It's gonna be cold...

So for the last 30 or so hours, I've been following the wonderfulness that is John and Hank Green as they've been conducting an amazing fundraising project. Now in it's 6th year, Project for Awesome is an annual event that aims to decrease world suck by raising money for various charities, using Youtube as a platform. The Youtube community comes together, creating videos to promote their favourite charities. The videos are then voted on by the public, and the top 5 split the donated money between them!

This is the first year I've seen Project for Awesome, and it is pretty um... well, awesome! John and Hank (along with a few guest hosts) have been livestreaming for about 30 hours now, and the total so far is closing in on $375,000! Amazing stuff!

Now, to say I'm inspired is a slight understatement, so I've decided to do something I've been talking about doing for the last couple of years - a Christmas Day swim! Basically, first thing on Christmas morning I'll be jumping into the sea near where I live in order to raise money for 2 amazing charities. The charities I've selected are the Children's Leukaemia Association and Operation Smile. Both of these organisations do incredible work and are very deserving of donations! I'm hoping to raise €100 but honestly, I'll be happy with anything!  

So if anyone feels like sponsoring me to jump in the freezing cold Atlantic, click the link below! 

(I'm hilarious!)

Huge thanks go to anyone who donates, it is hugely appreciated! 

P.S. John and Hank also do a really awesome webseries called Crash Course, which is well worth checking out! 

Earthshine!

I was heading home from work this evening when the moon caught my eye - it's a beautiful crescent at the moment, but what I was looking at was the earthshine. I dragged my scope out as soon as I got home and snapped a few quick pics...

(Ah, happy place!) 

(Mad earthshine!!) 

Unfortunately, the clouds rolled in pretty fast and it started to rain, so I had to head back in, but t'was nice while it lasted!

A Nerd's Eye View of London

So I recently went on a trip to London to visit the blog-famous Joanne! It was a brilliant trip, and Jo very very nicely put me up in her house for the few days! While I was there I (obviously!) fully took advantage of the awesome science-nerd activities that are available in London... and there are a lot of them!

(Jo works on the top floor of the tallest building in Canary Wharf! The view is amazing!!)

We went to the Dickens Inn for dinner when I arrived and I found a knight to cuddle on the way home!

Next day, I started in the Natural History Museum! They have dinosaurs, therefore it's awesome!

       

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(Bawww!!!)

Click to see more pics!

A night of Jupiter-gazing!

Last night was the most beautiful night I've seen in ages! I spent hours outside, and by the time I got back in I couldn't feel my feet! For the rest of the night, no feet!! But it was so worth it! The atmosphere was so still and the seeing was beyond perfect!

I hadn't been planning to go out, but on the way home from the cinema, it looked so wonderful, I couldn't stay indoors! It meant I had nothing planned though, and my red-dot finder is still battery-less, so I spent most of the night aimed at Jupiter.

(You can actually make out banding on the planet through the scope.)

I managed to get this snap of Jupiter and it's moons holding my (lovely new) camera up to the eyepiece. Not the ideal way to image planets, but I'm still working on getting a webcam setup... One day I promise I will take a decent picture of Jupiter. It is my favourite planet after all! 

Just before it got too cold and my fingers stopped working, I moved slightly north of Jupiter, up to my favourite star cluster, the Pleiades! I always forget how spectacular it is through the 25mm eyepiece! So beautiful! Again, my camera doesn't even remotely do it justice!

In reality, it was much brighter and there were hundreds more stars visible! 

In other news, I'm thinking of slightly changing the focus of my blog... Still probably going to be mainly astronomy, but with more general science and nerdiness thrown in! Think costumes/crafty things I've made, tv shows/books I'm raving about and so on... Doctor Who will definitely be included, sorry Jo! 

Anyhoo, it's a beautiful night out again tonight, so I'm off to brave the cold and give the scope another whirl! 

A triumphant return!

So after waaaaaaay too long, I was finally able to take out my telescope last night! The nights are getting darker again, and it was a fantastically clear night. I had just heard the news about Neil Armstrong passing away and decided to go take a look at the moon. It was beautiful out, perfectly clear and dark. I watched the moon go down through my scope, passing behind a tree before disappearing from view. It was very cool to actually see movement, it reminds you just how dynamic the universe really is! I snapped a quick photo as the moon was setting...

(Not great, but it set really really quickly!)

Once the moon had set, I decided to take a bash at finding the Andromeda Galaxy for the first time. There's far too much light pollution in my garden to see it with the naked eye, and the battery in my finder scope is dead, but it was just too nice to go inside! After a few mins of faffing around with the scope, and looking from the sky to Stellarium and back again, I finally found it! And it was gorgeous! In my scope, it wasn't much more than a fuzzy patch, but using averted vision I could see it pretty well. And because I'm a dork, I said out loud to myself 'It's coming right for us! Ahh!' It was pretty exciting! 

