Radiomind

Telescopes at the visitor center at the Grand Canyon National Park. The parking lot is illuminated with red light and telescopes are aiming up at the night sky. Credit: NPS

Have Telescope; Will Travel

I'm getting fired-up for the Grand Canyon Star Party June 1-8, 2024. I'll be at the South Rim Visitor Center with my 8" SCT, and the focus will be on springtime globular clusters. Come have a look! 🔭

Europe space telescope's sight restored after de-icing procedure The vision of the Euclid space telescope has been restored following a delicate operation that successfully melted a thin layer of ice that had been clouding its sight, the European Space Agency annou...

The Euclid space telescope team has successfully removed an ice deposit on one of the scope's mirrors. A de-icing procedure "performed significantly better than hoped", the ESA said. "After the very first mirror was warmed by just 34 degrees, Euclid's sight was restored." 🔭

Photo of the Euclid space telescope mirrors during construction. The image shows a view down the scope tube revealing reflections in the mirrors. Credit: ESA

Ice has formed on Euclid's mirrors. Water outgassing from the structure in the vacuum of space has condensed and frozen on the cold optical surfaces.

The ice is the thickness of a DNA strand. Careful heating should remove the ice, and over time, deplete the outgassing.
🔭
www.esa.int/Science_Expl...

Oregon Outback is now the largest Dark Sky Sanctuary in the world A swath of southern Oregon is considered one of the best stargazing spots in the country.

A 2.5 million-acre swath of southern Oregon has been named the largest Dark Sky Sanctuary in the world.

Future plans include expanding the sanctuary to 11.4 million acres across two additional counties.

Bortle 1 skies at high elevation are common in Oregon and the skies are not cloudy all night. 🔭

Image shows bubbles with amber gaseous filaments pushing blue shock waves resulting from an exploding star. In the background in the dark of deep space are numerous stars. Credit: NSF’s NOIRLab

It appears that something exploded...

A face-on spiral galaxy with four spiral arms that curve outward in a counterclockwise direction. The spiral arms are filled with young, blue stars and peppered with purplish star-forming regions that appear as small blobs. The middle of the galaxy is much brighter and more yellowish, and has a distinct narrow linear bar angled from 11 o’clock to 5 o’clock. Dozens of red background galaxies are scattered across the image. The background of space is black.

The James #Webb Space Telescope has confirmed the accuracy of #Hubble observations that measured the current expansion rate of the universe.

This solidifies a discrepancy between the local expansion rate and conclusions from measurements of the early universe: webbtelescope.pub/3V1pHU7 🔭 🧪

Image of the lunar surface littered with craters, including a crater chain on the floor of a larger crater. Credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University

Lunar crater Mendeleev contains a line of smaller craters called "Catena Mendeleev." This is an example of a crater chain created when elements of a single larger object disintegrated before impact due to tidal forces.

No, we don't think that, because here in Oregon we have some of the most progressive policies in the country. Women's health care is protected, and LGBTQ rights are vigorously defended. OTOH, in Alabama...

BTW, your article on Australian radio astronomy was fantastic! You deserve High Praise.

Image of the lunar surface with elongated divots, graze craters, caused by meteors impacting at acute angles. Credit: NASA Apollo 11

Graze craters of the lunar surface.

Eons after the Moon was created, debris from the Earth and the impactor rained back down on the Moon helping to create the pockmarked surface.

Here is an example of graze craters where meteors impacted at an acute angle, creating a divot in the lunar surface.

Image of a dense star cluster of young luminous stars partially surrounded by a cloud of gas and dust illuminated by the bright stars. Credit: NASA

This is Westerlund 2, a compact star cluster with some of the most massive, luminous stars in the galaxy, including numerous O-class stars and runaway Wolf-Rayet stars.

The large number of pre-main sequence stars with masses below 2.5 M☉ suggests the cluster is only 2 million years old.

The goatskin cover of a replica of a Nag Hammadi codex scribed with a star pattern typical of third century N. African craft bindery. Credit: Radiomind

The inside of a codex revealing the folios of the quire and internal binding. The inside of the goatskin cover is laminated with dark papyrus layers to stiffen the hide. The folios are made of modern paper suitable for fountain pens. Credit: Radiomind

An Astronomer's Notebook.

