View allAll Photos Tagged starmap
of "I have set sail on a fast mountain". I love how those double-zero paintbrush lines in the original size look so impossibly tiny in the smallest prints!
A super cute sterling silver origami bird corked bottle necklace! Measuring approximately 4cm and the bird suspended inside, which is folded from beautiful vintage print star map paper, measures approximately 1cm by 1cm.
You can check out my latest designs in my online store if you like! www.zibbet.com/tsuyu-designs
Library of Congress star map by Sidney Hall of the constelllations Psalterium Georgii, Fluvius, Eridanus, Cetus, Officina, Sculptoris, Fornax, Chemica, and Machina Electrica.
"The Jewel is of unknown workmanship. Some believe it traveled back from Campaign with one of the Lairds. Others say it is no a jewel at all, but a Star Map. Others, that it is a seed pod that will, one day, burst and spread its spawn across the Land."
Terra Firma Rotazion.
This photo is for my buddy Subho (Subharnab).
Taking a star trail was one photograph that I wanted to do in my Ladakh trip. Shubo had told me to take at least one over Panggong Tso. Well Panggong Tso was a different story for me, but this was in Tso Moriri. I had heard and read that the night skies in Ladakh are crystal clear. I have never seen so many stars, ever in my life. Never ever seen a galaxy with the naked eye before. Billions oh Billions and Billions of them. I wish i knew a little about astronomy, it would have been a delight. Had i knew that every minute i would see a shooting star i would have written down all my wishes from Bangalore. Some time its like the Diwali Fire works. We said about the wish stuff to Parvez and he had only one wish, "No more floods in Leh and Ladakh". Incidentally India's best astronomical observatory is located in Ladakh and Hanley (You need special permit to go to Hanley).
So what's the story about getting a perfect circle with circular lines among them. NORTH STAR !!
North Star had been the source for navigation for mariners as long as people have been sailing. Remember Caesar Saying "I am as constant as the north star of whose true-fixed and resting quality there is no fellow in the firmament.". When i was preparing for the start trail in Bangalore, i was amused to read that the star that we called North star gets changed after every 26,000 years. At present the North star is Polaris. So North star has been used for centuries to determine the longitude. Since the North Star is fixed in the horizon any celestial body around it would move in a circular fashion. All these for Northern hemisphere. For the southern hemisphere there is a South Pole Star too.
How do you locate North star ? its simple to locate. Its on the Northern sky. if you are an oldie like me, refer to this link everything2.com/title/How+to+locate+Polaris%252C+the+Nort... (While reading about the North Star before my journey to Ladakh, i was surprised to know that Ursa Major (Great Bear), Casseopeia were the only constellation that i knew). The geeky way is to use Samsung Galaxy andriod phone Starmap/starwalk etc.
The most difficult part of shooting the Star trail is to get the right orientation of the stars in the frame. This photo was taken during waning phase of the moon. That day moon rise was past midnight so i had some 2-3 hours to shoot this after dusk (Moon light spoils the frame for star trail). It's often difficult to get the frame orientation. I wish that my composition has a few trees on the ridge or may be some silhouette. That makes the picture very interesting.
Shooting : During dusk i had my tripod and camera set. I did use my compass to get the correct north direction and kind of got the frame that i wanted to shoot. Not choosing to shoot in Landscape mode was intentional because i was expecting the ambient light from the tents and ITBP (Indo Tibetan Border Police) camp. A couple of test shot and then 8 frames shot over 90 minutes amidst subzero temperature and crazy wind (I do not know how my friend Sankar Sridhar manages chadar trek every year and -25 degree centigrade and with another -10 to -15 degree of wind chill). The fingers goes numb. For the last 5 shots i went out of the tent for a minute to press the shutter release cable and then bumped into the tent below the quilt. I did not face any battery drain out issue. I wanted to do a 30 frame star trail beyond mid night, but had to give up as my nose was dripping, hand numb and almost frozen (yet there was no snow fall).
