Apod 2.7

Our milky way galaxy arcs of the desolate landscape of the Valle de la Luna in the Chilean Atacama desert. You can see the lights of San Pedro, Chile just along the horizon line, as well as Socaire, Toconao, and the road in between Calama and San Pedro. Also seen are the four galaxies easily visible from our fair planet's dark sky regions. At the far left, satellite galaxies known as the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds can be seen, as well as the much fainter, at the right, Andromeda Galaxy. The most farthest away, Andromeda lies some 2.5 million light-years away.

Apod 2.6

This photo of Europa was taken by the Galileo space craft in the 1990s while it was flying through the Jovian system. Scientists, using the newly

remastered images, this being one of them, have uncovered evidence that the moon's surface hides a deep ocean. The moon experiences tidal flexing in its elliptical orbit around Jupiter, which supplies the energy to keep the ocean liquid. And even more tantalizing is the possibility that in the absence of sunlight the process of the ocean being rotated by its orbit could also supply the energy to support life, making Europa one of the best places to look for life beyond Earth.  

Apod 2.5

In 1999, there was a sharp peak in the number of meteors during the Leonids Meteor Shower, in Europe. This specific picture is a 20-minute exposure ending just before the main Leonids peak began, on November 18. Seeable here are at least five Leonid meteors streaking above the Torre de la Guaita, an observation tower used during the 12th century in Girona, Spain. 2014 has a large amount of meteor activity, with the Leonids meteor shower peaking again, as well as a stream of debris left over from Comet Tempel-Tuttle.

Observation Post 5

Tuesday 
6th of January, 2015
        6:25 PM    South/ South-West
              Venus, Mercury
         6:26 PM
            Pegasus (great square) 

Wednesday
7th of January, 2015
        7:30 PM    North-East 
             Iridium Flare 
             Jupiter 
             

Apod 2.4

This image of a classic planetary nebula, NGC 6543, or more commonly know as the Cats eye Nebula, demonstrates a brief, yet beautiful phase in the life of a sun-like star. Scientists believe that this nebula's dying central star may have produced the simple, outer pattern of the concentric shells by shedding its outer layers in a series of regular expulsions. On the other hand, the formation of the more complex inner structures is not well understood. Although seen here very clearly in this sharpened Hubble Space Telescope image, scientists have very few ways of studying how this nebula grew into what it did. It is actually quite important for astronomers to discover the history of this nebula, for it is to believed that this may be the fate of our sun, destined to enter its own planetary nebula phase of evolution in about 5 billion years.

Apod 2.3

In Norway's Austnesfjorden fjord, close to the town of Svolvear on the Lofoten islands, whitenesses' had the grand opportunity to observe a spectacular light show. Auroras, as I have previously mentioned in other posts, are formed when emissions from the sun interact with the earth's atmosphere. These images were taken in early March, as our sun is approaching its maximum surface activity in its 11-year magnetic cycle. Due to this there has been an unusual abundance of picturesque auroras.

Apod 2.2

Not an actual image of a black hole, depicted here is a computer animation 

of what scientists think a black hole would look like if we were able to get up close to one. What we do know about black holes is that their gravity is so strong that light would bend towards it, as seen here, and would cause some very strange distortions. Also, there is evidence that black holes are the densest states of matter in the universe, and scientists believe that they can be found in stellar binary systems as well as globular clusters, galaxies, and quasars. This background was taken from the 2MASS infrared sky survey, with stars from the Henry Draper catalog photoshopped in. 

Apod 2.1

Focused in the central regions of the emission Nebula IC 1805, cosmic clouds form from stellar winds and radiation from monolithic hot stars. The nebula is the home to thousands of new born stars, which are formed within the Melotte 15. This image displays the Melotte cluster in the right hand side, in silhouette to around 30 light years of glowing atomic gas emitting ionized hydrogen, sulfur, and oxygen. Nubula IC 1805 is commonly known as the Heart Nebula, easily seen from a wider view than the one provided here by the Hubble Telescope. It is located about 7,500 light years away from the large constellation Cassiopeia.

Astronomer Biography 2

Joseph Fraunhofer

Fraunhofer was born in Straubing, Bavaria, in 1787, and was orphaned at the age of 11. He was taken in and apprenticed to Philipp Anton Weichelsberger, a unpleasant glassmaker, but in 1801, the shop where he worked collapsed while he was inside. Maximilian IV Joseph (the future king of Bavaria, Maximilian I Joseph) led the rescue operation, entering into Fraunhofer's life. The Prince provided him with books and forced Weichelsberger to allow the young Fraunhofer time to study.

Then in 1806 two other glassmakers, Utzscheider and Georg von Reichenbach, brought Fraunhofer to their Institute, a Benedictine monastery that specialized in glass making. It was there that he discovered how to make optical glass, as well as invent extremely precise methods for measuring dispersion. By 1818, he had became the director of the Optical Institute.

During this time, in 1814, Fraunhofer invented the spectroscope, and, while researching the light-bending properties of different types of glass, noticed dark lines in the light spectrum of a sodium fire. That bright line that had appeared in the orange color of the spectrum, led him to begin experimenting to determine whether the solar spectrum contained the same bright line in the orange like it did in the fire. Fraunhofer plotted hundreds of spectral lines, and by measuring their wavelengths found that the positions of the lines were constant, and didn't matter whether they were produced by the direct rays of the Sun or by reflected light from the Moon or planets. This led him to discover 574 dark fixed lines in the solar spectrum. Today we know that there are millions of such fixed absorption lines.

After his discoveries, in 1815, he designed several heliometers, that were eventually used by the German astronomer Friedrich Bessel, who made the first measurement of the distance between a star, 61 Cygni, and Earth. After studying the work of James Gregory, who identified the foundation of diffraction grating, and David Rittenhouse who invented the first man-made diffraction grating, he developed his own diffraction grating in 1821. Fraunhofer discovered that the spectra of first-magnitude stars, like Sirius, differed from the sun and from each other, thus founding stellar spectroscopy.

Unfortunately, like many glassmakers of his era, Fraunhofer died young, at the age of 39, due to heavy metal vapor poisoning.

The dark lines that Fraunhofer discovered were later found to be atomic absorption lines, as Kirchhoff and Bunsen explained in 1859. These lines are still called Fraunhofer lines in his honor and its said that his discovery went far beyond the few divisions in the solar system's spectrum that had been previously discovered.