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The Night Sky Podcast | Juno Probe And Astrophotography
Hello, and thank you for listening to this episode of the night sky podcast. My name is Billy Newman. And I’m Marina Hansen. And we’ve been on a little hiatus for the last couple of weeks, there’s been some cool stuff going on in the night sky above us. And we’re here today to talk about all of it, we’re going to try and get into and break down a few of the things that have been going on. And we’re going to jump into some news. That’s current, we’re gonna also be breaking out to a couple different sections, we’re going to talk about some of the cool observations that we’ve been making. I’m really excited to talk about that. And then some of the other projects we’ve been working on too. So we’ll get all to all of that stuff through the show today. But But first, we’ll talk about some current events, some news going on. For for some skywatching stuff, some some astronomy news.
Yeah, I’m excited for it. There’s been some cool stuff happening during the month of June. And now that we’re starting July,
yeah. Yeah, I think it’ll be great. through July Yeah, we’re gonna try and pump out some more podcasts. For you guys who, who are still patient enough to listen to us put together a fun, nice guy podcast. But there’s, there’s a handful you guys out there. So really do appreciate that. Thanks. Any more comments? Or questions or suggestions for the show? You’re welcome to to send those drop those in a comment.
Absolutely. If there’s anything you’re interested in, let us know. We’d be interested to look into it.
Yeah, yeah, you can check us out at night sky.io. If you want some more information, soon, that will be developing into some of the cool stuff. That’ll be really fun. We have some interesting ideas about how we’re going to do some stuff. And we’ve been kind of working on some equipment ideas to expand a little bit of our operation here. Yeah, we’ve got some cool stuff coming. I think it’d be pretty neat. But other cool stuff that’s happening right now. We’ve got a new moon. That was back on the Fourth of July. That’s right. Yeah. So we had a new moon then now I think, like, as of yesterday, it was in the constellation of Leo. And then tonight, it’s probably I think it’s a it’s probably real close to Jupiter, I figure this evening. I should have checked that. But it’s probably up real close to Jupiter and moving on and toward Virgo, I think eventually over the next day or so if it’s not already there at that line tonight. But she got Jacqueline. Well, you know, it’s cloudy here. And I’ve had this foul of overcast, which it seems to have been part of the weather pattern for the last two years, which is probably within within this week or so. Yeah, it’s it’s interesting how that goes. Even though we’ve had a lot of different differences between this year and last through the weather pattern over the Northwest like, like last year, it was incredibly dry, a huge drought on the west coast. And this year, it was sort of an El Nino year, so we had quite a bit more rain. I think even than a normal year. I’m not totally sure about that. I think California was still having some some difficulties from it. As it goes in Oregon, I’m pretty sure what I’d heard is that the water level for a lot of the reservoirs was already replenished early in the year with the amount of rainfall that we had.
Yeah, I believe that it I noticed it with some of the camping that we’ve done recently. Just not in Eastern Oregon, there was more
total evidence of it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like, like we’ve seen, you know that there’s a dry lake bed that we’d been to before, even earlier. And man, it was bone dry, and he could just drive out your car. And this year, which it may have been even a decade two decades since that had standing water in it since you know it’s been wet enough in that area to collect water to pull up in that spot. It just filled right back up. It’s still a drainage basins for that, that natural area out there. And it just collected a lot of water after the rainfall and now there’s a lot of vegetation in it and a lot of like wildlife. It’s about a frog. Yeah. A lot of frogs a lot of birds that were pulled into it. Yeah, that’s really interesting. Yeah, very interesting. Yeah. Those frogs. Yeah. Where do they come from? out in the middle of the desert? How does a frog get to your pond? Hmm. 100 Yeah, ton of frogs that I know that reproduce fast, but Gosh, there has to be like one frog that gets there. Anyway, though, rain again? Yeah, this year, Rainy Day this year. And so yeah, this weekend has been rained out. So no clear skies for us tonight. But I think by Monday again, we’re back up and running with clear skies in the forecast. So we’re going to be doing more observations after that. We can check out where the full moon is or where the crescent quarter moon is a Monday Tuesday. That’d be cool. Like it says observation. So last episode, we got into talking about Mars going into retrograde as it was coming into its position of opposition to the earth you remember that I was at its brightest magnitude, really bright, stunningly bright. It was really cool being out in Eastern Oregon, where we just Talking about out buy that dry, dry and then now wet lake bed that we were able to take some some cool night sky photographs of the southern sky of that section of Scorpio and Mars and Saturn in the galactic center center as it kind of moves over into Sagittarius. I think that whole section of the sky is really like one of my favorites. It’s really cool. I’ve always appreciated. Yeah, there’s so many first magnitude stars in that area are just bright objects and interesting things. And there’s just kind of tighter collections of stars. And that area is a really interesting part of the sky. Whereas in contrast to that in just a couple months when we’re at a point, and I don’t know, September, October, there’s going to be that section after this after the galactic center kind of passes by. And then there’s this big dearth of first or second magnitude stars for a long time, once we get into Capricorn, and Aquarius, and then past that, when you look into the southern skies, the year kind of moves on a few things kind of change, and you move away from from the plane of the galactic center that are that the plane of the Milky Way that we see. And there’s less and less stars out past that. So I think it’s like family Oh, is the only bright star. And I think that’s still like a second magnitude star. Oh, and it’s way out there. So So this time of year, the southern sky is the coolest, and getting like all these really bright planets in the southern sky right in that spot. That’s really cool during during opposition, it’s a really cool time to have it. And it’s just a really active and easy to observe time. So it’s been kind of cool to to get to check out.
