http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eyvy9E0rRVI&feature=related
Interesting video of the space shuttle being carted around. It looks like they hold some media conference in the middle of it. I wonder what the support is actually made of. It looks just like a little dolley for moving furniture.
http://www.naoj.org/Pressrelease/2011/02/17/index.html
http://www.naoj.org/Pressrelease/2011/02/17/supplement.html
This tells about the Subaru Telescope, lead by the National Astronomy Observatory of Japan. I did not know Japan did much astronomy research, but then there is no reason for them not to. The NAOJ released significant findings from the Subaru Telescope. They have very sharp images of protoplanetary disks around young stars. According to the website, these represent the most detailed image of protoplanetary disks ever seen. These protoplanetary disks are made up of dust and gas, and eventually coalesce into planets.
Stars first form from the collapse of material in molecular clouds due to the gravity of a dense region in the cloud. When the material collapses inward, it heats up. The material from the planets is made from the same cloud material that went to form the star. Molecular cloud molecules fall in to the protostar, or newborn star, and form together in a disk around the star. The article does not explain why it forms in this disk rather than falling into the star.
The molecules pulled by gravity into the disk heat up as they fall inward, releasing light at infrared and sub-millimeter wavelengths. A star in this stage is less then 100,000 years old.
When a star reaches an age of 1,000,000 years, most of the material surrounding it has been swept away by stellar winds and other occurences. Only a dense disk of material surrounds a star at this stage. In this stage of its life, a star is called a T Tauri Star. A star has officially "grown up" at an age of about 100 million years, when it is primarily kept stable from nuclear fusion in its core. By this time, almost all of the surrounding disk has disappeared, leaving mostly planets and larger particles. Collisions of comets or meteors at this time could lead to the formation of belts of dust in solar systems, such as the asteroid belt, or dust around the star Beta Pictoris--> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_Pictoris
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
Thursday, March 3, 2011
"NGC 6914 with Calar Alto Observatory: Processing Notes "
http://pixinsight.com/examples/NGC6914-CAHA/en.html
This article traces how a astronomical picture is developed to overcome the effect of saturation of pixels from stars, dust grains, and other problems. It is cool that they laid this out, as I have not read about the process before.
The first problem that arises with imaging the NGC 6914 nebular complex is that the bright stars quickly saturate the pixels in the ccd. This is called blooming. Their method for reducing this is simple and seems to make intuitive sense. It seems like they have to make additional changes afterward, called "cloning." I wonder what this is.
The issues that arise with this images sounds very similar to problems with electronics, thus, the huge importance of understanding electronics well. I noticed that signal to noise ratio is mentioned often.
I also wonder what astronomers are actually representing when they create images like this. Are they trying to represent what they human eye would actually see? Are they trying to make the coolest looking picture possible? Are they trying to mix making the picture realistic and making the image look cool? I think they pictures are pretty effected.
I can see the importance of understanding waves and quantum mechanics in developing these pictures. I am not sure what the pixel layers are in the section about dust grains. Is it 4 pixels deep, or 4 pixels wide? For the superflat correction, I did not notice much of a difference.
I could see having a strong math background helping in this process, as it involves mapping difference images onto other images. I am looking into analysis or p-chem. Ah, their are normalization factors...they don't go away... The DBE correction seems to have more of a definite effect. Wow, the HDR wavelet transformation does quite a bit.
This also has some star generator databases that you can download. I will definitely check this out. Anyway, this is the end of this post. I should try and make this more informative and less of running commentary. At least, I should try and quite what I comment on.
Ideas for format of blog posts (for which having a format is optional also)
1. Title
2. Link
3. Summary
4. Reaction/Things I specifically want to remember
This article traces how a astronomical picture is developed to overcome the effect of saturation of pixels from stars, dust grains, and other problems. It is cool that they laid this out, as I have not read about the process before.
The first problem that arises with imaging the NGC 6914 nebular complex is that the bright stars quickly saturate the pixels in the ccd. This is called blooming. Their method for reducing this is simple and seems to make intuitive sense. It seems like they have to make additional changes afterward, called "cloning." I wonder what this is.
The issues that arise with this images sounds very similar to problems with electronics, thus, the huge importance of understanding electronics well. I noticed that signal to noise ratio is mentioned often.
I also wonder what astronomers are actually representing when they create images like this. Are they trying to represent what they human eye would actually see? Are they trying to make the coolest looking picture possible? Are they trying to mix making the picture realistic and making the image look cool? I think they pictures are pretty effected.
I can see the importance of understanding waves and quantum mechanics in developing these pictures. I am not sure what the pixel layers are in the section about dust grains. Is it 4 pixels deep, or 4 pixels wide? For the superflat correction, I did not notice much of a difference.
I could see having a strong math background helping in this process, as it involves mapping difference images onto other images. I am looking into analysis or p-chem. Ah, their are normalization factors...they don't go away... The DBE correction seems to have more of a definite effect. Wow, the HDR wavelet transformation does quite a bit.
This also has some star generator databases that you can download. I will definitely check this out. Anyway, this is the end of this post. I should try and make this more informative and less of running commentary. At least, I should try and quite what I comment on.
Ideas for format of blog posts (for which having a format is optional also)
1. Title
2. Link
3. Summary
4. Reaction/Things I specifically want to remember
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