Category Archives: Space

Thirty years ago today the space shuttle Discovery launched with the Hubble Space Telescope onboard. It was placed into low Earth orbit the next day. Despite the problems that were discovered when the first pictures came down, Hubble became an astonishing success. Not only has it given us over 1,400,000 observations which have revolutionized astronomy, the crewed space shuttle missions to repair and later repeatedly upgrade the instruments on Hubble have been a truly amazing example of what a trained crew can accomplish in space.

In honor of that 30-year anniversary, NASA, ESA, and STSci have released this image of “the Cosmic Reef.” In it we see NGC 2020 (the large, red nebula) and NGC 2014 (the smaller, blue nebula).

(Image from NASA, ESA, and STSci)

These star-forming regions are part of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of ours that is 163,000 light years away.

In addition, a video about the image has been released by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

This means a lot to me, for so many reasons. Among them is the fact that for the 25th anniversary of Hubble’s launch, I attended my fifth NASA Social, this one in Washington, D.C. For that event, NASA released this image of Westerlund 2.

(NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA), A. Nota (ESA/STScI), and the Westerlund 2 Science Team)

(Here, here, here, here, here, here, and here are my posts from that NASA Social – other posts from around that time show pictures from my amazing sightseeing expeditions around Washington.)

When this picture was first revealed to the world, it was displayed on a huge video screen right over my head in the lobby of the Newseum,

I was sitting in the second row, behind three astronauts, one of whom was the head of NASA at the time.

(Astronaut and NASA Administrator Charles Bolden was seated in front of me – he was a crew member on STS-31 which launched Hubble thirty years ago. Loren Shriver was seated at right – he commanded STS-31. Scott Altman is the one on the left who was walking toward us – he was the mission commander for STS-109 and STS-125, the fourth and fifth Hubble servicing missions.)

That afternoon was spent at Goddard where, among other über cool activities, I got to hold and play with one of the actual tools that was used in space to do perform one of the instrument upgrades.

Oh, and we got to see the Hubble’s successor, the Webb Space Telescope, which should launch next year.

Yeah. That was a pretty great day.

So, Happy Birthday, Hubble! Here’s to a few more years of service, and maybe even more if us clever little apes can figure out a way to service you again even without the Space Shuttle!

I mentioned a few days ago while sharing pictures of the Moon and Venus that the Pleiades (an open cluster of bright, blue stars, easily visible to the naked eye) were nearby and Venus would be getting closer to them.

It’s happening over the next few nights and tonight’s clear (-ish) here so I decided to see what I could see with the big lens.

(As always, I urge you ignore the sensational headlines online no matter how tempting it might be to distract yourselves from news of the virus and the panic and our governmental ineptitude and the growing body count. This conjunction of Venus & the Pleiades is not a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity – it happens about every eight years. And it’s not something you have to see TONIGHT or you’ll miss it – it will take place over the next week or two, so relax if it’s cloudy tonight and you missed it.)

With the telephoto lens and a tripod mounted camera, you tend to start getting “trailing” in longer exposures. This is caused by the Earth moving (and no, not in the “good” way!) and the camera not. So even at the widest field of view, after about a four second exposure you’ll get trails. But it’s easy to see the extremely bright Venus and the core of “The Seven Sisters.”

(As always, click on the images to see them full screen sized, they’ll look much better and you’ll see more detail.)

If you let the exposure go to out to twenty-five seconds you’ll see a LOT of stars – but they’re moving and trailing. And that’s some random satellite crossing the upper right quarter of the field.

Zoom in about half way and the trailing gets worse, so anything over two seconds starts to show trails

And if you go out to twenty-five seconds, Venus starts to look like a really bright comet as it smears across the image.

Finally, zoom all the way out to 300 mm and crop the image to get a nice shot of the core.

Let’s see what I can play with tomorrow night or Saturday if it’s clear! (And Los Angeles folks, there are some fantastic ISS passes coming up on the weekend!)

There it is! I mentioned last night that I could see the one-day old crescent moon just barely above the horizon. Tonight it had climbed a bit and was easily visible with Venus.

About forty minutes later, after I had gotten my haircut, it was fully dark, but the moon was still above the hills and billboards. If you zoom in, even with this cheezy iPhone picture (which, let’s admit, has a pretty amazing camera in it as much as I might make jest), you can see the outline of the almost New Moon illuminated by Earthshine.

For the record, NO ONE in the shopping center was admiring the sight. and EVERYONE was wondering who the geek with the nice haircut was taking pictures of the sky while standing in traffic.

We know the answer to that one, don’t we?

I didn’t notice it until I was in the car, on the freeway, and couldn’t take pictures, but just barely above the horizon, in a notch between two hills, was the teeniest, tiniest little sliver of a moon.

Stunning!