Yeah, it’s been cool. It’s been the unseen Mars new round.
Yeah, that’s been the coolest thing. So now, we’re really most of the way through that cycle. If anybody had been listening to the podcast, we’d been talking about Mars going into retrograde. And that was at just after its point of opposition and its brightest magnitude point, when we were able to see it, I think, right in that last week of May and first week of June. And we saw it now over the last month move really significantly during its course of its travel or its transit in retrograde. So what we size, we watched Mars, moves into Scorpio, real close to Saturn and then drop into retrograde and really quickly move back out past on the end to shuba, the stars that are kind of that head of Scorpio and then work its way out past that into I think, like Libra, the small stars that are there and just sort of, you know, further up into that area of space over there. So it really made a really significant amount of distance, just in a couple weeks. I mean, I think you saw even just with those photographs that we took, you know, we photographed in an opposition. And then just went two weeks went by and we looked up again, we like Oh, wow. You know, notice how different it is for this picture, we just took really how much transit that really is how much space is is now in between the the front edge of Scorpio and the position of Mars now you can really see physically each night at really progress is much further in retrograde, back, back and back. So that’s a really cool part to really see the motion and observe at night overnight overnight.
Yeah, it’s really interesting. just noticing how much you really can see that it’s moving.
Yeah, yeah, it’s very interesting. And so the benefit is, if you haven’t paid a ton of attention to that motion, as of this point, the good news is that that’s going to continue for the next month, may know maybe next two months. So the difference now is we’ve just stopped the retrograde motion, it’s no longer moving retrograde, it’s now reversed, and it will be moving in pro great motion. And this means that all move in, in the same method, the same kind of understandable comprehension as the way that the sun or moon moves through the sky or the rest of the celestial bodies that we look at in their proper motion. So it’d be cool. It’d be cool to check out. But right now, it’s interesting as it gets really close to that curve, where How would I describe it like Mars is in retrograde motion up in through the last week of June. And then it really moves significantly. It during that space that it’s really transiting but right as it gets to that point where it’s going to, it’s going to come around, and then start moving back and prove great motion, it’s daily advancement through space seems to slow. So like the last 10 days or so, it’s really not moved very much physically in space, as its ended as retrograde motion and then come back around into pro grade motion. We don’t really see a lot of changes. And it’s kind of interesting. I’m not wholly sure why why the effect of it times out to be that way. But the interesting thing is now after maybe, let’s say the next seven days, we’re gonna see a more significant amount of advancement night overnight, as we see Mars really move a significant amount through that that period of time. Oh, it’s interesting at Sloan and it is yeah, it’s back. That’s sort of weird. thing about about retrograde motion and what took so long to kind of understand that it was just as kind of pulling up alongside the planet, and then moving away from it. And so once we move away from it, it’s significant amount again, it will slow. It’s it’s prorate motion advancement, it just won’t move as quickly through the sky. At least in relationship to the stars behind it, which is sort of our perspective to Mars changes the stars behind it. It’s really weird when you start thinking of it in that way. But But yeah, there’s there’s definitely some interesting things that the Mars is going to do over this next month. So the exciting thing is we get to watch it now. peculiar thing now after a month, after month, since it was at opposition, and at its brightest, it’s now half as bright or I think, like a whole magnitude less bright than it was before. Oh, wow. Yeah. So it’s probably a plus one point something magnitude right now. And it’s brightest. I think it was like a plus to four or five. Or is a native first magnitude, like a negative one is probably Yeah, is brighter than a first magnitude. It’s like first magnitude. And then like a negative first magnitude. It’s like a number line, you know, like, fifth. Fifth is the damage, then fourth and third place, then second place, first place, and then things better than first place get brighter. Yeah, so like the sun is like is the big it’s like a 24 or a negative 24 magnitude. Venus is like a negative four. And Jupiter can hit like a negative three or something.