Post processing : This comprises of 8 raw frames each having 4 minute exposure @ ISO 100, with noise reduction on. The frames converted to JPEG and then was joined by software from www.startrails.de (Amazing FREE software). I did cropping of lower half of the frame, multi-layered curve adjustment so as to bring out the maximum number of stars, adjusting the sharpness of the image and decreasing the lens glare. (See each of this star has 8 dots)
Why b/w ? Some times presentation makes all the difference of the picture. Behind the ridge there is the ITBP camp which had some light and that strayed into the frame. The vapor lamps made the frame reddish. I had to crop a little bit of the lower half of the frame so that some of the other light emanating sources gets chopped off.
Can i shoot a star trail from my city ?
You have to move at least 100-200 KM from any of the major metro's to get a clear sky. The ambient light is too strong for camera to capture the stars. At Least in Bangalore i can hardly see a couple of stars in the sky.
Library of Congress image by Sidney Hall of the Constellation Perseus (complete with bloody sword), along with the head of Medusa.
Library of Congress star map by Sidney Hall of the constellations Camelopardalis, Tarandus and Custos Messium.
Messier 31 (M31, NGC 224) is the famous Andromeda galaxy, our nearest large neighbor galaxy, forming the Local Group of galaxies together with its companions (including M32 and M110, two bright dwarf elliptical galaxies), our Milky Way and its companions, M33, and others.
Visible to the naked eye even under moderate conditions, this object was known as the "little cloud" to the Persian astronomer Abd-al-Rahman Al-Sufi, who described and depicted it in 964 AD in his Book of Fixed Stars: It must have been observed by and commonly known to Persian astronomers at Isfahan as early as 905 AD, or earlier. R.H. Allen (1899/1963) reports that it was also appeared on a Dutch starmap of 1500. Charles Messier, who cataloged it on August 3, 1764, was obviously unaware of this early reports, and ascribed its discovery to Simon Marius, who was the first to give a telescopic description in 1612, but (according to R.H. Allen) didn't claim its discovery. Unaware of both Al Sufi's and Marius' discovery, Giovanni Batista Hodierna independently rediscovered this object before 1654. Edmond Halley, however, in his 1716 treat of "Nebulae", accounts the discovery of this "nebula" to the French astronomer Bullialdus (Ismail Bouillaud), who observed it in 1661; but Bullialdus mentions that it had been seen 150 years earlier (in the early 1500s) by some anonymous astronomer (R.H. Allen, 1899/1963).
For more information: messier.seds.org/m/m031.html
New interior walls with paint, new desk, cleaned and stained floor and some artwork and starmaps on the walls.
Library of Congress star map by Sidney Hall of the constellations Aquarius, Piscis Australis & Ballon Aerostatique.
Library of Congress star chart by Sidney Hall of the constellations Taurus Poniatowski, Serpentarius, Scutum Sobiesky, and Serpens.
Gundo suffered a catastrophic accident that resulted in an explosion and the deaths of all the employees aboard the station. - ARK Starmap
With this post I want to point out a new website that contains an important collection of interviews and essays from Michael Perryman. These provide a unique inside view of the development of space astrometry from before 1980 to the present spectacular success of ESA's Gaia spacecraft currently operating from the second Lagrangian Point orbit one and a half million kilometres from Earth.
His website also hosts an updated second edition of his Exoplanet Handbook published by Cambridge University Press in 2018 along with a number of fascinating essays on mathematics.
I provide a brief introduction to the story in the text below this URL for Michael's website:
***
Note: Added in May 2022.
On 24 May 2022 it was announced that Lennart Lindegren and Michael Perryman had jointly been awarded the 2022 Shaw Prize for Astronomy: "for their lifetime contributions to space astrometry, and in particular for their role in the conception and design of the European Space Agency’s Hipparcos and Gaia missions."
www.shawprize.org/news/announcement-press-conference-2022...
***
The story, an introduction
Michael Perryman worked for the European Space Agency (ESA) and was appointed project scientist for the Hipparcos space astrometry satellite at the early age of 26. Its task was to measure unprecedentedly precise positions of over 100,000 stars out to distances of several hundred light years using methods that were around 200 times more accurate than previous catalogues.