(I even managed to capture Andromeda in a pic!)

And as it got later, and the sky got darker, and my night vision kicked in properly, I realised that the Milky Way was almost visible overhead! I aimed my camera up and took a ton of photos with the aim of stacking them, but I haven't quite figured out the software, so this is just a single image, with as much detail pulled out of it using PS Elements as possible! 

(You can sort of see the Milky Way!!!!!!)

So all in all, a great return to astronomy. 

Thank you Neil Armstrong, for reminding not only me, but thousands of people around the world to look up.

Safe travels, Commander.

Neil Armstrong passed away today. 

“He will be mourned by his families and friends; he will be mourned by his nation; he will be mourned by the people of the world; he will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send one of her sons into the unknown.

In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one; in his death, he binds more tightly the brotherhood of man.

In ancient days, men looked at stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood.

Others will follow, and surely find their way home. Man’s search will not be denied. But he was the first, and he will remain the foremost in our hearts.

For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind.”

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I'm going outside to look at the moon for a bit.

'...one giant leap for mankind.'

Happy Moon Landing Day!!!

How To: Fix Chromatic Aberration

I thought I'd stick up a quick tutorial on getting rid of the annoyance that is chromatic aberration. CA is the name given to the fringe of colour that is sometimes visible around the highlighted areas of an image and it occurs when there is a failure of a lens to focus all colours to the same convergence point. It is often seen in astrophotography, especially with amateur telescopes. It's mildly annoying, but very easy to fix! 

First, open your image in Photoshop. I'm using Photoshop Elements 8. 

Here you can clearly see the CA around the outer rim of the moon. Using my telescope, it's a blue colour, but it can vary from pink to green to blue.

To fix it, you want to create a new adjustment layer, adjusting hue/saturation.

Drop down the 'master' menu and select the colour you want to remove. I select blue.

Next, click the eyedropper icon and click on the blue area of your image, sampling the colour you want to remove.

Finally, drag the saturation down to zero. This removes the colour from the CA, making it almost invisible.

Before you save, be sure the merge the layers!

And that's it! Very simple! 

Solar Astronomy - First Attempt

WARNING! 

Never view the sun through a telescope or binoculars without the use of a solar filter! You can seriously damage your eyes!

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This afternoon I was watching an episode of Wonders of the Solar System, in which Brian Cox got really excited about a solar eclipse. Being as easily excitable as I am, I couldn't help but get caught up in it, and even though there was not currently an eclipse of any kind happening over Ireland, I dragged out my telescope for a look at the sun! 

Since our failed attempt at viewing the Venus transit in June, I have been itching to get a good look at our nearest star and luckily, today was the first day in at least a month with no rain and few clouds! I stuck my solar filter on and had a look. It's really cool looking at the sun though a scope! There were a few sunspots visible close to the edge of the disc. After much fiddling around, I managed to get a photo that was relatively in focus. 

I upped the contrast to bring out the sunspots and got rid of the chromatic aberration (Here's a tutorial!). There's cloud in the bottom right and the focus is slightly soft. But for a first effort I'm pleased with it.

This is an image from SpaceWeather.com showing the sunspots that were visible while I was shooting.

(Source)

It was great *finally* getting my telescope out again after weeks of rubbish rain. I even convinced my family to come out for a quick look! A fun evening of sun watching was had by all (but mainly me!)!

Fireworks

During yesterdays Independence Day festivites in San Diego, a computer error caused 20 minutes worth of fireworks to go off in less than 20 seconds.

(Source)

This video is pretty crazy too.

Probably an expensive mistake, but it looked very cool!

July 4th 2012 - Higgs Day

This is a big deal.

Today, scientists at CERN announced the discovery of a particle that is consistent with the predicted Higgs Boson particle.

Essentially, there is a Standard Model of particle physics, which says that there should be 12 fields that make up everything in the universe, and that there is a particle associated with each field. There have so far been observations made of 11 of the 12 fields/particles. And for about 45 years, scientists have been hunting for the missing 12th field.

Professor Peter Higgs, at the University of Edinburgh, predicted the existence of this 12th field, the so-called Higgs field in the 1960s. This idea is that interactions between the Higgs field and the other 11 fields give things mass. The Higgs field explains why things are solid, why our feet don't just go straight through the floor, why things have mass.

It is this particle that physicists working on the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in CERN have been searching for. They have basically been banging particles together really hard, hoping that one of the explosions caused would spit out a Higgs particle. And this morning it seems that their search may be nearing it's conclusion. 