That’s interesting. Yeah, gone down by a whole magnitude. And it’s damning because it’s moved further,
it’s moved further away from us. Yeah, it’s just wolf wine. It’s not an opposition to us right now. Which is, which is the best time for us to view it just because it’s gonna be straight straight out from it, and probably at its closest position to the earth. That’s, if you’re thinking two dimensionally and circularly. There’s, there’s a little elliptical eccentricities to both of our orbits, that mean that they get closer and further apart, depending on which part of the cycle we’re coming into a pass at. So that’s why there’s some variability like why they say, two years from now, it’ll be closer than it was this year, or whatever they might say about it. So there’s a few reasons for that. But when a planet is at opposition to us, that means it’s probably closest to us, because it’s kind of in line, the sun, then our planet, and then the next planet like Mars, or Saturn, or Jupiter, or whatever it might be. When I said opposition, it’s straight out from the sun from us. And let’s say like, you know, even you and I were thrown a ball back and forth, or something, if you were there, it’d be closer than if you’d kind of spun out another 45 degrees to the side. And you were further away further down at that point. So I think that’s why well, and that’s part of why it shows up. It’s brightest. But, but it was great. It was great. Being able to view it as brightness, and then kind of watch it get dimmer over the last period of time. It was very cool. Seeing how bright it got. Yeah, probably what yeah, definitely, just a super apparent object in the sky. It was really cool. Like how, how present it was just as, as a sunset, you really just see this big orange orb. Yeah, rise up in the southern or south eastern sky,
it really would catch my eye pretty immediately every time I go outside.
Yeah, I thought it was, it’s always really cool. I’m always really excited by that sort of stuff. But over the month, we’ve been able to see a handful of planets up in the southern sky. That’s been really cool. just observing overall, like we talked about Jupiter, I think is still out in Leo, which is going to be setting this month. So I want to try and get as many observations in of Jupiter as we can to now there’s Saturn, which is, which is doing some cool stuff. We’ve passed Saturn’s opposition on June third. And so that was a period that Saturn would have been at its brightest, to us or in its probably its most optimal observational period, because it’s going to be up when the sun will not be at the sort of big thing of it for a while to observe something that opposition means that the sun is going to be high noon on the other side of the world. And so it’s going to be the darkest part of the sky that that plan is going to be in. So it might be a little bit easier to observe when it’s at opposition. And the cool thing about Saturn right now, at least at this part of our relationship to the two orbits. Do you remember this how we talked about this before how Saturn’s rings are tilted toward for us? Right? Yeah, remember that? Yeah. And that’d be really cool. And we only had a little bit of a chance to remember when we were looking at the telescope at Saturn tech to really observe that just because the resolution that we have, it isn’t strong enough. at all, yeah, it
was cool. Being able you can see it, even with a terrible, terrible kids telescope from the 90s. Yeah, so see Saturn’s rings
pretty well. It’s cool. Yeah. And those are the discoveries that, that people hundreds of years ago were making to and the resolution they were able to have. And so it’s so fun that, you know, we get to have the fun of that experience of getting to kind of feel it and observe it the way, the truth of it the way that it really that it does exist, those moons out around Jupiter do exist, they do revolve. It’s really cool. And so we get to make those discoveries ourselves. But we also get the back that with all this really cool science now that we have. And I think that’s a really exciting part of it. And there’s some cool science news to get into also, but with Saturn. As we just talked about Mars, Mars has been in retrograde, it’s now stopped retrograde, and it’s swinging back around and heading back east wordly towards Scorpio. Saturn has also been in retrograde. But Saturn is retrograde motion is really quite a bit different and not as observable as or as powerful or as interesting as the Mars retrograde motion. And so, I don’t know, if you’ve been able to see I really haven’t been but Saturn is doing really what it ends up being essentially a really small little backtrack just just a few degrees remaining in the same constellation of Scorpio. And it’s just kind of rolling a few degrees up, and then back in procreate motion, but it’s doing that over a much longer period of time. And that’s probably why we haven’t seen that significant amount of motion, you know, in moving and tracking backwards along the ecliptic for you know, a whole constellations worth of space. We haven’t seen that, but what we are seeing is between the periods of March 14 of this year, and then August 2. So we’re coming up to the end of the retrograde motion. My Saturn, excuse me, is in retrograde in Scorpio in the southern sky. And and then after that, on August 3 it starts its programmed motion again. And I think we’re going to kind of watch it over the year. Probably you know, into the fall as a Scorpio and Sagittarius start to set we’re gonna probably see sad instead but we’re gonna see Saturn work its way back to the to the animal of Scorpio and then back into Sagittarius. And we’ll see it there for I guess probably like next year, we’ll observe. When Sagittarius comes back up