See:
www.cosmos.esa.int/web/hipparcos
and
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipparcos
The satellite was launched in August 1989 into a highly eccentric Earth orbit, ready for transfer to its intended Geostationary position. However, the rocket motor designed to achieve this orbit change failed to ignite, leaving the satellite to plunge regularly into the damaging Van Allen radiation belts. When all attempts to ignite the rocket had failed, Michael and the ESA operations engineers worked tirelessly to understand how to keep the satellite operating for as long as possible in its current orbit and how to redesign the entire programme of measurements to recover as much of the science programme as was possible.
With this heroic effort, the satellite lasted somewhat longer than its design goal of three years and the entire science programme was completed to levels of accuracy greater than expectations. The final Hipparcos Catalogue was published in 1997 along with a larger list of 2.5 million stars with somewhat reduced acciracy.
This catalogue represented a huge leap in our knowledge of the three dimensional positions of stars in our Galactic neighbourhood and it carried many profound implications for physics well beyond the field of stellar astrometry. Given the success of the mapping methodology, it was natural to think of a successor that would both greatly increase the precision of measurement and extend its reach throughout and beyond our Milky Way galaxy.
In collaboration with the prominent astrometrist Lennart Lindegren from Lund University, Michael pursued this idea which led to a proposal for funding being made to ESA in 1993. This was to construct a larger, more complex spacecraft that would become known as GAIA (Global Astrometric Interferometer for Astrophysics). This was eventually selected as a 'Cornerstone' of the agency's Horizon 2000 Plus long-term scientific plan in October 2000. Although the final design of the spacecraft was not actually an interferometer, the name Gaia was kept for project continuity. Michael subsequently led the project through its detailed design, technology development, and data analysis preparation through to his retirement from ESA in 2009.
See:
and
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_(spacecraft)
Gaia was successfully launched from Kourou in French Guiana in 2013 and is currently scanning the sky from a position some 1.5 million kilometres from Earth to produce a revolutionary 3D star map containing positions of around 2 billion stars, varying fractions of which will include other data such as colours, spectra, radial velocities etc.
Data collection is expected to continue at least until the end of 2023.
The story of the Hipparcos Mission is told by Michael in his book: "The Making of History's Greatest Star Map", Michael Perryman, Springer-Verlag, 2010.
link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-642-11602-5
Michael is currently producing a number of audio interviews with the scientists and engineers responsible for the realisation of both Hipparcos and Gaia. These provide a priceless documentary record of these two very major scientific space missions. He is also recording interviews with scientists who wrote some of the thousands of scientific papers already published based on the Gaia results.
Along with other material, including an updated version of the 2nd edition of the Exoplanet Handbook and a fascinating set of around 50 short (2 page) essays on relevant science topics, this material is now available on Michael's website:
The next Gaia public data release by ESA (Gaia Data Release 3) expected in June 2022, will take place within the 200th anniversary year of the death of William Herschel, marking a period that spans a remarkable developments in the history of mapping the sky.
Ever since I saw "Star Maps" for sale on the street in Hollywood, I have wanted to see a parody or mashup version that is an actual star chart as well as "movie star" gossip. So I had to make one -- this was my holiday card in 2021. The star chart was scanned from my collection.
My "Murmuration"tree for the "Ten Trees" exhibition as part of this years Jumpers and Jazz in July festival in Warwick. Ten artists have each taken one of the festival's well-known silhouette trees and turned it into their own unique artwork. At the Warwick Town Hall for the next ten days.
Cloudberries
cardboard
1,000 pieces, used and with one missing piece
68 x 48.5 cm
2022 piece count: 53,548
puzzle: 61
Annoyingly this vintage-style map of the night sky was missing a piece, as well as its full-size poster. Surprising, when the previous owner took the trouble to pack the pieces in a resealable plastic bag, often a sign that someone's a careful puzzler. On a more positive note, the matt finish proved pleasing to work with, especially under artificial light.
Library of Congress image by Sidney Hall of the constellations Delphinus, Sagitta, Aquila, and Antonous.