(Source)

The particle discovery announced earlier today is not definitively the Higgs particle, but it is definitely something new - a new boson. And the likelihood is that it is the missing Higgs boson. The director-general of Cern, Professor Rolf Heuer, said this morning - "As a layman I would now say I think we have it." 

It is a very exciting day for science. Watching the announcement unfold online was thrilling, and I am very glad that I am alive to witness it.

This Is Our Planet

This is a really cool time-lapse video, created using images from the International Space Station.

   

(Video source; image source)

 Very very awesome!

Moon Landing

Todays xkcd comic deals with the moon landing. And it's brilliant!

(Click for full comic!)

MRI of a Flower

This is an MRI of a flower, as the title says. And it's super nifty.

(Source - check out the entire blog, there's some amazing images!)

Reminds me a little of a firework.

Sigh...

This is the current sky situation in Ireland. 

(Source)

Clouds, clouds, and more clouds. Oh, and a bit of rain thrown in for good measure.

I miss the stars.

There's nothing for it. I'm going to have to move to Hawaii!

Tour of the Moon

This is a really cool video. I love the moon! Unfortunately it's been hidden behind a huge bank of cloud for the last week or so, so this is the best I can do!

Go Voyager, Go!!

Official word from NASA this week is that Voyager 1 has just about reached the edge of the solar system!

(Source)

This is really exciting news, Voyager 1 will be the first man-made object to exit the solar system. It is completely amazing to me that we can still communicate with the spacecraft, and receive data from it... I sometimes can't get phone reception in Tesco!

(Source)

FYI, it takes the information sent by Voyager 1 16 hours and 38 minutes to get back to Earth, travelling a distance of about 17.8 billion km. Amazing.

Voyager 1 is the probe that took the 'Pale Blue Dot' photo and also carries Carl Sagan's 'Golden Record'. And it's one of my very favourite spacecrafts!

Project 365

It's raining. Again.

Like proper torrential rain. Everyone got sent home from work early today (I work in a wildlife park) because there was no point in us being there. We have the fire lighting at home and it looks like November outside. Ridiculous!

So I've not gotten to take my scope out in ages! To cheer myself up though, I bought a new camera. It's an instant camera too, one that I've wanted for absolutely ages! A Fujifilm Instax mini 7s! It's arriving tomorrow and I'm so excited! I'm considering doing a year of instax photos... maybe 52 weeks, or 12 months... the film is way too expensive to do a photo a day! We shall see!

This is my last Project 365 effort, completed in 2011. I took one photo every single day for a year. It was hard work, but I enjoyed it, and got to know my camera tons better in the process. And it's nice to look back over the year and see what I was up to!

Transit of Venus 2012

Yesterday was transit day! Having made a quick solar filter the night before, and set my alarm for 4 in the morning, I was just crossing my fingers that there would be no clouds. But as soon as I woke up, I could hear the predicted rain tapping on my window. I was pretty bummed, but decided to check outside for myself. And lo and behold, there were a few breaks in the clouds towards the east.

So with more than a little excitement, I dragged my friend Darren out of bed and we loaded up the car with the telescope, filters and raincoats. We left my house at about 4.20am, and headed to the city to pick up another friend, Brendan. After that our basic plan was to drive towards the sunrise and hopefully find somewhere with a low horizon... Ireland is so freaking hilly! And we didn't have too much time to spare, as sunrise was 5.16am and the transit was ending in Ireland at 5.54am!

We drove down the dual carriageway, and eventually found a spot where the horizon was low enough. We pulled off the road and parked in a lane way. As we set up the telescope, we noticed that there was a gap in the clouds just where the sun was rising. I put the solar filter on and aimed at the sun. Which is significantly more difficult than I had expected. You can see nothing with the filter on and the sun is so bright it makes the red dot finder pretty much useless. But after a minute or two of faffing around, I managed to line it up.

On glancing through the scope however, there was a tiny thin band of cloud cover the area where Venus should have been visible. Gutted. We waited and watched until 5.54am, but we had no luck. As the sun rose, it hit a huge cloud and all but disappeared.

(Darren and Brendan star in Sunrise Kingdom)

It was pretty disappointing, but we still had a fun morning! The sunrise was beautiful, no-one damaged their eyes, and we had a good laugh in the car. And you know, only 105 years til the next transit!

So again, it was back to virtual astronomy! I spent a while when I returned home looking at photos and videos online. And boy are there tons of those...

(Source)

(Source)

(Source)

(This is one seriously epic video - source)

So despite not actually getting to see Venus, we had a great day. After getting a few hours sleep, we headed to the beach with my sister, her boyfriend and flatmate, and had a barbecue! Good times all round! 