My wife, an antiquarian, hand made this replica of a third century Nag Hammadi codex using goatskin, papyrus and modern fountain pen paper for the signature (quire). It's the perfect accessory to my new telescope!🔭

A backlit view of Jupiter revealing a tenuous ring system and the outline of the planet. Credit: NASA, Galileo

NASA's Galileo spacecraft captured this image of the Jovian ring system while the probe was in the planet's shadow and the planet was backlit by the Sun.

Image of a ridge on the Moon littered with boulders in light colored areas. Credit: NASA, LRO

This portion of a lunar wrinkle ridge has many boulders gathered on its slopes. These boulders are eroding out of the wrinkle ridge. What is the erosive mechanism? There is no wind or rain on the Moon. Most likely micrometeorites are slowly blasting loose regolith particles revealing the boulders.

Image of the lunar surface showing craters and a barely visible Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C lander, named Odysseus, with a white arrow pointing at the lander. Credit: NASA/Goddard/Arizona State University

On Feb. 22, Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C lander, called Odysseus, completed a seven-day journey to lunar orbit and softly landed near crater Malapert A. On Feb. 24, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter passed over the landing site at an altitude of about 56 miles (90 km) and photographed Odysseus.

Image showing gas and dust in deep space with newly formed stars appearing as red orbs still embedded in the gas. Star fields of both background and foreground stars fill the frame. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI Joseph DePasquale (STScI), Anton M. Koekemoer (STScI), Alyssa Pagan (STScI)

"The Pillars of Creation"

This is the Eagle Nebula in the constellation Serpens imaged by the JWST NIRcam infrared camera. In our galaxy about 1-3 new stars are born every year. The largest new stars will live short lives before exploding as core collapse supernovae. Note the red glow of new stars.

The Dwingeloo Radio Telescope. The image shows the concave dish reflector of the telescope along with the mount and receiver in a field in the Netherlands. Credit: CAMRAS

The Dwingeloo Radio Telescope (DRT), commissioned in 1956, is one of the oldest radio telescopes in the world. Enthusiastic radio amateurs gave the DRT a second life. In 2007 they established the CAMRAS foundation and started to renovate and use the telescope again.

www.camras.nl/en/about-the...

Dwingeloo telescope viewed from the front fills the field of view. Under the telescope is a circular track that the telescope rolls on. The dish itself is a wire mesh with a support structure of metals beams which connect in a triangular pattern. The telescope receiver is at the prime focus, suspended at the focus of the dish by four long legs extending from the dish. The sky behind the dish is cloudy gray.

A zoomed out version of the previous picture of the Dwingeloo telescope. In the foreground, concrete steps make up a walkway to the telescope with green grass on either side. There are small clusters of trees around the telescope.

A view of the telescope from the back. You can see through the mesh dish to the receiver. Below the dish is the operator cabin. It is part of the rotating structure of the platform under the dish. Here you can perform point the telescope and record data.

Today’s telescope visit: the Dwingeloo 25 m. 📡🧪🔭 When it was built 1954-1956 it was the largest radio telescope in the world. It’s now a rijksmonument (national heritage site).
It also played a historic role in understanding the structure of the Milky Way galaxy! 🌌
www.camras.nl/en/about-the...

Image of Uranus' moon Ariel reveling extensive cratered terrain cross-cut by a system of scarps, canyons, and ridges. The surface shows signs of more recent geological activity than other Uranian moons. Credit: NASA, JPL, Voyager 2 (1986)

Uranus' moon Ariel with a surface of water and CO2 ice cross-cut by a system of scarps, canyons, and ridges. The core of the moon is likely rocky and the smoother, seemingly weathered regions are ice remelted by tidal friction. Ariel is the fourth-largest of the 27 known moons of Uranus.