A pair of students look at constellation maps while others use a laser pointer to identify constellations at the astronomy department's 'dark site' far away from city lights. Photo by Robert Jordan/Ole Miss Communications
Edited Gaia visualization/montage of the best star map of the galaxy yet created.
sci.esa.int/gaia/60192-gaia-creates-richest-star-map-of-o...
Image source: sci.esa.int/gaia/60199-gaia-the-galactic-census-takes-shape/
Original caption: Gaia's all-sky view of our Milky Way Galaxy and neighbouring galaxies. The maps show the total brightness and colour of stars (top), the total density of stars (middle) and the interstellar dust that fills the Galaxy (bottom).
These images are based on observations performed by the ESA satellite in each portion of the sky between July 2014 and May 2016, which were published as part of Gaia's second data release on 25 April 2018.
Acknowledgement: Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC); Top and middle: A. Moitinho / A. F. Silva / M. Barros / C. Barata, University of Lisbon, Portugal; H. Savietto, Fork Research, Portugal; Bottom: Gaia Coordination Unit 8; M. Fouesneau / C. Bailer-Jones, Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg, Germany.
Copyright: ESA/Gaia/DPAC
Edited Gaia visualization of the best star map of the galaxy yet created.
Image source: sci.esa.int/gaia/60169-gaia-s-sky-in-colour/
Original caption: Gaia's all-sky view of our Milky Way Galaxy and neighbouring galaxies, based on measurements of nearly 1.7 billion stars. The map shows the total brightness and colour of stars observed by the ESA satellite in each portion of the sky between July 2014 and May 2016.
Brighter regions indicate denser concentrations of especially bright stars, while darker regions correspond to patches of the sky where fewer bright stars are observed. The colour representation is obtained by combining the total amount of light with the amount of blue and red light recorded by Gaia in each patch of the sky.
The bright horizontal structure that dominates the image is the Galactic plane, the flattened disc that hosts most of the stars in our home Galaxy. In the middle of the image, the Galactic centre appears vivid and teeming with stars.
Darker regions across the Galactic plane correspond to foreground clouds of interstellar gas and dust, which absorb the light of stars located further away, behind the clouds. Many of these conceal stellar nurseries where new generations of stars are being born.
Sprinkled across the image are also many globular and open clusters – groupings of stars held together by their mutual gravity, as well as entire galaxies beyond our own.
The two bright objects in the lower right of the image are the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, two dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way.
In small areas of the image where no colour information was available – to the lower left of the Galactic centre, to the upper left of the Small Magellanic Cloud, and in the top portion of the map – an equivalent greyscale value was assigned.
The second Gaia data release was made public on 25 April 2018 and includes the position and brightness of almost 1.7 billion stars, and the parallax, proper motion and colour of more than 1.3 billion stars. It also includes the radial velocity of more than seven million stars, the surface temperature of more than 100 million stars, and the amount of dust intervening between us and of 87 million stars. There are also more than 500 000 variable sources, and the position of 14 099 known Solar System objects – most of them asteroids – included in the release.
A complementary image showing Gaia's density map of the stars is available here.
Gaia's all-sky view is also available in equirectangular projection (suitable for full-dome presentations) here.
Acknowledgement: Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC); A. Moitinho / A. F. Silva / M. Barros / C. Barata, University of Lisbon, Portugal; H. Savietto, Fork Research, Portugal.
Copyright: ESA/Gaia/DPAC
Guide I used to find the Perseids on August 12, 2009.
Lower right: Perseus constellation (the source of the Perseid meteor shower trails). This was directly to the north when I was viewing them hours earlier, but was now NE (lower right).
Left: The Big Dipper and Little Dipper served as landmarks, at the time to the northwest.
Since I moved homes 3 months ago I have not had much chance to get the scope outside due to the negative 30 temperatures, last night it was around just below freezing. The warmest in months.
To set up the polar alignment I used my iphone with Starmap to align the CGEM with Polaris as I have a 2 story house to my north a few feet behind me, I hold the phone flat on the pole finder and move the mount to line up with the star on the center of the phone screen. It seems to have worked.
