Star gazing

Well, tonight for the first time in a couple of months we've actually got clear skies here in West Cheshire. So tonight, in between spells on GC, I've been in the Observatory trying to calibrate the new ZWO camera with the main telescope, i.e: trying to find the right distance between the back of the scope and the sensor of the camera. I started from what is called the Prime Position which places the camera as near to the back of the camera as physically possible and tried to focus......but no go. Then I kept adding extension rings between the camera and the Telescope, 5mm, then 10mm, then the two together,........still no go. So I put on a 21mm.....still no go, so I added the 5mm and the 10mm extension rings to the 21mm...........and it's looking good as I got a sharp image of the Moon....at last!! Unfortunately, it has started to cloud over, [now there's a surprise] so I've had to halt the fine focusing phase, but at least I'm in the general focusing area

 

T

Thanks, lori. It is fun......if the weather will give you enough clear skies so you can do things that need calibrating and/or proving. But recently the cloud cover has been so constant that I felt like I was trying to wade through treacle!! Anyway, this one night has got me from no focus at all to being almost there. I need now to use the camera to focus on the Stars, tonight I was using the Moon, so that I can adjust the focus to get really tight, sharp Stars.........so another night of clear skies would not go amiss

 

We have a saying here in the UK.."Thick as two short planks"..........that was me as a Kid! I was going to add that that's the prime time, when you're a kid, for learning, but then I realised that we learn new things every day whatever age we are.

Now that's a good thing as it shows you have a "curious" mind, lori, and that stops you from taking all the wonders of this Good Earth for granted.

 

"A professional observatory in Greece has begun recording flashes created when bits of interplanetary debris strike the Moon.

The Moon's battered face bears witness to the countless times something has slammed into the lunar surface, and new craters (albeit very small ones) form all the time. Even these mini-collisions occur at 20 km (12 miles) per second, while the very fastest are 70 km/s. If the chunk of debris has a mass of at least a few tens of grams, it creates a momentary white-hot flash — and if that occurs somewhere on the Moon's night side, it's an observable event.


So far the NELIOTA project has captured 22 impacts on the Moon. Colors indicate the estimated temperature of each strike, from 1,770 K (dull red) to 3,730 K (white).
ESA / Chrysa Avdellidou

We have front-row seats for these crash landings, but they're rarely seen. Over the past 20 years only a handful of lucky telescopic observers on Earth have spotted one inadvertently.

In 2005, a team from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center started routine monitoring of the lunar disk using a network of 14-inch telescopes, particularly during annual meteor showers such as the Perseids and Geminids, and it's captured hundreds of flashes to date. Other monitoring efforts are MIDAS, operating in Spain, and ILIAD in Morocco.

Recently a new player has upped the scientific stakes. Since February, European astronomers have been staring at the lunar night using the 1.2-meter Kryoneri telescope on Peloponnese in Greece. This project, led by the National Observatory of Athens under a contract with the European Space Agency, has developed a special observing system called NELIOTA (short for NEO Lunar Impacts and Optical Transients). The 22-month observing effort records strikes down to 12th magnitude — far fainter than other programs can achieve.


The NELIOTA project records about a quarter of the lunar disk. Here an impact flash (right edge below center) punctuates the lunar night.
NELIOTA project

At this week's meeting of the AAS's Division for Planetary Sciences in Provo, Utah, researcher Chrysa Avdellidou (European Space Agency) reported that to date the system has captured 22 flashes. That's one impact per 1.8 hours of observing, compared to one per 2.8 hours for the NASA system.

The power of NELIOTA, apart from the telescope's large aperture, lies in using a beam-splitter to feed a 17-by-14-arcminute field of view to two high-frame-rate video cameras simultaneously. One camera records the lunar night in red light (R band, 641 nm) and the other in the near infrared (I band, 798 nm).

This combination captures longer events, lasting from 43 to 182 milliseconds, because the collision sites remain hot after the visible-light flash has faded from view. "You can watch the cooling of each impact plume," Avdellidou says.

Moreover, the two wavelengths provide a way to extract each impact's temperature and an estimate for the colliding object's mass.

But such calculations are tricky — partly because there's no way to know exactly how fast these interplanetary bullets are striking the Moon and partly because the amount of kinetic energy that goes into creating the flash (its luminous efficiency) is guesswork.


