first galaxies. Then again, those previous studies also had a hard time classifying the most distant ones, which looked like little more than smudges. That’s where the Webb telescope comes in.

The longer wavelengths Webb detects enable it to see farther back in time. Webb’s images are also sharper than Hubble’s, and its sensitivity greater. The CEERS group has used the new data (both images and spectra) to find 850 early galaxies, measure the distance to each one, and then tag its shape as “disk,” “spheroid,” or “irregular.”

Those classifications were not mutually exclusive. “Galaxies are complex, and they don’t necessarily fall into just one box,” Kartaltepe says. Some galaxies, for example, have both a disk and a central bulge, much like the Milky Way.

In the future, such classifications will probably be left to computers; Kartaltepe’s student, Caitlin Rose (also at RIT) is already working on convolutional neural networks and other computational methods that will eventually take over. But in the meantime, the job is still very much human: Three CEERS team members examined each of the 850 galaxies to make the classifications.

Despite their youth, the galaxies had shapes similar to those nearer to us. The percentage of disk galaxies declined only slightly in the early universe, while the fraction of those with a central bulge and those with an irregular shape stayed roughly constant over cosmological time.

ince disks are thought to form only in serene environments, in which stars can settle into a spinning skirt instead of being thrown about, their prevalence in a universe only a few percent of its current age is a bit like seeing teens when expecting toddlers. “We're not surprised to see disk galaxies,” Kartaltepe clarifies. “I think the surprise is to see so many of them. . . . We're really not seeing the earliest stages of galaxy formation yet.”

At the same time, she notes that yesterday’s disks are different than modern ones. “They’re not today's Milky Way,” she notes. “They're turbulent, they're messy, and we need to study them more.”
An Embarrassment of Distant Galaxies

Speaking at the same AAS press conference, Haojing Yan (University of Missouri) reported on galaxies even earlier in cosmic history. Using Webb images at multiple wavelengths, Yan found 87 distant galaxies behind the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723, their light magnified and distorted by the cluster’s gravity. The galaxies appear to date to between 200 million and 400 million years after the Big Bang (corresponding to a redshift as great as 20, in astronomer-speak).

These candidates await spectroscopic confirmation: Their redshifts are only estimates for now. But so far, spectroscopic confirmations of other galaxies have confirmed the vast majority of preliminary distances. Even if only half of Yan’s selection turn out to be nearby galaxies masquerading as distant ones, the latter number would still be unexpectedly large. “Our previously favored picture of galaxy formation in the early universe must be revised,” he says.

One of the theorists tackling this problem is Jordan Mirocha (Jet Propulsion Laboratory), who presented later in the day. “There's either an overabundance of galaxies, or they're much brighter than our typical models predict,” Mirocha says. He argues that multiple, interrelated factors are at work in throwing off predictions.

The first galaxies formed in still-growing dark matter halos, with ordinary hydrogen gas following the gravitational pull of the amassing dark matter particles. That inflow of matter, Mirocha suggests, might have stymied the stellar feedback that slows star formation in present-day galaxies. Yet even as the furious formation of new stars would cause early galaxies to appear bright, it would also generate dust, which in turn dims the galaxies.

Balancing all these different factors will be key to understanding how the first galaxies formed. Mirocha puts it mildly: “I think we have more to think about.”

[flatbutt]

The path of comet 2022 E3 ztf

[Cajundaddy]

Jan 21-27 should be good for comet viewing as the moon is young and sets early. As we head into Feb the comet should brighten but may get washed out by the waxing moon. Jan 28 is 1st quarter moon and after this the sky may be too bright for comet viewing.

We are in luck here in ID as the skies are clearing this week after nearly a month of clouds. Maybe a good green comet photo op.

[flatbutt]

We've been socked in most nights. I'm ready to sacrifice a goat to the gods of weather.