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I haven't finished this
section yet. I have a life outside the Internet, and this Web
design stuff takes time, ya know...
Here are some astronomy
pics I've taken over the years:
The gang out observing the sky late one night in the Florida
Everglades.
Omega Centauri is a globular cluster in the southern sky. It is composed of over one million individual stars, which this photograph partially
resolves. I took this photograph at the Southern Cross Astronomical Society's 1993 Winter Star Party in the Florida Keys.
It was made using my Meade LX-6 8" Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope and a 35mm Cannon AT-1 SLR camera at the
telescope's prime focus. The color film used was hydrogen gas-hypered Fuji
HG400 (the old version of the emulsion which took well to
astrophotography). I hand-guided the telescope and exposed for 45 minutes.
The Orion Nebula (M42) is a beautiful cloud of gas surrounding several
very hot, young stars in the Trapezium, a
star cluster deep in the nebula.
The nebula is 1500 light-years from Earth and consists primarily of
hydrogen, helium, oxygen, carbon, neon, nitrogen, sulfur, argon, and
chlorine. The density of these gasses is high enough that new stars are
able to form when the gasses are compressed beyond a critical point by
their own gravity; the stars of the Trapezium were formed in this way.
I made image at the Kissimmee Star Party in central Florida in November, 1996 using
my Meade LX-200 12" Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope and a 35mm
Canon AT-1 SLR camera at the telescope's prime focus. The image was
made on hydrogen gas-hypered Fuji HG400 and was guided by an SBIG ST-4 for 40
minutes. This image was scanned from a color print and is unretouched or
color-corrected.
Lunar Eclipse
This breathtaking patch of sky would be above you, were you to stand at the south pole of the Earth. Just above and to the right of the
image's center are the four stars that mark the boundaries of the Southern Cross. At the top of this constellation, also
known as "The Crux," is the orange star Gamma Crucis. The band of stars, dust, and
gas crossing the middle of the photograph is part our Milky Way Galaxy. In
the very center of the photograph is the dark Coal Sack Nebula, and the bright nebula on the
far right is the Eta Carina Nebula. The southern cross is so famous a constellation
that it is depicted on the Australian National Flag.
This astonishing photograph of the northern sky was taken by the
Hubble Space Telescope. The image subtends approximately 0.0057 degrees.
That means that the horizontal swath of sky you're looking at is about
as wide as a human hair would look at arm's-length. I'll say that again
in case you failed to grasp what this means. If you hold a hair out
against the sky vertically in front of you at arm's length, the width of
the hair would be the width of sky this photograph shows. Each spot in
the photograph is a galaxy consisting of billions of stars like our own
Milky Way galaxy!
This photograph of the Sun in the light of highly-ionized helium at
304 Angstroms was taken by the SOHO spacecraft orbiting the sun just
inside and behind the orbit of the Earth. A large prominence hundreds of
times the diameter of the earth appears in the lower left. The
temperature in the prominence is about 70,000 Kelvin.
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Copyright © 2001
Mike Rodriguez. All rights reserved.
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