'...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.

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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.

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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.