I converted my C-11 to the Hyperstar 3 for 560mm f/2, I used an IDAS LPS-P2 filter as the light pollution is still bad in my new backyard location, on the north edge of a red zone.
I took 10 raws @ 30 seconds ISO 400 and 10 @ 120 seconds ISO 100 Canon EOS 5d mkii un-modified. Low ISO due to light pollution.
Yes 2 minutes in Hyperstar configuration with no guiding. Minimal star trails.
5 min ISO 400 plus 20 mins ISO 100, 20 bias, 5 darks in “deep sky stacker”
My first attempt at the Orion Nebula from the edge of the red zone.
The blue haze is light pollution from my laptop
I flocked the inside of the OTA “Telescope” with prostar flocking recently. It’s like a black felt to reduce light reflections inside the telescope
Sterrenkaart van de zuidelijke sterrenhemel (ca. 1722–1750) by Carel Allard. Original from The Rijksmuseum. Digitally enhanced by rawpixel.
Patterns: Penrose or the impossible triangle (found in Beate Winkler´s "Das grosse Zentanglebuch", Masie by Carla Jennings, Starmap by Suzanne mcNeil, andTipple
String 007: tanglepatterns.com/2012/06/tanglepatterns-string-007.html
Edited illustration from the Rijksmuseum titled Sterrenkaart van de zuidelijke sterrenhemel by Carel Allard. A chart of the southern sky with interesting illustrations on the side. The sun in particular is interesting: note the northern hemisphere solar volcanoes...
"Cant stop the spirits when they need you, this life is more than just a read through. Can't stop the Gods from engineering, fear no need for any interfering. Choose not a life of imitation distant cousin to the reservation"!!!!! - RHCP
-Acrylic on canvas 16x24 inches
The environment map for this is a star cluster image from Hubble space telescope. I love the texture it gives the image. Created with Jux 1.2
Old star map of the southern celestial pole with all of the interestingly-named constellations. From the Rumsey Map Collection.
Celestia is an amazing space simulation program; it would be the perfect way of displaying the interstellar and interplanetary geography of 2300AD/2320AD. This is my current groping towards a working addon; it displays both 2300AD stars and the possible stutterwarp routes and allows you to explore them interactively - unfortunately still with some bugs.
This is a screenshot of a map, by Toronto Star web editor Patrick Cain using Google Maps, of Toronto's different neighbourhoods. The original is available here.
Celestia is an amazing space simulation program; it would be the perfect way of displaying the interstellar and interplanetary geography of 2300AD/2320AD. This is my current groping towards a working addon; it displays both 2300AD stars and the possible stutterwarp routes and allows you to explore them interactively - unfortunately still with some bugs.
IC1396 shows on starmaps as a large area of nebulosity in Cepheus, to the north and east of the North America nebula. On the western (right hand) edge can be found the Elephant's Trunk nebula.
Tech Stuff: First light for a combination of a nebula enhancing light pollution filter with a mono camera. Borg 71FL/Baader MPCC corrector/QHY163m/IDAS LPS-V4/Ioptron Cubepro 8200 guided. 20 minutes each of 8 second exposures for L, R, G and B, captured with SharpCap live stacks; processed with PixInsight. Several layers showed a frustrating amount of noise, likely a camera or camera settings issue. Unclear if there was any benefit here to the mono approach versus using the equivalent capture time with a color camera. Imaged from my yard 10 miles north of New York City.
Find any constellation on this 24" x 28.5" poster. This Star Map poster is great for anyone into astronomy. You can learn the major constellations over North America, Europe , and Asia. Lie in bed and see the constellations glowing overhead. With the lights on you see the major star groups visible from the northern hemisphere clearly identified. Turn out the lights and the lines and titles disappear while the stars glow brilliantly for approximately two hours! This poster is made on glossy stock with a dark blue background.
To See
Celestia is an amazing space simulation program; it would be the perfect way of displaying the interstellar and interplanetary geography of 2300AD/2320AD. This is my current groping towards a working addon; it displays both 2300AD stars and the possible stutterwarp routes and allows you to explore them interactively - unfortunately still with some bugs.