in the summertime, we’re going to be able to see Saturn sitting back another constellation. And it’d be fun to when we get a year into it. We see like, oh, wow, look at how everything moved around. Yeah, that’d be really interesting to see what things are kind of in the same spot where things are drastically different spots. That’ll be pretty cool. But we’re talking about, about a lot of the science stuff that makes it really interesting now, how, how we get to make these discoveries with the telescope that we have. That’s real similar in design, and in essentially in resolution is what people a few 100 years ago had like Galileo and Simon Marius, when they’re first making their observations of Jupiter, we get to do those same kinds of really fun experiments, we get to see those things and you know, kind of make some deep sky analysis or, you know, investigation, we get to kind of run those experiments ourselves. And I really like getting to do that. But we also get to back that up now being in 2016, we get to back it up with incredible scientific data and results in imagery that are from all these really cool probes that we sent out into space now, during the last century that have been able to collect real photographs or real images of all these planets. Yeah, I mean, like, I think it was just, just last year, we finally had photographs of Pluto for the first time. Yeah, I thought that was fun. Yeah, I remember in high school, they didn’t they didn’t have photographs of Pluto. We just had a little white sphere in the text. said yeah to be and as they gave us their best picture, which was like a like a fuzzy blown out dot surrounded by blackness. There wasn’t any Yeah, it was nothing. So so it was really cool. You know, we have really high definition images of Pluto, Saturn of Uranus, and Neptune. Really cool stuff of Mars and Venus and Mercury. And we just had news that all this cool stuff is going to be happening with Jupiter. Right? And so it’s really cool. Yeah, the Jupiter or the was Juno. The Juno probe has just arrived at Jupiter, which is really cool to think about, you know, when you look at Jupiter tonight, and you’re like, well, we like a few years ago, shot something there. And did you hear about how big it is?
You were telling me something around like a basketball court.
That’s what they say. Yeah, it’s almost a basketball court. I think I think it was like a long cylinder and you know, and then there’s two wings that kind of like fold it out. I think there’s a solar panels you know, they fold it out, as that’s probably where The radius is something like, you know, or like that the essential part of the of the equipment is probably much less than that. But I think the spread the wingspan of those solar panels is probably near basketball
court. It says, That’s huge.
It’s really big. Okay. So in contrast to that, that’s 2016. That’s we have there now. And it’s really interesting. There’s a lot of advancements that we’ve made. And to kind of compare it. I was thinking about, as Juno arrived, I think it sent this tweet out, and it was, it was at the proach to Jupiter, and what you could see were the four Galilean moons, kind of doing their orbit around Jupiter. So we could kind of observe the motion of the moons, as Juno was approaching, you know, the days in advance of Juno getting to Jupiter. And the cool thing is, is that back in the 70s, the Voyager spacecraft did did basically the same thing. And so we had these old, I think it was a chairman. He was the leader when we said if you were to Jupiter, but this but but I remember like, yeah, that the first images of Jupiter coming from Voyager, and seeing like what they had back in 1979. When they sent those two spacecraft out, and those really did, I think they might have done an orbit there. I’m sure they had some some tricky ways of getting into orbit and then slingshotting out of orbit, to kind of continue on amazing how Jet Propulsion Laboratory to figure that sort of stuff out well beyond me. But it’s really cool. I think, for Voyager one and two, I wrote down it was March 5 1979, which seems ancient, right? Think of think of the truck that you would have bought a new car lot in 1979. And that being the same technology that built a spaceship,
to Jupiter,
it just seems so different now. Right? You’re like, way easier to get it spaceship to Jupiter with a 2016 truck. But, but yeah, so March 5 1979. That was there was a voyager one as it passed Jupiter. And I think it had something real similar to what we were talking about this images of the moons revolving around Jupiter. And then it was Voyager to July 9 1979. And that was when we got these, these really cool, you know, some of the first digital images that were transmitted back to Earth, they were actually physically of that planet from that planet. And that was a really cool experience, especially for Jupiter. You know, since it was such a fascination for a long time, since like Galileo and all the astronomers at that point, since had been looking at Jupiter through some resolution, we got to see the bands, we got to see the storm, but you know, it’s not there, it’s not closer, it’s not more than that, you can get a lot, you can get a really good view of Jupiter through through a nice telescope. And now with modern technology, or or say, I don’t know, turn of the century technology 100 years ago, there’s probably really cool views of Jupiter that you could optically see. But now, we have all this imaging equipment, all these screens and all these ways to kind of blow it up, you can see it in a way that that people really could never have done before. So the cool thing is with Juno, we get so many technological advancements, it’s it’s just a much more advanced mission. And it’s more specific to Jupiter