Welcome to Science - Zen Pencils

Tuesdays Zen Pencils featured the words of the brilliant Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy. It's all kinds of wonderful...

(Click image to view)

Check out the full comic here!

DIY Solar Filter

My solar film that I ordered from Green Witch arrived today! Just in time for the transit of Venus tomorrow!

So I've bunged together a quick solar filter. There's tons of tutorials online with good directions for making them... The biggest thing is to make sure that there are no holes or damage to the film, as you can do serious damage to your eyesight observing the sun through a telescope.

We've been given about a 90% chance of clouds for the morning, but my alarm is set for 4am, and we're giving it a go anyway!

Fingers firmly crossed!!

The game is afoot!

I was reading a thread of astronomy jokes recently and this one popped into my head. It combines two of my very favourite things; stars and Sherlock Holmes!

Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson were going camping. They pitched their tent under the stars and went to sleep. 

Sometime in the middle of the night Holmes woke Watson up and said: "Watson, look up at the stars, and tell me what you see." 

Watson replied: "I see millions and millions of stars." 

Holmes said: "And what do you deduce from that?" 

Watson replied: "Well, if there are millions of stars, and if even a few of those have planets, it’s quite likely there are some planets like Earth out there. And if there are a few planets like Earth out there, there might also be life." 

And Holmes said: "Watson, you idiot, it means that somebody stole our tent."

According to Wikipedia, this is the second funniest joke in the world...

Happy Towel Day!

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have.

If you don't get this, then check this out. Thank me later!

Bluuuuuuue moon!

It's a beautiful evening out! And I've got work in the morning so I can't spend all night outside... Sadface.

I dragged the scope out for a bit earlier on though, to have a quick look at the daylight moon. It was gorgeous, and I managed to get this snap. Not as good as my last one, I found it a lot harder to get decent focus in the daylight.

Again, it was a lot prettier through the scope!

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UPDATE: 12.29am

I couldn't help myself, the moon was calling me through my living room window! I had to drag the scope out again for another look... Crescent moons are just so beautiful! So here's tonight's nighttime moon...

Right, it's seriously time for bed now! Going to grab a glass of milk and switch on an episode of Sherlock ... 

Zzzzzzz...

Falcon 9 has cleared the tower!

Got up really early today to watch a rocket launch. And by really early, I mean 8.30. But it was my day off, so it counts as early.

It was the historic launch of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Dragon capsule to the International Space Station. If the mission is successful, in the next few days SpaceX will become the first private company to rendezvous with the ISS (Check out the mission plan here). It's a pretty big deal for space exploration and is paving the way for future manned missons, which SpaceX are already planning. Huzzah!

It was very exciting watching it live, especially after the last minute abort on Saturday. The atmosphere at mission control was obviously electric, and there was much cheering from the crowd gathered at SpaceX. I have to admit I welled up a bit seeing the solar array deploy, such was the excitement onscreen. I also may have cheered out loud when the guy said 'Falcon 9 has cleared the tower.'

This is one of my favourite pictures I've come across so far. I love the guy cheering! It's exactly what I was doing, except I was in bed in Ireland...

(Source)

Massive congratulations to all the folks at SpaceX and NASA!

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Also hugely deserving of congratulations today is my little sister (one of only 2 people who actively read this blog) who graduated from secondary school today! Congrats Roisin! 

Eclipse

So there was a lovely solar eclipse over the weekend, visible across Japan and the western United States. Unfortunately, that's not where I live so I had to enjoy it online... There are some amazing photos and videos around.

This is yet another amazing timelapse video!

From the Youtube page:

'700 pictures through a Coronado Solar Max 60 Double Stack telescope were used to make this video. The Telescope has a very narrow bandpass allowing you to see the chromosphere and not the much brighter photosphere below it.' 

Really lovely! I wish I could have seen it myself! Oh well, there's a rocket launching in the morning that I'll get to watch! Hurrah!

A shout-out to Joanne!

Hi Jo!

So tonight, after nearly 2 weeks of clouds, the sky finally cleared!

And just in time too, cos my lovely lovely friend Joanne was visiting and I really wanted to show her my telescope. (There's really no way to say that without it sounding sexy...). When she arrived to the house, it was still cloudy, but by the time it had gotten dark, around 10.30 pm, it was completely clear!

(This is a penguin that Jo sent me!)

I headed out and set up the scope, and we started star-gazing. I wanted to save Saturn for last, seeing as it's so cool, so I pointed at Venus first. It's looking pretty lovely at the moment, with the crescent clearly visible. And Jo loved it. It's now her favourite planet. I think everyone should have a favourite planet... mine's Jupiter. For several reasons that I'll most likely go into on a later date...