A sequence of frames, taken every 33 milliseconds (left to right), shows how a lunar impact flash disappears quickly in visible light (top pair) but lingers longer when recorded in near-infrared light.
NELIOTA project

So far, the flashes have varied from 1,770 to 3,730 Kelvins, a range that fits theoretical predictions well. Avdellidou isn't convinced that these blackbody temperatures are telling the whole story, however. So she wants to conduct a series of hypervelocity laboratory experiments in simulated lunar materials to see how the target's composition affects the intensity and duration of each lunar flash.

In the meantime, she's using mapping data from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to try to determine the composition of each impact site. This spacecraft is also very good at spotting fresh impacts on the Moon. So, with luck, LRO scientists can use NELIOTA's high-quality images to track down where some of the larger strikes have occurred — the "smoking gun" that would provide crucial links between an impactor's kinetic energy and the brightness of its flash."

 

"The better to see you with, my dear
NASA’s Mars 2020 rover will be armed with an impressive array of 23 cameras to help it analyze and navigate the red planet

This image shows a selection of the 23 cameras that NASA’s Mars 2020 rover will have. Though many are just drastically improved versions of the Curiosity rover’s cameras, there are a number of new additions as well.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
The first cellphones with built-in cameras were introduced to the market back in 2002. The first popular U.S. camera phone, the Sanyo SCP-5300, could capture images at 640 x 480 pixels, or 0.3 megapixels. For comparison, my current smartphone sports a 12.3-megapixel camera with the ability to shoot laser-assisted autofocus 4K video — and it’s already two generations old.

My point is that camera technology has taken a quantum leap in a little over a decade. And this hopefully helps illuminate just how mediocre (by modern standards) the five cameras on NASA’s Mars Pathfinder were when it touched down on the red planet way back in 1997.

Because cameras have shrunk in size, increased in quality, and decreased in price over the years, NASA has decided that the rover for its Mars 2020 mission will be decked out with more cameras than any rover that has come before it. All together, the Mars 2020 rover will have 23 cameras that it will use to study the Martian atmosphere and soil, reveal potential hazards and obstacles, create sweeping panoramas, and much, much more.

In 2021, when the rover begins its initial descent into the Martian atmosphere, six entry, descent, and landing cameras will switch on to capture the first video of a rover’s parachute as it opens on another planet. And as Mars 2020 approaches the surface, it’s Lander Vision System Camera will process images of the planet’s terrain with an onboard computer, guiding the rover through its landing.




Once on the surface, the rover will begin to both gaze upward and dig downward. SkyCam, which you may have guessed is a sky-facing camera, is part of the rover’s suite of weather instruments designed to study the Martian clouds and atmosphere. On the other hand, CacheCam is embedded within the rover and will watch as it collects rock samples and deposits them for later analysis.

Jim Bell, principal investigator for Mars 2020’s Mastcam-Z, explained in a press release that the new rover will also have much better color and 3-D imaging capabilities than its predecessor, Curiosity. Mastcam-Z is a much more advanced version of Curiosity’s two-camera Mastcam, which served as the rover’s main eyes. The “Z” in Mastcam-Z refers to the fact that the upgraded camera has a 3x optical zoom built in. With it, Mars 2020 can take finely detailed images of the Martian surface from up to a football field away.

With Mastcam-Z’s stereoscopic cameras, it can also capture more 3-D images, which are ideal for spotting potential samples or geologic features — like erosion and soil texture — from long distances. “Routinely using 3-D images at high resolution could pay off in a big way,” Bell said. “They’re useful for both long-range and near-field science targets.”

That brings us to Mars 2020’s Enhanced Engineering Cameras, which are built to plan out driving routes (Navcams) and avoid hazards (Hazcams). Though the Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity rovers have all had engineering cameras, they only captured 1-megapixel, black-and-white images. On the new rover, these engineering cameras will snap high-resolution color images with a whopping 20-megapixels.

Furthermore, the new Enhanced Engineering Cameras will have a very wide field of view, revealing more of its surroundings so it can optimize how it spends its time. “Our previous Navcams would snap multiple pictures and stitch them together,” said Colin Mckinney, product delivery manager for the new engineering cameras. “With the wider field of view, we get the same perspective in one shot.” To further minimize downtime, the rover’s cameras will also automatically reduce motion blur, allowing it to take photos while on the move.