itself. Like a few other trips in that area had been but there’s a lot of scientific research they’re going to be able to do now. Because this Juno probe is there. And I think you’re probably checking this out, too. It’s there to observe auroras. Do you hear about that? Right? Yeah, I don’t know just a little bit about it. It’s interesting i into the the part of that that’s a little different. It’s, it’s essentially just a lot of, there’s, there’s some soft selling that’s going on in the media around, you know, from NASA, you know, like, we’re sending Juno there to unlock the mysteries of our solar system. And that’s a way to do it. The scientists did not write that when they pitched the idea. They have very, very specific outcomes that they’re trying to get and exact goals or exact experiments that they’re trying to prove or disprove that may in then interpret the meaning or the connection of our planets in the solar system at its dock. But there’s some other cool stuff. It’s like the more practical pieces that we could talk about, and that would be like the the Aurora photography, or I don’t know if it’s photography, but Aurora imaging that they’re trying to accomplish. So there’s a handful of different sensors that are on there, there’s a doc or a Yeah, it’s a documentary online. If you look at Juno probe documentary, I’m sure I’m sure to pull it up. It’s like an hour, I think NASA produced it. And it really goes through specifically with all the key players involved, about the different imaging modules that are built into Juno. And that’s sort of what it is. It’s all these different teams that have these experiments to run with their imaging equipment. And then that’s built into Juno. So there’s a team that wants to do Aurora photography, so they have or, you know, storm photography or something Like that, so they have this infrared and visible light camera, they’re going to be taking these really detailed and close up and faraway images of Jupiter to kind of do stuff that we hadn’t really been able to do before with perhaps there’s these other things that are like these, these radiation collectors, like as the craft rotates as the probe rotates around, it kind of picks up this 360 degree field. Radiation is supposed to be calibrated to be understood, and you’re gonna get some kind of radiation level of what, whatever’s going on around Jupiter. But there’s a whole bunch of different systems that are there. And yeah, it seems like a lot. Yeah, there’s a there’s a bunch of different pieces.
Did you? Did you see when they started, Juno? Oh, you know, I’m not sure. I should look that up. Yeah, I was thinking I that’s part of the information. I don’t know.
Gina was launched August 5 2011. According to NASA, I guess they did it. They might know. August 5 2011. To what, July sixth? Third, third or something? 2000? Yeah. 2016. That’s a long ship to Jupiter. But yeah, that’s what it takes is so interesting. It’s really interesting. It does that. But yeah, they’re gonna do Aurora photography, I think they’re trying to understand a few of the pieces of why a charged particles do that as a phenomena in the upper atmosphere planets. So it’s interesting, I mean, that I might be able to do some of that here too. But it’s cool. I think I think Jupiter is one of the other areas that has these really strong Aurora fields that they’re going to be able to take images of that the new thing about Juno is that all of these other craft these probes that we’d send to Jupiter, they weren’t really able to move past their equitorial orbit. So the orbit that would be essentially around the E quatre of the planet. And that’s why we get these kind of face on images, sort of running north pole, the South Pole. And now what we’re going to be able to do with greater flexibility with Juno is make images from the Arctic Arctic Circle area, like, you know, up at the 4940 parallel, of Jupiter, so we can be up higher, and kind of look down at like, where Alaska would be, you know, if we were kind of matching stuff on on Earth. So we can kind of move the SAT or move the probe up to be doing more photographs of the polar regions, which is going to be cool and specific to this Aurora photography, or these Aurora imaging projects that they’re talking about. And in the storm imaging projects, they’re going to be looking into, like how these different gas storms really work, or, you know, if they’re changing, they’re just gonna be able to do these more intricate observations of them. And I think what I was hearing is that they were trying to pull a lot of information from amateur astronomers to apparently, Yeah, apparently, there’s a lot of it’s, I mean, it’s maybe marketing, but they’re what they’re going to be doing, as I understand it, is making these observations of these specific storms. So we know about like the big red spot on Jupiter, right? That’s one of the storms, there’s also there’s a number of other storms that are observable with with amateur equipment. And depending on the time of year, the time of the observation. But there’s people that do track this stuff, and serious astronomers and scientists to track the stuff that don’t have a probe at Jupiter. So they’re trying to take this data about what the storms are like, or which ones are interesting or have interesting features. And I think they’re trying to get these. They’re trying to collect data on those storms, or the systems and demonstrate or see how they’re modeled. See how they work. If they’re working kind of the same as they do here on earth for us, or if they move quickly, you know, that sort of stuff. So
that’ll be really interesting. Yeah, to see the results from some of those studies they’re doing
Yeah, I think, what’s that called the Coriolis effect? Have you heard of that before?
