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Monday 30 August 2010

M92 – the other Hercules Cluster

Filed under: Photography and Art,Science — Chris Curtis @ 22:15

M92, originally uploaded by ThinkingCamera.

I made this image on a lovely late summer evening (28 August 2010) when the sky was extremely transparent, though the moon was rising and making the background brighter than I wanted.

This is M92: a globular cluster in Hercules. It is smaller than the great cluster (M13) but roughly the same distance from us, so is actually more compact. I like the way this image has caught star colour, but you can see the effect that fairly strong wind was having by vibrating the telescope.

Sunday 22 August 2010

Running between the rain

Filed under: Orienteering and Running — Chris Curtis @ 20:44

We had light rain for most of the morning and there are dire warnings of very heavy rain for this evening (which seems to have started now). There was an interlude around tea time so I decided to get today’s run in. Run 2 of Week 8 of the “Couch to 5K” programme. Run continuously for 28 minutes.

I was struggling from the first minute. Humidity was near 100% and the temperature about 24C – plus I was just out of sorts and lacking energy. I had to take a few walk breaks but did not stop – I was moving for the whole 28 minutes. Despite the lack of energy, I quite enjoyed plodding along in the cloudy gloom, all on my own.

This week I ran the longest total distance in a week so far this year – only 11km but things are moving in the right direction.

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Sunday 15 August 2010

Ouch!

Filed under: Orienteering and Running — Chris Curtis @ 10:01

No running this week due to injury.
On my last run I wanted to do the 25 minutes without stopping (which I know I can do) but see if I could cover 4km in that time or more realistically see if I could be at 2km by half-way. This would be closer to my “traditional” running speeds which have slowed down as I have lengthened runs.
I was going well. 10 minutes in I was at 1.6km needing a little push to make sure I hit 2km by 12.5 minutes. This was in spite of having to stop for nearly a minute until I could cross the main road. I upped the pace a little.
About a minute later I went flying. I was on a small country lane, barely one car wide and completely unexpectedly I was in mid-air then crashing half on the Tarmac and half on the verge, thankfully just missing the big pile of horse manure on the road. I came down on my knee and with one arm and hand under my chest. It took a minute or two until I was ready to get up. The surprise and loss of control were the worst feelings, as was feeling a complete idiot. I could not see anything that could have tripped me.
Anyway, after recovering a little, I ran back home, though a little slower. I did do 4km but in 32 minutes.
When I got home, I discovered that the knee was a mess. Lots of skin gone and dirty plus swollen and visibly bruised. My ribs hurt but nothing broken. More bruising.
The pain and stiffness were actually worse over the next days. No running.
A week later and the knee is good. Scabbed over and working fine without pain. The ribs are still a little sore on some movements but generally fine. Back to running soon but it knocks your confidence.

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Saturday 14 August 2010

A better M27

Filed under: Photography and Art,Science — Chris Curtis @ 23:58
M27 - the Dumbell Nebula

M27 - as imaged by me on 14 August 2010

M27 – the Dumbell Nebula – is in the small and inconspicuous constellation of Vulpecula (the little fox), fairly high in the sky in the summer. It is a planetary nebula. The star at its centre cast off most of its gas about 48,000 years ago, which has now expanded to be a shell about 1.2 light years across, still expanding at between 9 and 20 miles a second.

I only saw this for the first time about a week ago, observed visually, looking like a blob of grey fuzziness floating in front of a rich field of stars. My first attempt at imaging it caught lots of (inaccurate) colour, but was very disappointing. I had to try again.

This was taken with an Atik 16ic specialist CCD camera attached to my Celestron CPC800 telescope. With the help of a “focal reducer” the telescope is the equivalent of a  1260mm lens at f6.3. The telescope tracks the stars, but is in alt-azimuth mode so the view seems to rotate as the earth turns. This meant that I can only realistically take 30 second exposures without the objects blurring because of movement. I took about 20 of these and combined them using software. (Maxim DL) This gives the effect of taking a much longer exposure and allows you to “average out” random noise. Astrophotography is the lowest of low-light photography and images are always noisy – there is almost as much “random stuff” happening on the chip as there are photons hitting it.  As part of this processing, I took “dark” frames – images only showing what the chip is capturing without light – so you can subtract it leaving the light itself, which is what you want.

I am very pleased with this image. You can see the central star (magnitude 13.8) very clearly and if you look closely its companion is visible just below it – magnitude 17 (very dim indeed). Some photos show more detail in the gas clouds and more of the gas, but this one is a “keeper”.

Thursday 12 August 2010

Astrophotos

Filed under: Photography and Art,Science — Chris Curtis @ 21:31

Last night it was clear – though the sky seemed hazy, it was possible to see lots of stars. For the first time in many weeks, I put out the telescope and took images. I struggled with some tracking problems – sometimes the telescope tracked smoothly and sometimes not – with lots of dew forming on the correction lens, making everything dimmer and blurry and with imaging at the full magnification of the telescope (f10 instead of the f6.3 I usually arrange). All this made it much harder to get images, but I captured lots of new Messier objects to add to my personal catalogue and was really interested in some of them. A few examples of the images are here.

Globular Cluster The Wild Duck cluster The dumbell nebula

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