First Day of Work at SAO!

Well, today marks a new era in my life, and hopefully a new era in my space blogging habits. Today I started work in the Science Education Department of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, located in charming Cambridge, MA. I walked by portraits of Famous astronomers who did important work there, and learned that the SDO has an office in the basement!  I can also see an observatory dome from my window so that's definitely a plus.

I think that's my window!

This week apparently has many exciting events in store, including take your child to work day on Thursday, and an Observatory Open House on May 1 as part of the week long Cambridge Science Festival!

Lunar Eclipse

A few weeks ago, Katie and I decided it would be a good idea to stay up all night and image the Lunar Eclipse! I must say I am pretty happy with the results, even if we did miss the very beginning and the very end. I think our first run through of processing turned out pretty darn nice! Check out the original image, and Katie's official NASM blog post about the process, too!

SUN UPDATE

Major breakthrough. On Monday, the wonderful amazing Greg Piepol who runs sungazer.net actually came to the museum and gave me and Katie a hands on tutorial for how to take pictures of the Sun. I learned how to better use Registax, how to use the telescopes better, and how to get a heck of a lot more out of the gimp.

I think the jumps between the last five days are kinda mind blowing.... see for yourself!

Sun, July 25th

I took this one the day before Greg Piepol came to the observatory, so I was still using some of my old techniques. This included, what I later found out, waaaaaaay overexposing the disk of the Sun to get what I *thought* were more details. The prominences don't look half bad, though! 

Sun, July 28th

Here I discover the true secrets of the perfect disk exposure. Some nice filaments there! Also, there is a large sunspot just creeping over the edge there...

Sun, July 30th

And, my favorite. Check that out. The big filament is there, the sunspot has gotten a lot bigger, AND a prominence even decided to show up. The disk detail is much improved (thanks to my new found understanding of wavelet processing in registax!) and I think my sun pictures are really starting to, ahem, shine! 

Mars!

The observatory is officially RE-open! One of the exciting things we did to celebrate this second coming was to hunt down an elusive daytime object: Mars! We pointed our good 'ol Boller  & Chivens telescope where we thought it would be and BAM, amazing, it was right there.

I snapped a picture through the main telescope, and came up with this fuzzy blob of a planet! It's not much to look at, but hey, it's Mars!

I must say I am pretty proud of this little blob. Daytime astronomical photography is HARD!

April Fools: Sun Gone Wild

Did I get anyone??

I meant to do even more posts as the day went on, but darned if "actual work they're paying me to do" didn't get in the way. Oh well. I was eventually going to blow up the sunspots until they were as big as the sun itself, and suggest that the government was going to launch some Sunshine-esque mission to save us all. Maybe next year!

----------------------------------------------

The Gigantic sunspots are even bigger now: and are growing by the hour! Looking through the telescopes thismorning you could  almost watch it happen! Crazy numbers of spots are cropping up everywhere. I've never seen anything like this before!

I managed to snap a quick picture after our sun observing session this afternoon. By then another group had popped up on the lower right. Look how much the two spots have expanded in just a few hours!

If the spots keep growing at this rate, I'm just not sure what's going to happen...

........
Check out the picture I managed to snap of the sun this morning!

I didn't quite believe my eyes, as this sunspot is absolutely massive. It's pretty close to a record breaking size, and quite frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if it shatters the sunspot record pretty soon! Yesterday, while we were doing solar observing, I'd estimate the sunspot  was about 2 times the size of earth: this morning it looks as if it's grown to about 8 times the size of earth! 

This thing is growing like CRAZY. 

I'll keep ya'll posted!

Sungazerade!

So, I decided I needed some advice when it came to what was going to make my solar photography even better. So, I turned to the creator of one of the best sites It'd visited so far to ask for help! Greg Piepol from sungazer.net was so incredibly wonderful, not only in helping me decide what focal reducer to use, but what software would make our pictures even more fabulous. He even gave me a quick photoshop tutorial that took my images

 TO THE NEXT LEVEL.

Before

After!!!!1

Holy Moly! Photoshop is the bee's knees!!! 

Also check out the Super Prominence transformation:

Before...

 ...and After 

Stay tuned. If I'm getting these bitchin' images from essentially a single frame, who knows what kinds of things will happen once I get RegiStax and LuCam Recorder going...

Hellz. YES. 

Purple Sun

Sunspot 1057 is large and in charge. It even managed to poke its way up through the chromosphere and show up in our Lunt Calcium-K telescope today! Apparently it's growing, too, and according to spaceweather.com, it has already unleashed a coronal mass ejection. Luckily, though, it's not headed towards earth, so no worries about any adverse effects on our home planet's magnetosphere.  

The sunspot is hanging out at the very bottom towards the left in this image. You can see it's actually two sunspots very close together. It's also quite big, my best guess is 2 or 3 earths long. Yikes. 

Here is a pretty awesome up-close image from Brazil. I'll work hard towards getting images like this one, honest! Someday. 

Also check out the rather large plage (pronounced like you're saying "blah" but with a p) on the right middle of the sun. That there's an area of hotter plasma hanging out in the chromosphere. You can see another small plage surrounding the sunspot as well!