The pictures of Comet Lovejoy keep coming, each cooler than the one before. It’s hard to imagine topping the ones from the Space Station, but then you don’t have to imagine it when you can just look at this crazy amazing shot:

Holy Haleakala! [Click to stimulatedemissionate.]

Well, actually, "Holy Paranal!" This picture, by Gabriel Brammer, was taken at the Very Large Telescope observatory on Cerro Paranal in the Atacama desert in Chile, and it’s just stunning. The comet is obvious enough — you can still see the two tails — and the crescent Moon, somewhat overexposed, on the left. On the right is the VLT itself, firing a laser into the sky. The laser makes atoms high in the atmosphere glow, creating an artificial star that can be used to compensate for turbulence in the air, creating sharper images.

I love how the Milky Way is splitting the sky. You can see the dark hole of the Coal Sack, a thick dust cloud that absorbs the star light from behind it, and the Southern Cross in the middle of the frame. The two bright stars just below that are Alpha and Beta Centauri, the former being the closest star system to our own. The southern hemisphere gets a better view of the galaxy than we northerners do, since the geometry of the Earth’s tilt puts the center of the Milky Way higher up for them. I’m jealous enough just because of that, but to have this incredible comet visible too? Curse you antipodeans!

[UPDATE: The ESO has added a nice time lapse video to the mix, using Brammer's photos:

Sigh. So lovely.]

If you’re south of the Equator, the comet will be visible in the east before sunrise for a few more days at least. If you can, go take a look. Comets like this are extremely rare, and you may never get another chance like this again.

Image credit: Gabriel Brammer/European Southern Observatory

[Reminder: I'm doing a live Q&A about asteroids impacts on the TED site at 20:00 UT today!]

Northeastern Italy is a mountainous, difficult terrain. Costazza peak, for example, is over 2000 meters (6600 feet) high, craggy and sharp. That makes it a daunting climb for a hiker… but if you’re content to stay near the bottom, it makes an awesomely dramatic frame for astrophotography.

Earlier this year Italian astrophotographer Edoardo Brotto ventured to Costazza and, late at night, took a series of pictures that he put together into an amazing mosaic of the sky. He calls it Crown of the Dolomites:

[Click to maggiorenate.]

Isn’t that breathtaking? He took 14 pictures in total for this mosaic; seven of the mountains themselves and seven of the sky. The Milky Way dominates the view; I love how it appears to arc over the mountains (hence Brotto’s title)! That’s actually not how it appears in the sky; it’s an artifact of taking pictures of the sky — which looks like a curved dome over our heads — and mapping it to a small rectangular picture. This sort of mapping confounds people (xkcd recently did a funny comic based on how maps are made), but it’s just what happens when you try to make a round peg fit a square hole.

The high orange clouds and darkly-lit peaks make this one of the more dramatic pictures of the night sky I’ve seen in a while. You can see more of his pictures on Wild Visions and 500 px.

Image credit: Edoardo Brotto, used by permission.

Randy Halverson is an astrophotographer who takes gorgeous pictures of the sky and puts them together into amazing time lapse videos (see Related Posts below for links to his work). On Google+ this morning he posted a picture he took last night, and it’s simply stunning: the International Space Station rising into the Milky Way, with both reflected on a lake’s still waters:

[Click to embiggen.]

What a fantastic shot! I’ve tried getting similar pictures, but never managed to get one as nice as this. It takes dark skies; Randy was about 300 km west of Sioux Falls, South Dakota when he took it, where there’s almost no light pollution. The Milky Way is obvious; you can see the bulge of the central region of the galaxy, and the disk tapering off to the top of the frame. Pictures like this are always a good reminder that we live in the mid-plane of a big spiral galaxy.

When Randy got this shot the ISS was rising over the southwestern horizon. 100 meters across, 380 km up, and moving at 8 km/sec, the station reflects a lot of sunlight and moves rapidly enough to create a bright streak in short time exposures… and bright enough to create a strong reflection in the water.

A funny thing: as I looked over the picture, I saw a faint streak not too far from the ISS. (more…)

So I finally watched the pilot episodes of the new Fox scifi drama "Terra Nova" (it airs Mondays at 8:00 p.m. ET). I found it watchable, with some potential, and like every other TV show in existence (except "Firefly") it had some things I liked and some I didn’t. I got email about it due to a couple of lines in the pilot, which I’ll get to in a sec. First, a quick overview.

Gotta get back in time

The idea behind the show (no real spoilers here, since this is all explained in the first minute of the program) is that by the year 2149, the Earth is dying. Pollution, global warming, and so on have made the planet nearly uninhabitable. People need rebreathers just to go outside, and many scenes show huge chimneys pumping smoke into the air just to hammer home that point. Population control is mandatory; having more than two kids is an invitation for the police to come.

