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The personal blog of me, Tim Trott. What I get up to, photography, news and so on.
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Monday 13th August 2007
Last Night (12-13th) was the peak of the Perseid Meteor Shower, its typical that it was cloudy so I have yet to see a Perseid. I did hear one though, crackling across the sky.
Fingers crossed for a clear night tonight, but with the MET Office issuing severe weather warnings of heavy rain and gale force winds, I think its unlikely :(.
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This post is filed under Astronomy by Lonewolf at 7:59am
Sunday 12th August 2007
Tonight I had a very good nights astronomy, starting with my first visual of Jupiter this year. I have had to wait a long time to see Jupiter this year because its altitude is very low. It has only just come round the back of the houses in the estate. I only get about a half hour to observe before it disappears behind some tree’s.
I used my baby telescope, the StarTravel 102, with a 25mm eyepiece I can see Jupiter as a bright round object and I can make out a moon. With the 10mm eyepiece I can see Jupiter a bit more clearly, and identify Ganymede and Io. Finally with the 10mm eyepiece and 2x Barlow lens I can see the light ring around the northern hemisphere and just about make out the lower ring. The great red spot was not visible to me today. I could also see Europa and Callisto clearly as well.
After Jupiter had gone behind the trees I turned round to see Arcturus shining bright. This orange star is magniture -0.03 and shines bright in the western skies.
I also observed the International Space Station fly overhead. I even managed to track it with my scope, and was amazed to be able to see some faint detail. With a 25mm eyepiece I believe I saw what looked like a large elongated dot, with two lines either side. This is the modules with solar panels either side. I was not able to view the space shuttle Endeavour at that magnification.
Throughout all this I was joined by a frog (which had a lucky escape), some bats and a hedgehog rummaging around for some food.
Unfortunately I did not see any of the Perseid’s.
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This post is filed under Astronomy by Lonewolf at 12:34am
Thursday 19th July 2007
GalaxyZoo is so addictive! I have been processing photos for GalaxyZoo for a day now, and while most are uninteresting elliptical galaxies, occasionally there is a very nice looking spiral, or interesting galaxy. I have created a new gallery on this site for the my best GalaxyZoo galaxies.
Below is a sample, I will be updating the gallery when new interesting galaxies.
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This post is filed under GalaxyZoo by Lonewolf at 11:19am
Wednesday 18th July 2007
Whilst reading Chris Lintotts Universe (link on Blogroll right), I discovered a particularly interesting project called GalaxyZoo.
Inspired by NASA’s “crowdsourcing” project, Stardust@home, where members of the public are given the task of sorting through dust grains obtained by a mission to Comet Wild-2, GalaxyZoo aims to classify millions of galaxies photographed by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) telescope in New Mexico. After taking a short tutorial and a test, (which I aced!), GalaxyZoo shows a series of images of Galaxies and you decide if its a Spiral (clockwise, counter-clockwise or sideon) or and Elliptical. The ultimate aim of the survey is to shed light on how different kinds of galaxies are distributed across the universe.
By taking part, you’ll not only be contributing to scientific research, but you’ll view parts of the Universe that literally no-one has ever seen before and get a sense of the glorious diversity of galaxies that pepper the sky.
GalaxyZoo works by harnessing the power of the Internet and the power of the Human Brain. The brain is infinitely better at pattern recognition than even the most powerful super computer, so by using distributed processing hundreds of thousands of people across the world analyse each image and classify it.
Anybody can sign up, you don’t need to be an Astronomer, just head on over to GalaxyZoo and register an account. Its easy and only takes a few minutes.
That’s just what I have done today and started classification, after all, it gives me something to do in work!
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This post is filed under GalaxyZoo by Lonewolf at 12:11pm
Wednesday 11th July 2007
Today is was the first chance I have had to use my new StarTravel 102 and Thousand Oaks filter on a decent Sunspot (I have only previously tried once with a little sunspot). This image was photographed with my Canon 350d at prime focus, 40 of the best images were processed with Registax to create the final.
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This post is filed under Solar Observations by Lonewolf at 4:00pm
Tuesday 26th June 2007
Its official now! I have just completed studying for a Certificate in Astronomy with the University of Central Lancashire, via distance learning, and the result: a pass (of course!) I’m now thinking of signing up for another course, but I haven’t decided which one yet. I would have liked to do Cosmology or IT for Astronomers, but they aren’t running this academic year.
If anybody is interested in astronomy this course is very good as an introduction to the theory behind the most basic of astronomy principles including the magnitude scale, stellar spectroscopy, calculating stellar mass and distance as well as investigations into astronomical features.
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This post is filed under Astronomy by Lonewolf at 7:25pm