I feel like maybe I’ve heard I recognize the name, but you should tell
the Coriolis effect is shoe i don’t i don’t know that’s gonna be really verbose. As I say, the Coriolis effect is the effect caused by the rotation of the Earth, the spinning of it during the day and and what that causes basically, is whether or banding so you know how, like when we were in Hawaii for our cool vacation when we got to see Konopka if you guys want to go back and check out episode nine, you’re gonna have the night sky podcast. When we were back in Hawaii, we were looking at cannabis out in the southern sky, we were, we were further south. And so in that area, we had exceptionally good weather. But they talked about the trade winds that would come through, right, and so those bands they run, let’s say westward, but then on the other side of the equator, they would run eastward. And so this opposite rotation of a banding that doesn’t happen at the equator. Does that make sense? So you get these weather patterns to kind of build out over a spherical shape as it spins around. And sort of like if you would imagine, I don’t even know if they have something like this. But, but like, if we had a sphere here on the table, and or like a ball, you know, when we wanted to spin it like a top or you want to spin around, and let’s say there was like, a layer in it, that was sort of a fluid, kind of a mixed fluid that was different colors that was separated, as you’d spin it, you would see those kind of by force by centrifugal force, they kind of pull, and they sort of spin around. Sure, it’s sort of like, you know, not mixed in, but they’d almost really through this through the Coriolis effect, at least in zero gravity, that sort of separate out from each other makes it they’ve been different materials at the top different materials in the center, and different are in the mid ranges, and the different material at the equitorial range of the scent at the mid level of it, just depending on its density, and on the rotation and a lot of stuff. But that is what we see when we look at to Jupiter, and we see these bands, which is really cool. So that’s why we see the different sectional divisions of material, you know of color on Jupiter when we look at it. That’s really interesting. Yeah, it’s caused by this Coriolis effect. That makes weather banding.
Why do we see on Jupiter not other planets as much?
That’s a good question. I believe? Well, most of the planets don’t have atmospheres in the ways that ours does. So I guess we we do observe it on Venus. But it’s but but you can’t observe it because it’s all the same color. It’s just an it’s a it just seems brown or tan, green. And mercury doesn’t have an atmosphere. Mars doesn’t really have an atmosphere that would demonstrate it. Jupiter is a great example of it. We do see banding in Saturn. But from or you know, from a telescope perspective of it really does also look tan and the best observable pieces there are like the rings and the moons that you can see around Saturn, i think i think i think like Neptune, you see the banding a little bit, but the light blue and the dark blue? Sure. Yeah. It’s hard to see the best example would be would be Jupiter or B Earth, you know, here for us to kind of see like those those weather patterns systems that move east west. But it’s kind of cool. Yeah, it’s, it’s gonna be exciting for the junior team to get into it and start doing a bunch of science for a long time. You know, I love this sort of stuff. I remember, like when Cassini reached Saturn, do you remember that? I was back in 2006 2005. Is sometime around, then that’s when that’s when I think there was another name to that I’m forgetting. But yeah, that’s when the Cassini probe land or reached Saturn. And that’s when we got that probe that left Cassini and made a successful drop onto Titan. And it was take these photographs, as it as it passed Titan’s atmosphere, another one that has that just says a really dense methane atmosphere that’s just brown or tan that you can see through. But as you get below that, what they were able to photograph was was all these ridges and water, water tribute Well, not water. But methane based grooves in the land, like you would see tributaries into a river system and then into an ocean is really interesting. You see, like mountains and erosion occurring in this sort of convection cycles, as it would, you know, pull up methane and then rain it down, and then have it dry in canyons and then pull back up into the ocean and do that again. But it’s a very alien world. But, but yeah, it was really cool to get to see those images, just this kind of eerie, topographic landscapes.
That’s cool. I think I vaguely remember that. Back in 2006. Man, that’s a lot.
That’s like 10 years ago. Now. You’re done a few space stations now all robotic stuff. And yeah, like, I wonder what’s going to be what are what are the stuff we got going on? I know, they’re, they’re launching, you know, more stuff all the time. So that I’m more interested in. I’m most interested in what’s showing up. I think the next thing showing up is it’s like this European project that they put together the hammer, they put together a probe that was going to Mars and it ended up jokin on landing it got to Mars that went out and then like something shook, and it deployed landing gear at the wrong time and baggage bomber. Huge, huge bummer. But there’s there’s something new coming up. Yeah, some other European project. I’m not sure which point it was, I think it was Mars. Or it could be Jupiter too. I’m not sure. But yeah, pretty cool. Little stuff about Juno finally showing.
Yeah, it’s really cool. I’m excited to see some more photos from that.
