A Darker View

For four years Darker View has run on a software package called Serendipity.

No longer.

I am switching to Wordpress. It will be painful, It will be ugly, but it will happen. As of midnight, the very end of 2011, it will be live. Bear with me as I fix all of the little issues.

Those of you who use the old RSS feed will need to switch to the new feed. The old blog and the material in it will continue to be available. All new posts will be on the Wordpress platform.

Welcome to 2012!

Regular readers should be getting tired of seeing photos of these guys. More than a few of them have been posted here. But here I go again... I just could not help myself... He is so cute!!

I do not usually write about the dwarf planet Pluto, not only is is difficult to find, but even more difficult to confirm when you do have it in the eyepiece. It is usually a dim 14th magnitude star lost amongst many other dim stars. Confirming its identity is often a frustrating exercise with good charts of an area or waiting a few days to see it move. I have seen Pluto visually in the eyepiece... once.

For the first few decades of the 21st century the exercise becomes even more difficult as the distant Pluto moves through the Milky Way where it is even more lost amongst the swarms of stars. A few enterprising astrophotographers have managed to catch Pluto as is crossed in front of dark nebulae during 2010, but otherwise finding the dwarf in very challenging indeed.

For the next couple weeks Pluto will move through the star cluster M25. From about the 3rd of January to the 17th this dim object will cross through the dense swarm of stars making up the cluster. Visually identifying the planet will be very difficult indeed, but it may be possible photographically. The best plan would be to take a pair of photos separated by a few days to see the planet's motion.

The astrophoto rig is working well, with most of the little issues resolved. I have made myself a Bahtinov mask to aid in focusing the AT6RC. The only issue with shooting from Waikoloa with the higher magnification is seeing. The air is a bit unsteady down here leading to somewhat soft stars in the images. Going to have to take the rig up the mountain sometime to see what it can do in better seeing.

Just a fun video for the morning.

Well... Mostly a fun video, there are some serious and somewhat disturbing shots. All for a good cause...

This evening will see a bright Venus paired with a crescent Moon high in the evening sky. The two will be separated by a little over 6° and will be at 28° elevation at sunset. The 7% illuminated Moon should be a nice match to the brilliant Venus shining at -4 magnitude.

Regular snowfall has accumulated at the summit. It is patchy, the wind sweeping the snow off the slopes, creating substantial drifts behind buildings and against guardrails. If you want to sled or snowboard, some of the north slopes have a bit of accumulation. Try the small bowl between Keck and Subaru. Need to have a white Christmas in Hawai'i, we can provide this year...

A seasonally appropriate astrophoto, NGC2264, also known as the Christmas Tree Cluster. It does have the outline of a tree decorated with stars in place of ornaments. This was shot on the evening of the 23rd from the driveway.

Keeping the exposures short I concentrated on the stars rather than the nebula that fills the region. I am working on the appearance of my stars, attempting to improve my technique. Not sure if I have succeeded here, they are better. I used some Photoshop tricks to preserve the color of the stars in working on the image. Better, but not quite up the the standard I aspire to.

There seem to be a few deep sky objects that are appropriate for the season. The Rosette Nebula makes a nice wreath, the Christmas Tree, etc. The folks at WISE published a nice infrared image of Barnard 3 that also looks like a wreath. Long winter nights are an excellent time to consider the night sky. Not much else to do, I am on call for the weekend, thus staying home. It is new moon and the recent storms have departed allowing dark skies. May as well take a few more astrophotos.

Mele Kalikimaka!

New Moon will occur today at 08:06HST (18:06UT).

I have been posting a lot of photos from others lately. Not something I do a lot of, I prefer to use my own shots. But when I get shots like this...

W. M. Keck Observatory Press Release...

NASA’s Kepler mission, aided by the Keck I Telescope, has discovered the first Earth-size planets orbiting a Sun-like star outside our solar system. The planets, called Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f, are too close to their star to be in the so-called habitable zone where liquid water could exist on a planet’s surface, but they are the smallest exoplanets ever confirmed around a star like our Sun.

The discovery marks the next important milestone in the ultimate search for planets like Earth. The new planets are thought to be rocky. Kepler-20e is slightly smaller than Venus, measuring 0.87 times the radius of Earth. Kepler-20f is slightly larger than Earth, measuring 1.03 times its radius. Both planets reside in a five-planet system called Kepler-20, approximately 1,000 light-years away in the constellation Lyra.

Kepler-20e orbits its parent star every 6.1 days and Kepler-20f every 19.6 days. These short orbital periods mean very hot, inhospitable worlds. Kepler-20f, at 800 degrees Fahrenheit (427 degrees Celsius), is similar to an average day on the planet Mercury. The surface temperature of Kepler-20e, at more than 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit (760 degrees Celsius), would melt glass.

I have hoped to look for comet Lovejoy in the dawn. Given it's current location in the sky it is mostly a southern hemisphere object. But our low 20° latitude should allow some view of the spectacular tail. The problem? The local weather has been dismal for astronomy all week.

For someone who does not have to worry about clouds the view can be sublime...

W. M. Keck Observatory Press Release...

Kamuela, HI – Astronomers have spotted one of the most distant galaxies known, churning out stars at a shockingly high rate. The blob-like galaxy, called GN-108036, is located 12.9 billion light-years away from Earth, and is the most luminous galaxy known at that great distance.

The galaxy was first identified by the Subaru telescope and its extreme distance was then carefully confirmed with the Keck II telescope and its DEIMOS instrument (Deep Extragalactic Multi-Object Spectrograph). Both observatories are located on the summit of Mauna Kea, Hawaii. NASA’s Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes were used to measure the galaxy’s high star production rate, equivalent to about 100 suns per year. For comparison, our Milky Way galaxy is about five times larger and a hundred times more massive than GN-108036, but makes new stars roughly 30 times more slowly.

“We’re really surprised to know that GN-108036 is quite luminous in ultraviolet and harbors a powerful star formation,” said astronomer Yoshiaki Ono of the University of Tokyo, Japan. “We had never seen such a vigorously star-forming galaxy at a comparable distance until the discovery of GN-108036.” Ono is the lead author on a paper on the results that is accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal. The principal investigator is Masami Ouchi, also at the University of Tokyo.

Winter solstice occurs at 19:30HST today. The official beginning of winter for many calendars, this day is also the shortest day of the year for observers in the northern hemisphere, or the longest if you live south of the equator. The Sun will make its southernmost path across the sky, and will begin swinging north in the sky after today.

Winter solstice occurs at 19:30HST today, December 21st. For much of the world solstice will occur on December 22nd, at 05:30UT. Since Hawai'i is ten hours behind universal time the solstice will occur the previous calendar day. Thus many calendars will mark this solstice on the 22nd, double check the time zones.

2011 Solstices and Equinoxes
Perihelion	Jan 3	19:59 UT
Spring Equinox	Mar 20	23:21 UT
Summer Solstice	Jun 21	17:16 UT
Apehelion	Jul 4	10:59 UT
Fall Equinox	Sep 23	09:05 UT
Winter Solstice	Dec 22	05:30 UT

Source: USNO Data Services Website