In this artist’s concept, Mars 2020’s SuperCam blasts a Martian rock with its 1064-nanometer laser to vaporize a sample for analysis. While a microphone records audio from the disintegrating samples, the rover’s highest-resolution camera, the Remote Micro-Imager, will help directly determine the geochemistry and mineralogy of the Martian samples.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
Unfortunately, as is often the case, more advanced technology tends to breed more advanced problems. In this case, Mars 2020’s abundance of advanced cameras will likely produce an overabundance over data. “The limiting factor in most imaging systems is the telecommunications link,” said Justin Maki, deputy principal investigator for the Mastcam-Z instrument. “Cameras are capable of acquiring much more data than can be sent back to Earth.”

In order to handle the torrent of data these cameras will produce, researchers are focusing on two key issues: data compression and data relay.

Unlike Spirit and Opportunity, which compressed data using onboard computers, the more recent Curiosity rover used electronics within the camera itself to condense data before transmitting it back to Earth. This was a very efficient approach that researchers will implement again with Mars 2020.

To transmit that compressed data back to Earth for further analysis, NASA is planning to use existing spacecraft already in orbit around Mars as powerful relay stations. For the first two years of the Mars 2020 mission, the rover will beam its data up to either the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter or the Trace Gas Orbiter before the signal is boosted and sent to Earth for analysis.

With 23 modern cameras, each designed to excel at a specific task, the Mars 2020 rover is destined to return some of the most fascinating images yet of the red planet. But, when you consider how far camera technology has come in the past decade, it’s extremely difficult not to look further into the future, and dream about the technology that will be available for Mars 2030."

 

Just an update what is happening in the Observatory. After weeks of cloud ridden skies which stopped me from calibrating and finding the correct focal length needed to get the new camera into the focusing zone I've finally got there. So I've been taking every chance I've had, when clear skies happened, to fine tune the camera to get to the "sweet spot" which meant adjusting the focal length millimeter by millimeter, up and down, until I was happy. The sensor on the camera is really excellent and super sensitive picking up Stars, Nebulas, and Galaxies that I couldn't see with the naked eye. My telescope, due to it's focal length, see's only an area of space less than the width of my little finger because of the magnification given by pairing the telescope with the new camera and it's amazing just how many thousands of Stars, Galaxies, and Nebula I can image in one exposure of 5 to 10 seconds, and the longer exposure you take the more of the more distant Stars, etc, you see in just that tiny area. At the moment I'm just taking images randomly, just to get the feel of things, and not targeting any specific targets. Also with this set up I can only see a third of the Moon because of the magnification but am getting some close up shots. So, all in all, I'm slowly getting things together and will start to target specific Galaxies, Stars, etc that are prime targets for Astronomers. The only "fly in the ointment" at the moment is that the Laptop I'm using to record the images is running W10 and for some reason, when downloading onto a Flash Drive, my W7 Desktop won't recognise the download. No doubt, I will find a solution but at the moment I'm stymied.

 

That, lori, is so true I tend, when observing or taking images, to get "lost" in the darkness out there and actually feel that I'm out there. So seeing Stars, Galaxies, and Nebulas, while realising just how many trillions of miles away they are, always makes me, and the Earth, seem so insignificant.

 

That's quite a profound question and thought, Lori When I'm viewing through an eyepiece, [which is a completely different experience to imaging as it's more personal and immersive] I've, so far, done it in silence and real awe. No matter how many times I have seen Saturn through the scope when I view it the next time my brain does a flip, my jaw drops, and I'm totally stunned with it's beauty.


Imaging is a different experience as you're busy getting the Star, Planet, Nebula, into the centre of the image, making sure the focus is absolutely sharp, deciding how long an exposure, how many exposures, making sure that the scope is tracking correctly, the computer is set right, and that you don't "bump" the scope when the exposure is being taken then looking at the image to see if it's as good as you hoped it would be. So, mentally, you're busy making sure every things comes together and at the end of the session it's not been a waste of time.
I guess, though, either way, I'm listening to the "music" that, at the back of your mind, the Stars, Planets, Nebulas, and the Universe quietly orchestrates in the recesses of your mind. But I like the idea of earphones, Lori, and some music might be good for creating an "atmosphere"........although I'm not certain what music I would want.
By that I don't mean what song titles, I mean the type of music.