Erin Space

First Day of Work at SAO!

2011-04-25T19:48:00.000-04:00

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

2011-01-02T17:43:00.001-05:00

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

2010-07-30T17:34:00.000-04:00

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!

2010-05-27T22:58:00.000-04:00

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

2010-04-01T09:38:00.005-04:00

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!

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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!

2010-03-26T15:39:00.004-04:00

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

2010-03-24T16:42:00.000-04:00

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!

SUPER PROMINENCE!!!

2010-03-20T20:25:00.005-04:00

I think the 3 exclamation marks in the title of this blog post is completely justified: Sungazers around the world have been overjoyed at the appearance of an ultra-big-superhuge prominence that has stuck around for most of this past week. At the museum, we managed to get a picture of the sucker on March 17th using our 60mm Lunt Hydrogen-alpha telescope and our Luminera SkyNYX 2-0 CCD camera.

Like our other pictures, we found we had to adjust the gain and exposure differently to capture the disk features and the prominence itself. We took one image that captured the details of the prominence (in which the disk was completely washed out red) and one that showed the details of the disk of the sun (in which the prominence was way overexposed and blobby looking). Then, I isolated the disk in the second image, stuck it on top of the beautiful prominence picture and bam! This wonderful image was produced!

This prominence is really totally huge. Totally. Though I didn't do the calculation myself, I saw on spaceweather.com that the plasma jet was roughly 20 earths long and 5 earths tall! Twenty of our planet could fit across that thing. Twenty.

2 days left...

2010-03-15T21:23:00.001-04:00

... to request your tickets for the Annual John H. Glenn Lecture at the National Air and Space Museum! This year the lecture takes place within the 40th Anniversary of Apollo 13, and so the guest speakers will include some pretty awesome people. The panel discussion will include Apollo 13 mission commander Jim Lovell, lunar module pilot Fred Haise, Apollo 16 command module pilot Ken Mattingly, and mission controller Gene Kranz. Should be so awesome.

Staring at the Sun

2010-03-13T10:03:00.000-05:00

Erin Space is BACK. I mean it this time. Yes.

So, at the museum, I've been tasked with figuring out the best ways to use our CCD cameras, and to take some photos of the sun in the process. So, I've done just that, and now I can show you all out there the fruits of my labor! This will all be posted on the official Air and Space blog soon, but not until we can get some more current pictures taken for posting soon after.

Here is an image of the sun that I took on February 18^th. I used a Lumenera skynyx 2-0 CCD camera attached to our hydrogen alpha telescope. This telescope reveals the sun’s chromosphere, filtering out all light except the red light given off by excited hydrogen atoms. This image shows the two large prominences that appeared on the sun that day. You can also see some surface texture on the sun, which is called granulation.

Now, in order to make it come out exactly right, I'll admit I had to photoshop this beast a bit. First of all, our camera isn't quite big enough to fit the whole sun in it's field of view. I had to paste together 4 different pictures to get this full disk view of the sun. One gigantic challenge was the fact that our telescope is much brighter on the left side of the field of view than the right, so the images were all different colors. It took a lot of experimenting with vector masks, but I finally got the colors to look halfway decent. If you look near the center left you can see some remainders of a wonky colored sun that would just not die.

If you're ever in downtown DC between 12:30 pm and 2 pm, on any sunny day except a monday, you should swing by the Independence Ave entrance of NASM to see the sun up close and personal for yourself!

Water!

2009-11-18T11:23:00.000-05:00

Woah. Remember when they bombed the moon about a month ago? The results are in. Apparently not only is there water ice on the moon, but quite a bit of it! Crazy stuff! The water could be used to extract hydrogen for rocket fuel, or even for future moon inhabitants to drink.

According to space.com, they found evidence of about 100 kg of water in the 20 meter crater, or about a dozen 2 gallon buckets. NASA wants to send astronauts back to the moon by 2020, and this water would make it a lot easier for them in terms of setting up a lunar base for long term missions. Blows your mind.

LEONIDS

2009-11-17T19:41:00.000-05:00

Hooray! A meteor Shower!

So last night Stevie, Jeff and I drove all the way the heck out to near Tuckahoe St Park, a Dark Site just over the bay bridge, to see the meteor shower! After a few snafus, we left DC around 1 am and made it to the lovely corn field around 2:15am, just in time to see the peak of the shower.

According to the handy-dandy FLUXTIMATOR (thank you Jeff!!), you can calculate what the shower will be like in the days, times and places to come!

It's really weird to think that all of those little bright streaks we saw last night come from specks of dust that are on average about 1mm in diameter! The leonid meteor shower's dusty bits are flung from the tail of the Comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle, and gives us a show around the same time every year.

The shower was pretty sweet. We even saw one that made a noise! Srsly. A tiny distant sonic boom. Twas the best night I've had in a long time.

Observing + Astronauts = a good day.

2009-11-16T15:08:00.002-05:00

This is for real this time. Check it. This is my first ever entry in what I hope will become my new EPIC SPACE BLOG. It'll be about rockets and other awesome science things too. All over the map. Yes.

Anyway, I think an appropriate first ever post will be in anticipation of tomorrow, which will be the first time that NASM's Public Observatory is going to

be open at night! We'll be able to hopefully look at the moon and Jupiter. Not much else, but that's downtown DC for ya. AND, if that wasn't awesome enough, astronaut John Grunsfeld is giving a free lecture on the significance of the Hubble Space Telescope. If you are freaking out and think this is as awesome as I do, it is not too late to check out the details and request free tickets!

Our observatory is so dope, even Galileo came to check it out. He insisted his telescope was still better, though. Right.

First post, over and out.