Yeah, obviously some more photos from it. But you know, the other part is I really want to do more photos from Earth here of star stuff as part of our projects that we want to do for night sky. Yeah, and we’ve been trying to do that a bit, which I think has been cool, but trying to get into more Astro photography stuff, where we’ve been, you know, trying to go out with, so we have like, some better digital SLR camera equipment. And I bet a lot of you guys out there have, you know, some good DSLR equipment too, that’s ended up in a shop in the last few years. Any of these cameras now crop sensor, or a cheaper camera, anything that’s, that’s really more modern, that has this tremendous sensors that you can pump the ISO, the gain up on to these really high level. So once you get up to like 3200 6400, whatever is passed, there’s a few other options past that on both the Canon and the Nikon side, and you know, whatever other, whatever other camera system you use, you can push the ISO up really high, like we’ve been doing. Yeah, and, and that gives you so much more sensitivity to light. And that’s where you get, you know, and I’m probably not breaking news to anybody that’s been on Instagram or, you know, on anywhere on the internet before. But you get all these really cool, low light photographs that have these really sharp, crisp stars in them. It’s not the star trail photos, as long exposure images where they track and streak process guys they rotate. It’s not really that like it’s just, it’s just a short, long exposure. But there’s these cool options where it’s really wide, right? You know, you get to capture more light with like an open aperture. And so and then this really wide angle is what allows you to keep the stars looking really tack sharp, really crisp. And the photograph that’s the real secret to it is the wide angle lens. And so what was it? What did you find the best? What do you think is the best? Like lens? stuff? You know, for for Astro photography?
I’d heard the 14 millimeter is pretty good. I think there’s what is it a rock? Is it or Kenan? Yeah, that’s that’s a real cheap one that for Yeah, for cheap options for affordable options. I think that’s $350 this cheap.
Yeah, lenses. Oh, yeah, super. But the best thing is, is that that wide angle, like you’re talking about 14 years away, then and so if not everyone out, there might be a photography buff or something. But the I think the lower the number for the, the minimum f stop, the wider the aperture and the more light you can collect to get brighter star photographs if you’re trying to photograph the stars. So that’s why you want you want that but you can get away with a lot now. Yeah, just a regular like even if you have an 18 to 55 millimeter kit lens. That’s like a like a variable three, five to four or five or something that’s that’s still going to be an F 3.5. At 18 millimeters. That’s going to be really a really wide angle view. And I think you’re going to be able to do a lot with that. As a star photography goes, I think they say I think it’s like not, not more than 35 millimetres. She’s sort of a rule of thumb, like if it’s a 50 millimeter lens, you’re really not going to you’re going to get star tray out. You’re going to get these tracks to start building up if you have it open for 20 seconds.
Yeah, I have noticed that. I remember on a camping trip we did. I think it was a couple years ago now. I was using that 50 millimeter that we had. And also the 35 inches doing some kind of nothing for fun. Just to mess around with the camera a little bit was after I got my D 7000. Right. Yeah. So I was seeing what I could do with night stuff with that. But I noticed with those, there’s a little bit of blur no matter what, you really can’t get away without the blur. But we have that 28 millimeter that we’ve been using. What is the what is that? It’s 28 was oh
yeah, that’s an adult math. 2.8 2.8. Yeah. Which I try and set it to.
Yeah, and that works really nicely. Yeah. Done really few sheets of it now with the your new camera. Yeah. It’s been cool to put together. Yeah, you got I think you even just as last weekend, we were in Southern Oregon.
And that was cool. Yeah, I had a really nice time taking those photos with you. Yeah, we went down to Southern Oregon for you know, over the Fourth of July weekend. And yeah, take some photos at the southern sky.
Yeah, it’s really cool. It’s fun taking the photos is, man it’s hard though because you pick up more stars. I was gonna say it’s cool because you get to look at the you’d see Mars in your photo. You get to look at Scorpio or whatever constellations are in your photo. Yeah, but it’s actually also really hard to because You pick up so many more of the stars and so much more of the light from it, that it actually ends up becoming more difficult to see sometimes or pick out. Yeah, you have so much
in that’s an interesting thing you say you get some aspects to the photography that are different than the way you get to see the sky. I think I think if anybody wants to try something like this, they should go. Look, if you’re in the Northern Hemisphere, that is look to, to the galactic center, that center. Yeah, look at toward the galactic center, it’s probably a pretty rewarding spot to get some photographs from, that’s where we were taking some photos, looking out to the south. And that’s into what we’re all talking about today. That’s an looking out toward Scorpio and Sagittarius, and then that band at the Milky Way that cuts up toward Altair, and then you know up into the summer constellations that were had. But that view out to that section that’s the Milky Way galaxy, which is really cool. And it definitely shows up in a pretty impressive way, when when you leave the shutter open for a few seconds, what I recommend is probably about 20 seconds, there’s there’s a good rule of thumb and a little system to like to get good star photos but but to keep it kind of light, at least for the moment, I’d say about 20 seconds or so at or at around, you know 30 millimetres, I wouldn’t do any longer