The show centers on a family – cop father, brilliant doctor mother, rebellious teenage son, science whiz-kid teenage daughter, and their youngest, a girl. And yeah, if you count three kids, good for you! That drives part of the plot in Part 1 of the show, so I won’t spoil it.

The big plot device in the show is that a fracture in time is discovered — how and why are not disclosed, perhaps to be revealed in a later episode — that goes to 85 million years in the past. People are being sent back in time to populate the still-clean planet, save humanity, fight dinosaurs, and so on.

I’ll note that I like how the time travel was handled. When we join the story, time travel has already been around a while — this family is sent back as part of the tenth wave of colonists — so the writers didn’t have to spend a lot of time talking about how it was done. It just is. Also, the writers circumvented the inevitable fan rage with a short expository scene stating how this isn’t really our past; the time line has split, so it doesn’t matter if you step on a butterfly or eat an entire herd of dinosaurs. It won’t change the future. That made me smile. Score one (pre-emptively) for the writers.

Of course, the show tried to distance itself from "Jurassic Park", and did so by having the first look at the dinosaurs be a herd of brachiosaurs, and then having the main characters in souped-up jeeps getting chased by a carnivorous velociraptor/T-Rex-like animal.

Um, yeah. Oops.

I’m no paleontologist, and I like watching dinosaurs with big sharp teeth eat a person as much as the next guy, so that part was fine. But then they went a little bit out of their way to add some astronomy, and kinda blew it. So I have to jump in here a bit.

What follows is me nitpicking the science of a couple of lines of dialogue. I don’t do this to be petty — I gave up on that in my reviews a long time ago — but just to use these lines to point out the real science. Any snarking is incidental.

(more…)

We live on a spinning ball, rotating madly as it moves through space. Once every day the surface of our planet makes a circuit around the imaginary line connecting its poles… well, imaginary it may be, but the effects are quite real, especially when you take long exposures of the night sky. That’s what photographer Brad Goldpaint did, and created this lovely time lapse video he calls Breaking Point:

[If you go to the Vimeo page for the video you can watch it in HD, which you really need to do, as well as make it full screen.]

Amazing, isn’t it? The visual of the stars wheeling around the sky over our head invokes such a wonderful feeling, as if the whole Universe is spinning around us. But it can also be a little odd-looking too. For example, take a look at this picture Brad composed using some of the images he crafted into the video, which he has singled out and called Delineated:

[Click to siderealate.]

Strange, isn’t it? For one thing, it isn’t one long exposure, but instead composed of 60 short exposures added together. If you squint you might see streaks of light, but in reality those arcs are composed of individual dots, the images of stars frozen as they moved across the sky.

It’s also a bit odd due to the fuzzy glow at the bottom. That’s actually the smeared-out light from the Milky Way galaxy as it rose into the frame. Not being a point-like source of light like stars, it has a dreamier, fuzzier quality. Again, from the video, here’s a single exposure from that series:

(more…)

[UPDATE (February 2, 2012): It has come to my attention that the photograph that was posted here has most likely been manipulated during post-processing to a degree that is unacceptable. Because of that, I have taken it down. I do not take this action lightly, but until more information is forthcoming I think it's best this way. National Geographic has a brief statement about this on their website as well.]

If you need a pick-me-up to start your week (after a hurricane, a series of earthquakes, and just having to face another danged week at work) then may I suggest this amazing time-lapse video by Eric Hines, called "Wild Wyoming":

[Make sure it's set to HD, and make it full screen. I personally think the music is very good, too (it's from "The Fountain"), so you might want to crank up the speakers as well.]

Isn’t that breath-taking? At about a minute in I saw a couple of satellites heading across the Milky Way right-to-left, and of course the airplanes zipping through are pretty obvious (from the direction they’re moving, I’d guess most are coming from or heading to my home base of Denver airport). At 2:20 there is an eerie scene of what looks like light pillars to me; vertical glowing columns caused by flat, hexagonal ice crystals in the air bending reflecting the light from sources beneath them. I’m a bit surprised they would appear in the summer, but some locations in eastern Wyoming/western Nebraska can get plenty cold at night. [UPDATE: I was wrong, those are simply lens flares, which makes a lot more sense to me. I asked Eric Hines about it and he replied on his Google+ post. Thanks to Neil Creek in the comments for pointing this out.]

Also, at 2:50, there’s a scene that better be familiar to anyone who reads this blog!

I’ve been to southern Wyoming (it’s not far from Boulder) and the geology there is very cool. Someday I’ll have to go fossil hunting up there. And maybe do a little star gazing too. Clearly, the skies there are magnificent.

Image credit: screen grab from Eric Hines’ video. Tip o’ the lens cap to Randy Halverson.