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La Silla Star Trails North and South
Fix your camera to a tripod and you can record graceful trails traced by the stars as planet Earth rotates on its axis. If the tripod is set up at ESO’s La Silla Observatory, high in the Atacama desert of Chile, your star trails would look something like this.
Spanning about 4 hours on the night of January 24, the image is actually a composite of 250 consecutive 1-minute exposures, looking toward the north. The North Celestial Pole, at the center of the star trail arcs, is just below the horizon in this southern hemisphere perspective.
In the foreground, the polished 15-meter diameter dish antenna of the Swedish-ESO Submillimeter Telescope (now decommissioned) shows star trails toward the south by reflection. Sweeping around the South Celestial Pole, the distorted arcs of those stars appear underneath the southern horizon in the focusing dish’s inverted view.
Right of the dish is the dome of the observatory’s 3.6 meter telescope, home to the planet hunting HARPS spectrograph.
Spitzer Discovers Largest Ring Around Saturn
NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has discovered an enormous ring around Saturn –?? by far the largest of the giant planet’s many rings.
The new belt lies at the far reaches of the Saturnian system, with an orbit tilted 27 degrees from the main ring plane. The bulk of its material starts about six million kilometers away from the planet and extends outward roughly another 12 million kilometers. One of Saturn’s farthest moons, Phoebe, circles within the newfound ring, and is likely the source of its material.
Saturn’s newest halo is thick, too –?? its vertical height is about 20 times the diameter of the planet. It would take about one billion Earths stacked together to fill the ring. The ring itself is tenuous, made up of a thin array of ice and dust particles. Spitzer’s infrared eyes were able to spot the glow of the band’s cool dust.
The ring would be difficult to see with visible-light telescopes. Its particles are diffuse and may even extend beyond the bulk of the ring material all the way in to Saturn and all the way out to interplanetary space. The relatively small numbers of particles in the ring wouldn’t reflect much visible light, especially out at Saturn where sunlight is weak.
Spitzer was able to sense the glow of the cool dust, which is only about 80 Kelvin (minus 316 degrees Fahrenheit). Cool objects shine with infrared, or thermal radiation; for example, even a cup of ice cream is blazing with infrared light. By focusing on the glow of the ring’s cool dust, Spitzer made it easy to find.
Jan. 31, 2012 — A couple of weeks ago I stumbled across some truly stunning photographs by German photographer Markus Reugels, part of his “Setup Liquid Art” series, depicting spherical representations of the Earth, Jupiter, and the moon, among other objects. The twist: they are “liquid planets,” comprised of a drop of water caught mid-fall.
And there’s no computer manipulation — these shots are real.
Reugels was kind enough to answer a few questions about his art via email. That’s how I learned that the father of two started doing photography seriously as a hobby around three years ago, initially just taking pictures as mementos for the family album. Soon he connected with the broader photography community, and became interested in taking pictures of “the beautiful things we are not able to see with our own eyes.”
Now, he lays parquet floors by day and works on his photography in his spare time. And his favorite medium is water. He dropped water onto various surfaces and figured out how to rig up a sensor-based trigger to his high-speed camera to capture its motion mid-splash, revealing all kinds of wonderful shapes that would otherwise not be visible to the human eye.
“Water can create beautiful shapes, but without high-speed photography we could never see them,” Reugels told the Daily Mail last year. (His shutter speed is a blistering one sixteen thousandth of a second.)
Reugels kept experimenting, first adding food coloring to the water and adding colored gels to his flashes to create an eerie glowing effect. Last year, in what he describes as a “personal milestone,” he figured out how to create “jumping spouts” so that the splashes were bigger, reaching between 3 cm to 15 cm in height. The secret? Adding sugar to the mix, along with a thickening agent (guar gum) to get even more bizarre shapes.
He got the inspiration for his “liquid planets” when he saw a photograph of Spiderman caught in a water drop. “I thought it would be great to place the Earth in a single drop,” he said. He used a satellite image of our pretty blue planet as a backdrop, and his high-speed camera setup captured the light refracting through the falling water drops. Voila! And then he extended the project to other planets, like Jupiter (above).
Of course, while the process seems simple, it’s far from easy. Everything has to come together at just the right moment, with just the right lighting, to create these photographs, and Reugel’s labor-intensive process requires a great deal of patience. While other photographers might boast fancier, more expensive equipment, he’s proud of what he’s been able to accomplish with his souped-up home apparatus and a boatload of creativity.
“The technical devices are only the key to bring your imagination into the pictures,” he says. We can’t wait to see what Reugels comes up with next.
Was the Moon Once Powered by a Dynamo Core? MIT Research Says “Yes”
MIT’s research on an ancient lunar rock suggests that the moon once harbored a long-lived dynamo — a molten, convecting core of liquid metal that generated a strong magnetic field 3.7 billion years ago. The findings, published today in Science, point to a dynamo that lasted much longer than scientists previously thought, and suggest that an alternative energy source may have powered the dynamo.
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