Galileo's Camera

When I was processing the photo of the Magellanic Clouds , I noticed that four of the photos had a light trail going across it. As these are long exposure photos, a light trail means a travelling object. The light streak - Composite shot of 4x10s There are many types of illuminated travelling objects in the night sky. They can vary from natural objects to different types of man-made objects. 1. Meteors The only extra-terrestrial natural object to make star trails on a long exposure photo like this one is a meteor. During a meteor shower, you will be able to capture many trails like this during the span of an hour. One of my wishes for a very long time has been to capture a meteor shower on camera. 2. Airplanes/helicopters/drones - flying machines There is a host of man-made objects that are not necessarily space borne that can cause a light streak. These include all the flying machines invented by man. In the past, these were limited to airplanes and helicopters. But than...

Magellanic clouds are two irregular galaxies that were once thought to be the closest galaxies to the Milkyway. The two galaxies are situated in the southern hemisphere and may have been first observed by the Khosians. However, the first written evidence of the two clouds appears in 964AD in a book by Abd al Rahman al Sufi. The Large Magellanic Cloud, which is not visible from his native area, was referred to him as Al Bakr, the White Ox. Today, the two clouds are known by the name of the explorer Ferdinand Magellan. LMC, SMC and Achernar - 13 shots of 15sec 5.6F 18mm. Canon 550D. Location: Kirindy Forest Lodge, Madagascar The Small Magellanic Cloud (NGC 292) is located around a declination of -72 0 , which means anyone beyond 18 0 northwards from the equator will not be able to spot it. The Larger Magellanic Cloud, which interestingly lacks an NGC (or other formal numbering), consists of a multitude of nebulae and globular clusters, and is located between the declinations -...

I've been using a Celestron NexStar4SE for about five years now and have tried photographing various types of sky objects. The best photos I have so far have been of planets. My rig for these have been the following: Celestron NexStar 4SE Canon 550D unmodded Celestron 93635-A T-Adapter for NexStar 4GT Celestron T-ring for Canon EOS camera Samyang 2x teleconverter Along with these and shooting on 640x480 movie crop mode on the camera, you can get pretty decently sized photos of the plantes such as the following. Saturn through Nexstar 4SE, Canon 550D via Samyang 2x converter and 640x480 movie crop mode shooting. However I always had doubts about the optics of the Samyang 2x converter. It was built to go with the Samyang 500mm mirror lens and wasn't exactly built for the purpose of astrophotography. My choice of replacement was the Celestron 2x Barlow. The Celestron 2x Barlow however comes with its own set of new requirements. While the Samyang 2x converter could ...

Supermoon was a term that turned up in various social media news items in the recent past. While obviously sparking an interest among the general public, it drew some criticism from prominent figures in astronomy like Neil deGrass Tyson ( http://time.com/5046984/neil-degrasse-tyson-goes-on-epic-rant-about-tonights-supermoon-calls-it-an-embarrassment/ ) on how the term is a major exaggeration of reality. What does supermoon mean? The term supermoon has turned out to mean that Moon appears bigger than usual. This happens because the orbit of the Moon around the Earth is not a circle, it is infact an ellipse. At its closest point to Earth, the Moon is about 360,000km away where as at its furthest, it is about 405,000km away. For comparison, the Earth it self is about 12,600km across (diameter). It looks like the Moon swings at least four Earths towards and away, and that is clearly a big swing. So why do the astronomers claim that it is not a big deal? While the difference in the...

In the recent times, the term "blue moon" has come to mean having two full moons in a month. The term "once in a blue moon" implies some kind of a rarity. The year 2018 is in that sense even more rare in the sense that there are two blue moons in the same year. But is it that much of a rare phenomenon? Having two full moons in a calendar month occurs due to a mismatch in the lunar calendar and our standard calendar. But before going there, let's get some basics in. What is actually the lunar calendar? or what is a lunar month? There are two ways to define the periodicity of a body like the Moon. This occurs because Moon revolves around the observer while the observer also revolves around another object. If we measure the time taken to do a full 360 degree cycle around the axis of the Earth, that period is called the sidereal period (or month). It takes 27.3 days for the Moon to complete this revolution. However there is a slight problem here. Sin...

The entire last year has been a disaster on this blog. For the entire year I managed only one post and that too thanks to an accidental spotting. While I am determined to make at least one post per month this year, I am not entirely sure how the weather would work out. Thankfully, the year started with multiple events of astronomical significance. The 1st January was a full moon day that causes some interesting religious/cultural effects in Sri Lanka. It was also a supermoon. But this post is not about that. The month of January this year saw another interesting astronomical event; planetary conjunction of Mars and Jupiter. A planetary conjunction is an event where two planets appear at a very small angle in the sky. In laymen's terms, the two planets look very close to each other. In the conjunction that happened in January, the closest apparent angle between the two planets was about 0.25 degrees. What does that really mean? That means something close to half the width of ...