Moon Venus conjunction

What a marvelous moon Venus conjunction! The early bird gets the best photos. The moon rose at 3:30 and Venus just 7 minutes after it. I got up at 4:40am to see this marvelous view from my roof. I am using a Canon HS50 for this photos. It is a simple camera and very affordable with a huge x50 zoom which looks like a telescope. No telescope is required.

Since the moon moves quite fast, Venus is already in the same height as the moon, and in few hours Venus will be above the moon.

It will be possible to see both during he daylight hours as well, check the article about how to see Venus in daylight. Also notice the gibbous shape of Venus which has phases just like the moon.

Moon and Venus conjunction

About one hour later, already dawn the moon is even nearer. See the difference in this photo

Moon and Venus conjunction

And another one shortly after with much more daylight

Moon and Venus conjunction

Also in the early hours sky are Mars in Virgo and Saturn in Libra. We are at the end of the Winter and the entire Summer Triangle of Vega, Deneb and Al-tair is already up

The summer Triangle. Vega (up) Deneb (Left) and Altair (Right)

And a scene photo in wide area with all the morning clouds. The tiny dot just above the moon is not dust, it is Venus!

Moon and Venus conjunction

Great naked eye observations!

Astro photos are easy

Astro-photography doesn't require expensive equipment. These photos all taken in a single day using an OLD Sony alpha DSLR (The ISS pass) and a relatively new Canon HS50 which has a great zoom. The only really must equipment is a sturdy tripod which will enable you to stable the camera for long star exposures.

 The sunspots photo requires a solar filter, and it is dangerous not to use one. Here is a detailed article about how to photograph sunspots

This huge sunspot is AR1967, and I am following it for many days. On February 3 2014 it was almost in the middle of the sun

Sunspot AR1967

 The next photos are from the sunset and the sunspots are seen easily

Sunspot AR1967 during sunset

The perfect round is a swanning ball on a high voltage power line, but it remind me the great Venus transit from two years ago.

Sunspot AR1967 during sunset

Sunspot AR1967 during sunset

Sunspot AR1967 during sunset

The next photo is a great ISS pass in the well known constellation Canis Major (Great dog). The pass was very low and the light pollution is visible. however the entire group is visible and in the full photo I was able to detect the open cluster M41. Also I caught the extinction of the pass and you can clearly see the graduate extinction in the pass color from white to red.

ISS pass in Canis Major

Even f your camera doesn't have much zoom power to get good photos of the moon or the sun, you can still get nice photos of the constellations. You will need to experiment but even 1 second of exposure will show many stars. If you are in a rural area you can take longer exposures. Be aware that the longer the exposure time, the stars will create small trails as the Earth keep rotating around its axis. Also notice that it might be hard to see stars on the camera small LCD and you might need the help of a laptop to compose the photo. Also try to use manual focus and set it to infinity.
Here is Orion Constellation

Orion Constellation

And Orion constellation with the ISS. This is a 20sec shot and the light pollution is clearly visible.

The ISS in Orion

And finally the moon

The moon

Conclusions: Even with simple equipment there is plenty to do! Good luck

Carnival of Space #339

Hi all and welcome aboard the 339th edition of Carnival of Space. We will start this edition by honoring the 17 astronauts who have given their life to the American space program. On January 27 1967 during a training for the first Apollo mission, less than a month before the planned launch, a fire in the crew cabin took the life of  Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom, Edward H. White and Roger B. Chaffee. The challenger disaster occurred on January 28 1986 just 73 seconds after launch, taking the lives of Francis R. Scobee, Michael J. Smith, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Judith Resnik, Greg Jarvis and Christa McAuliffe. On February 1 2003 the Columbia disaster at the end of STS-107 mission, and in which Rick D. Husband, William C. McCool, Michael P. Anderson, Kalpana Chawla, David M. Brown, Laurel Clark and the Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon died.
Dedicate a few moments in memory of these men and women in the official NASA day of  remembrance page.

Apollo 1, Challenger and Columbia Astronauts. Credit: NASA

Back again to this week articles. We will start with our closest neighbor, the moon.
Dr. Paul Spudis shares his memories and knowledge as one of the investigators and researchers in Clementine missions. A comprehensive article about the mission can be found in Dr Spudis's blog. A summarized version can be found in Air&Space magazine.

The next item from CosmoQuest shows that even spaceships, orbiters, landers and such like to have some company from time to time. Read about the latest spacecraft imaging  another spacecraft, LRO take a snap of LADEE.

Another useful article from CosmoQuest. What are some great mobile apps for doing and learning astronomy? Here's a list with a link to our recent Hangout on the subject. I already downloaded few of these great apps.