So we spent a while looking at Venus, while I pointed out constellations and stars. I then decided to take a bash at finding M81 and M82, as they're right overhead. I didn't want to spend too long at it, cos that's not fun for anyone else, so after about 5 minutes of looking around, I moved on.

(Stellarium screenshot of Jo's favourite planet and constellation!)

To Saturn! The main event! I lined it up in the 10mm, focused and handed the scope over to Jo. There was a few seconds of silence, and then 'Wow.' Which is really the only appropriate reaction to Saturn. The atmosphere wasn't as steady as it could have been, but the view was as spectacular as it always is. We could make out Titan just above Saturn too. It was lovely. And I think Jo was pretty impressed!

We moved on to Mars next, though it's super tiny even in the 10mm eyepiece. It's distinctly red though, which is pretty cool. And I'm happy to gaze at Mars with the naked eye. Every time I see it, I just think of the fact that we have robots wandering around up there, and I'm happy.

Joanne had to leave then, so I swung quickly back around to Saturn for one last look. It's a shame the moon and the Orion nebula weren't up, but there'll be time for that when she's next visiting. And I *just* realised I never offered Jo a cup of tea... bad friend. But there'll be time for that when she's next visiting... (Love you Jo, I'm glad you're the only person who reads this!)

After Jo left, I decided to have one more go at M81 and M82 before putting everything away. I swung the scope around, aimed at the general area, glanced through the eyepiece, and lo and behold there they were! Very very faint, but very very beautiful. And of course they would be faint, they're about 12 million light years away! Most distant object so far! They would be wonderful at a proper dark sky site...

(Once again, this is not how they looked in my scope! Source)

So all in all, a very fun and successful night! I think showing Saturn to other people is my new favourite thing to do!

We Are Star Dust

New Symphony of Science video!

Lots of the wonderful Neil DeGrasse Tyson, along with Richard Feynman and Lawrence Krauss. Brilliant stuff!

I'm not sure it quite tops World of the Dinosaurs, but it's great nonetheless!

Again, you can check out the rest of the series here and downloads are available here!

Cloudy skies: Day 9

In no particular order, here's a list of my favourite space-related songs!

1. Space Oddity - David Bowie

2. Saturn 5 - Inspiral Carpets

3. The Space Race Is Over - Billy Bragg

4. Starman - David Bowie

5. We Are All Connected -  Symphony of Science

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This is keeping me happy until the clouds go away and I can take the telescope outside again!

It's May, what is going on with the weather!? 

Scale

I just came across this nifty video showing how some of the other planets in our solar system would look in the sky if they orbited the Earth at the same distance as the moon does. It's really interesting to see...

Lovely stuff!

By the way, it's been super cloudy here the last few days, so it's strictly virtual astronomy for me at the moment... 

Science is Awesome: Reason #845

This is a video of a 29 year old woman, who was born deaf, hearing her own voice for the first time after receiving a hearing implant.

I challange you to watch it without grinning/welling up! 

There's a follow up interview here!

High Five Science!

Over the moon? Definitely.

Tonight I got my first look at the moon through my scope. It was spectacular. Seeing something that you think you know so well in such a different light is amazing. You can see every crater, every sea, every hill.

I even managed to get a semi-decent shot by holding my camera up to the eyepiece. 

This is the view through the 25mm ep. The view through the 10mm was brilliant too, but unfortunately I couldn't get a decent shot through it... I need to work on my afocal imaging...

But I've found an old webcam that I don't use anymore, so I'm going to attempt to modify it for planetary imaging in the next few weeks! 

The best part of tonight though, was my Dads reaction. It took a bit of coaxing to get him to come outside for a look, but he was blown away by the view. His exact words were 'Oh good Jesus, I didn't think you'd be able to see that!' Delighted!

Astronomy is so exciting!!!!!!!!!!!!!

DNA Day

59 years ago today, the 25th April 1953, molecular biologists James Watson and Francis Crick published a paper in Nature which suggested a structure for DNA.

(Source, via Wikipedia)

Their paper 'Molecular structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid' provided a brilliantly simple answer to the question of how genetic instructions were both stored inside organisms and passed from one generation to the next. It described Rosalind Franklin's discovery of the structure of DNA, and had a major impact on the field of biology, and genetics in particular.

(Watson and Crick with Maclyn McCarty. Source, via Wikipedia)

Watson and Crick, along with Maurice Wilkins, were awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material".

(Source)

The full paper has been made available online and can be viewed here, with an annotated version here.