of an exposure than that if you if you want to try and stay away from from the star trails. But I try and say like I’d expect to most people out there probably have an 18 to 55. If you drop it down to 18 millimeters and have a 22nd exposure at your highest ISO, you’re probably going to come out with a couple pretty cool Astro photography pieces that you can edit on. And they do need a little bit of editing. In fact, one tip I might add to that is watch your white balance, it’s going to be set for daytime light, it’s going to come out a little purpley or a little orange II. And what you’re gonna want to do is drop that into some software, if you can, Photoshop Elements would do fine or Lightroom if you can do it. But whatever kind of thing you can do to process your image, and you’re going to want to pull back in a ton of blues, and maybe some purples. But really like a ton of that blue light, you’re gonna want to pull back in, I think it’s like the 10th side of it, or the color temperature side, you’re really going to push that toward the blue. And and that’s really going to get back a lot of that natural look. And in the darkness of the night sky and the color of the stars and stuff. So there’s there’s some cool ideas, I guess you can kind of poke around with? Oh, did you want to talk about the ratio? discussing? Yeah, there’s a little ratio, I don’t want to get too technical if you know if you’re not like a big photography person, but but maybe you want to do some some stuff. Looking out, you know, in the evening sky tonight or over the next week and you want to try some photographs. There’s this helpful kind of I don’t know, I don’t know if the saying that this helpful kind of equation to set up your your shot with the setup these photographs with. And so what I understand is, it’s the 500 rule. Let me read it here for you. Take 500 and divide it by your focal length to determine the maximum number of seconds of your exposure before star trails are apparent. So in this example, a 24 millimeter lens on a full frame camera, we would take 500 and divide it by 24. So 500 divided by 24 equals 20.8. And that would be an equivalent to a 22nd exposure for us any more than a 22nd exposure, we’re going to start seeing that drag. And I think what this is based on is the rotation of the earth as the Earth Day progresses, and we see the stars rise up over the eastern horizon. There, they’re pulling that kind of moving up and you wouldn’t notice it maybe but you know, if you’re if you’re out to see the sun or the moon rise, you notice how fast it goes by it’s it’s within three minutes that much of the sky moves past the horizon. So even every 30 seconds, a significant amount of movement happens in the sky. And that’s what causes these drags in the star field above us. Otherwise, we could just leave our exposures up for a really long time. And, you know, we just get these super dark, deep, crisp images, which is similar to this other process. Have you heard of that before? This is back when they used to do a lot of the time and what they still do and more serious locations of doing Astro photography is they do stacking? Oh, I remember stacking? Yeah, yeah, where they use layers, they use layers to duplicate the light that was in the file previous to it. And so they add that and then add that and add that. And that’s I think the same method that they use for a lot of these deep sky photographs that we get to see from Hubble or from other telescopes like that is Yeah, as they do a system you know, just a whole set of images that they layer on top of each other to boost the brightness up or to boost that that clarity and resolution of it’s a really interesting process though I don’t I don’t understand or really claim to understand all the ins and outs of it, but it’s cool learning about Astro photography and deep sky imaging.
It’s really cool. It’s a lot of fun to do. And yeah, we both definitely recommend it. If you have a camera. It’s really not that hard to.
Yeah, it’s probably not that hard to do. I think it’s probably definitely worth setting up. But, but yeah, I think it’s pretty neat stuff. I’m glad we get to do more Astro photography. I want to try and get that going with you, too. Over the next next couple of weeks. We got to do more stuff, especially why it’s in summertime. But I don’t know. I think it’ll be good. Yeah, I will. Yeah, I guess the problem is most of our stuff for the explanation of the Astro photography stuff that we’re doing, send some questions or send some pictures if you guys ever take any cool pictures? Oh, yeah. We’d love to see. Yeah, there’s probably like, like, 100 people, like it’s check this out. Yeah, yeah, that’s other than me, or you know, spam or something like that. But, but yeah, if anybody gets to check any, any cool, deep sky stuff out or any cool wide angle Astro photography out, let us know, drop us a comment, or, or review or whatever that is, you can check us out on iTunes, try and subscribe to our podcast. If you’ve enjoyed it. We’ll have a few more of these coming soon. I think we have a couple other cool ideas to to sort of spread some of our night sky stuff around. As long as we’re kind of bringing we’re trying we’re trying to get it together. We’re gonna get more nice guys stuff going. Yeah, I’m really excited for a few of the things we’re working on.
I’m really looking forward to to keep track of us at night. sky.io.
Yeah, nice guy that I Oh, we’re going to get that up and running. And we’re going to get way more content or just way more pieces up there for everybody to check out and to get into to learn about some of the sky stuff that they can check out in the sky above them tonight. And for the rest of the summer. I think that’s what we’re going to try and do next week. Or Monday or Tuesday cuz it’s cloudy right now. Yeah, we’re just gonna hang out, watch it rain for a little while. That’s what we get here in Oregon. So, on behalf of Marina Hanson, my name is Billy Newman. And thank you very much for listening to this episode of the night sky podcast.