The Synergy principal is true everywhere and also in space - three are better than one. The Urban Astronomer tells us about the Frontier Fields program - an ambitious attempt to combine the power of NASA's three flagship space telescopes (Hubble, Chandra and Spitzer) to peer deeper into the universe than ever before and learn about the structure of the first galaxies to form after the Big Bang.

From Discovery News we learn about vast rivers of Hydrogen flow into galaxies.

What's new on Mars? Meridian Journal discuss two new photographs from Curiosity: Dingo Gap and the ‘Firepit’.

The last three articles are from NextBigFuture: Elon Musk thinks there are five innovations that will change our lives in the decades ahead:

• The Internet, an astonishing invention by which people can access knowledge from anywhere.
• The transition to the sustainable production and consumption of energy.
• The extension of human life to other planets, depending on how rapidly we progress in developing space transport and how we live - if we manage to survive -- by then.
• Reading and writing genetic code
• AI - artificial intelligence.

Make yourself some free time and watch the videos of Elon Musk.

The discovery of water on Ceres arise many more plausible places for astrobiology research: Unlocking the solar system by unlocking water in the asteroids.


And back to the moon on a future missions to find exact location of water on the moon during 2018.

That's all for this, thank to all our contributors and readers. As always hosting the CoS is a pleasure.

Gravity (movie)

It seems like the entire space and astronomy community is talking about Gravity. It is indeed a great film you should watch it in 3D. The new film, directed by Alfonso Cuaron, presents Sandra Bullock and George Clooney as two astronauts who got stuck outside their spaceship. During a routine service mission to the Hubble Space Telescope, the Russians sent a missile to destroy an old satellite (something the Chinese has actually done in the past). The debris' cloud spreads quickly and destroys Bullock and Clooney's space shuttle. The ISS team abandon it, and so does the Chinese in their Tiangong station. Our heroes are left alone to find their long way home.

The film is minimalistic. Bullock and Clooney are the only actors. There are some voices like Ed Harris as the capcom (Harris played flight director Gene Kranz in Apollo 13) but the most astonishing thing is the view of Space. I was very happy to see that one of the first places seen clearly on Earth is my country, Israel, together with the Sinai desert and Egypt.

Is the film realistic? The danger of debris is real. Of course there are errors in the film and you can search and find a whole list of them on the net. The debris cloud speed is too high and in this speed it will not orbit the Earth but continue to outer space. Hubble ,the ISS and Tiangogng, are in entirely different orbits and it is hard to go from one to another and so on. There is no point to search for errors, the point is to enjoy the film and the feeling of actually being there in space hovering above Earth. In the film we go through most of the existing spaceships. A space shuttle (now retired), the ISS, a Soyuz spaceship and the Chinese Tiangong which is much bigger that the real thing. Astronauts said the the spacecrafts look very real with all the handles and the buttons in the correct places, and it certainly looks real to the audience.

There is a lot of physics in the film. Children from grades 4 to 12 can learn a lot from it. Newton's second law of motion is demonstrated throughout the entire film and all the following terms: mass, velocity, acceleration, force, moment, vector, drag, pressure, energy, friction, lift, elastic and so on, are in the film. A guided view of the film can help to teach all these terms with the entire laws of mechanics.

However if you do looking for errors you will find quite a few. Here are some:

• The Hubble Space Telescope ,Tiangong and the ISS are in totally different orbits. They are not in the same height and not in the same place moving in tandem. It is impossible to move  from one to another like the astronauts do in the film.
• The debris cloud is moving too fast. In that speed it will not orbit Earth but proceed deeper into space.
• When Bullock removes her spacesuit, she has only regular clothes underneath. In reality, there are many more layers on an astronauts body.
• The Tiangong (Chinese space station) is like it might be in ten more years, but maybe the film is in the future (The STS number is 157 and the last one was 135, of course space shuttle are retired now)

For a very long list of errors (With spoilers) look in the comment I received in Reddit.

Gravity. All the rights are reserve to Warner Bros.

During the film Bullock is trying to have a radio converstaion with someone named Anningaaq. This is a corss-refernce to a short movie (7 minutes only) of the director's son: Jonas Cuaron. Watch the short film here. This cross refrence reminded me the masterpiece book by Chinghiz Aitmatov: "The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years".


After saying all the above, I will repeat my recommendation to see this film. Not because of the reality and not due to screenplay. The real star is space itself. 3D or IMAX are a must. Gravity is joining the hall of fame of space movies and we will probably hear a lot the sentence: "And the Oscar goes to Gravity". 

Watch the official trailer.

Additional links

How to see the ISS

The space shuttle