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Taking pictures of the sky is an amazingly fun thing to do. It’s not terribly hard to get decent shots of stars, and I’ve taken quite a few lovely pictures of planets and satellites myself with nothing more than a tripod and an off-the-shelf digital camera.
If you have taken some good pictures of the sky — through a telescope or otherwise — then I suggest you take a look at the Astronomy Photographer of the Year contest being hosted by the Royal Greenwich Observatory, BBC’s Sky at Night magazine, and the (UK) National Maritime Museum. Join up, submit a photo, and you could win £1000!
Haha. A little metric humor there. Actually, I think 1000 quid is a cubic hectare. Or is that only for liquids?
Anyway, my friend Chris Lintott is one of the judges, and I rather envy him the job he’ll have of going through all the submissions they’re bound to get. They’ve already got some stunning images on Flickr. But if you have something you just know has them all beat, submit it!
January 21st, 2009 at 11:01 am
Ooo cool… unfortunately the heavenly bodies I like to photograph are Ferraris…
Dr E.
January 21st, 2009 at 11:12 am
I was so sure this was going to be about the skepchick calendar.
January 21st, 2009 at 11:30 am
I couldn’t help but think of the Monty Python sketch “Knudge Knudge, Wink Wink” when I read your title. A long way to go for a British comedy reference, true, but oh well.
January 21st, 2009 at 11:32 am
Actually, Matt, I pondered a title along those lines. “Is your planet a… a… goer? KnowhatImean?”
January 21st, 2009 at 11:33 am
What the heck, I sent these to the Flickr group:
http://www.dwfoto.com/NGC7000.htm
http://www.dwfoto.com/aurora3.htm
January 21st, 2009 at 11:36 am
I have been meaning to try this and just got a tripod. The problem so far has been that the clouds never seem to let up whenever something interesting is happening. Heck, we hardly ever see the moon. There’s also a lot of light pollution. Hmm, maybe I just need to move…
January 21st, 2009 at 11:44 am
Quid. Aren’t those the swimmy-floaty things in the ocean?
January 21st, 2009 at 11:56 am
Phil Plait, you have mangled the URL link to Chris Lintott.
January 21st, 2009 at 12:09 pm
Actually, I think 1000 quid is a cubic hectare.
I cant make any sense out of this sentence. It might be a language problem…
A hectare is a unit to measure an area (10.000 m^2 or 100mx100m). A hectare cubed would be 4 dimensional, a tesseract, or hypercube I presume?
I assume a quid is a pound and the joke probably revolves about the fact that a pound is also a (very odd) measurement for mass (or is it actually weight?). Anyway that would not be possible to translate into a volume, unless you have a pound of water, e.g. which would probably be somewhere in the area of 0.4 dm^3 (much less than a cubic meter and much much less than 100m^3 or something like that.
Maybe I am just to tired and sick to get the joke today though. BTW, the english refuse to use the metric system…
January 21st, 2009 at 12:10 pm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7843186.stm
EVERY ONE SAYS 2012 IS A MYTH THEN HOW DOES IT SEEM TO MAKE PERFECT SENSE ACCORDING TO THIS LINK? REVERSE POLE SHIFT ANYONE? SUN ALIGNMENT?
January 21st, 2009 at 1:28 pm
Phil, you need to figure out who the guy above me is a get rid of him. It’s now obvious that he’s trolling under different names.
January 21st, 2009 at 1:43 pm
@ drksky,
Agreed. There ought to be a requirement to register first before commenting here.
January 21st, 2009 at 1:44 pm
Too bad I get a database error, trying to insert into the ‘entrants’ table, when I try to submit my photos.
January 21st, 2009 at 2:09 pm
Heh…I had previously just uploaded my pics to the Flickr group. I just tried to do the entry and got the same error.
January 21st, 2009 at 2:12 pm
…and by the way “NY Jack”, what does that link have to do with all the 2012 nonsense?
Also, please explain what “sun alignment” is…
Sigh…
January 21st, 2009 at 2:15 pm
Elmar_M: I don’t get the joke either. I reread it a few times, but there is nothing funny in there. It must be an American thing.
January 21st, 2009 at 2:31 pm
Hmmm. might have to look into it. I’ve been doing astrophotography since the early 1980’s…
January 21st, 2009 at 3:37 pm
I’d enter the contest, but all my astrophotos are ruined by these flying saucers and unexplainable lights that keep getting in the way.
January 21st, 2009 at 4:42 pm
Thanks for the heads-up. My photos are already in the stream!
January 21st, 2009 at 8:16 pm
know whatahmean? nudge nudge, wink wink, say no more!
January 22nd, 2009 at 2:02 am
NY Jack is NUTS!
January 22nd, 2009 at 2:18 am
2012 a myth? The last time I looked at a calendar it was right after 2011.
January 22nd, 2009 at 3:35 am
To everyone confused about the British pound…
It is, of course, the value of a pound of silver, as represented by the gold sovereign (obviously!). Thus, the unit of currency is the pound sterling. The unit of weight, the pound, is therefore the same thing, comprising 16 Imperial ounces. Thus, a pint of water (20 fl. oz.) weighs a pound and a quarter. In terms of value, £1000 (GBP) is roughly equivalent to 1600 Euros or $2000 (USD).
We do use metric units in the UK, but not for everything. For instance, food is sold in metric units (although many of the smaller British breweries bottle beer by the 568 mL, because that is an Imperial pint), usually with an Imperial equivalent printed beneath (e.g. a 2.5 kg bag of potatoes would often have 5.5 lb printed somewhere on it too).
The rule of thumb is that units of length are metric (mm, cm, m) until you start talking about lnger distances, when you start to get yards, furlongs and miles (we no longer use the rod, perch, chain or ell, and fathoms are used only in a nautical context). Although, furlongs are only used in horse-racing these days. But the heights of people still use feet and inches.
Weight is typically in kg and g until you reach large weights, when some people will start to use the Imperial ton (2240 lb, or 20 cwt), except when talking about the weight of a person, when stones and pounds will be used (a stone is 14 lb, and there are eight stones in a hundredweight).
Speeds will be quoted in Imperial miles per hour except in technical contexts, when the SI unit m/s is used. Or a nautical context, where we use knots (nautical miles per hour).
We don’t use pounds of force (for force there is the Newton) and for pressure we use bar, psi and kPa (kiloPascals) depending on context (weather charts sometimes have millibars of atmospheric pressure, tyre pressures will be in psi, and technical contexts use bar, kPa or MPa, but 1 bar = 0.1 MPa so that’s all right).
See? It’s all perfectly simple.
January 22nd, 2009 at 5:05 am
Please don’t joke about the metric system!
January 22nd, 2009 at 8:59 am
doh! references have already been made to the python skit. neeeeevermind.
January 22nd, 2009 at 9:45 am
Yes Nigel Depledge, I knew most of that (except for furlongs. Who uses furlongs? That’s just crazy. Next you’ll be telling me that you measure mass in slugs). I still don’t understand the joke in what the BA said. How does “Join up, submit a photo, and you could win £1000! “ qualify as “a little metric humour”? What makes it funny?
I’m not trying to nitpick or anything, I just honestly don’t see the joke.
June 14th, 2009 at 7:10 am
When the Metric System is universally adopted for human convenience, why not the British, who are rich with more than one million words in their reputed language, switch over completely from the British system once for all?