The Uranian moon Miranda revealing its surface ice is a jumbled maze of deep canyons, freshly melted and refrozen massifs and older regions with weathered cratering. Credit: NASA, JPL, Voyager 2

Miranda is the fifth largest of Uranus’ moons. Miranda’s surface consists of water ice and reveals intense geological activity in the moon’s past. Impacts melt the ice, and then it refreezes without craters.

This tortured moon is criss-crossed by huge ice canyons as deep as 20 kilometers!

Image of the lunar surface with craters, lava channels and smooth lava fields. This is the Aristarchus Plateau. Credit: NASA, JPL, LRO

The Aristarchus Plateau taken from Apollo 15.

"The Aristarchus plateau is one of the most geologically diverse places on the moon: a mysterious raised flat plateau, a giant rille carved by enormous outpourings of lava, fields of explosive volcanic ash, and all surrounded by massive flood basalts." — Mark Robinson, LRO principal investigator.

"JWST-7329: a rare massive galaxy that formed very early in the Universe. This JWST NIRCAM image shows a red disk galaxy but with images alone it is hard to distinguish from other objects. Spectral analysis of its light with JWST revealed its anomalous nature – it formed around 13 billions years ago even though it contains ~4x more mass in stars than our Milky Way does today." — Swinburne University of Technology

“We’ve been chasing this particular galaxy for seven years and spent hours observing it with the two largest telescopes on earth to figure out how old it was. But it was too red and too faint, and we couldn’t measure it." —Karl Glazebrook

The JWST finally imaged this ancient z ~ 11 massive galaxy.

Perched atop a rocky peak in the Alps sits an astronomical observatory. In the background, snowfields on steep slopes fill the frame. Credit: Sphinx Observatory

The Sphinx Observatory in Switzerland.

This is what they mean by "Reaching for the stars."

At an elevation of 3,571 m, it is one of the highest observatories in the world. An elevator in a vertical shaft inside the rock serves the facility.

Image of a radio telescope dish in the night with the Milky Way Galaxy in the background. Credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF

"Astronomers, like burglars and jazz musicians, operate best at night."

— Miles Kington

Andrew Pearce, an amateur astronomer in Australia, discovered a nova on the evening of February 9, 2024. He reported his finding to the IAU Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams (CBAT).

The nova is located in Scorpio and has a magnitude of about 7.8 at the time of discovery.

The image shows a shell of material ejected from a dying star. There is an outer irregular ring of gas and a central structure that looks like bubbles. The dying star is visible in the center. Credit: NASA, Andrew Fruchter and the ERO Team [Sylvia Baggett (STScI), Richard Hook (ST-ECF), Zoltan Levay (STScI)].

Here is a mesmerizing image of planetary nebula NGC 2392. When a sun-like star reaches the end of its lifespan, radiation pressure causes material to be ejected into shells. Then the star will collapse into a white dwarf and spend eternity as a dense, cooling ember.

Image of Eta Carinae, a massive star system that has expelled gas and dust into two huge lobes of a dumbbell-like structure. The lobes are illuminated internally, are laced with dark streaks and are surrounded by another ring of material ejected in an earlier event. Credit: Credits: NASA, ESA, Hubble; Processing & License: Judy Schmidt

With a mass 100x greater than our Sun and 7500 ly away — the Eta Carinae star system is a sure candidate for a full blown supernova. About 170-years-ago Eta Carinae underwent a powerful outburst that made it one of the brightest stars in the sky. She's going to blow, but when? Nobody knows.

The Trapezium in the Orion Nebula. Image shows the four major stars of the Trap, nebulous clouds filling the area and pollywogs, young stars with tails. Credit: NASA, C.R. O'Dell and S.K. Wong (Rice University)

Below: a long exposure image of The Trapezium in the Orion Nebula. I can detect the six brightest starts in the Trap in my 8" SCT, but the pollywogs were not visible with recent seeing conditions. The brightest of the pollywogs is magnitude 13.68, and I need darker skies to see it.

Ingenuity sitting on the slope of a sand ripple after Flight72.

Ingenuity's final resting place among the sand ripples in Neretva Vallis.

Full resolution panorama: flic.kr/p/2pwyXGU

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/Simeon Schmauß

🔭 😢