Startrails in the Canaries

A few months ago I decided to look through my images from the Canary islands that I took during the past couple of years and make a few star trails out of them. Below are the selected four: 

The western view from the INT 2.5m telescope terrace. Moon, Venus and Jupiter are the three brightest streaks in the image. An observer's car illuminates the road in red. 

Mount Teide reigns in the left part of the image, while Venus and Jupiter set in the early twilight. For the cities below, the night has already arrived and the street lights illuminate the clouds from below. 

Back to the island of La Palma, the MAGIC telescopes scan the skies for Cherenkov light cones, while the Moon high in the sky illuminates the landscape. 

The final set of trails comes from near the top of the Teide Volcano in Tenerife. I love how the road is visible due to the (very few) passing cars and how a little bolide (at least -5m!) decided to show up near the lower right of the image. 

Moon: close-up

This is my first attempt at taking high resolution images of some celestial object, in this case it was the Moon.  From about 1700 frames, the best 30% were stacked in Registax 6.0 to produce a "high resolution" image of a few craters. The smallest resolved detail is about 3 km large, all this with a rather horrible seeing of 3". I basically had no idea what I was doing with the wavelet filters, they always introduced some very unnatural plastic look for my taste, so I only used them to some moderate effect. 

Unfortunately, although the telescope I'm using is quite large for this kind of stuff (0.5m, f/9), the fact that it lies on the roof of a heated building means that my seeing will very rarely be better than 3" :( But I'll try more, who knows, I might get lucky one day! I'm using a Canon 600D to take the movies, which has the unfortunate side-effect that I have to transform the original MOV files to AVI, therefore loosing a bit more information in the process... 

   I have a couple more movies taken that night awaiting processing, so soon there should be an update to this post :)

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Update: 02 March 2013
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Two more images came through the processing pipeline, showing the immediate area around the close-up above and another, northern region:

Super, super Moon!

  March 19th 2011 full Moon vs May 4th 2012 full Moon    ====    ~357 300 km vs ~358 000 km 

      The orbits of the planets around the Sun are not circular but elliptical, as are the orbits of the satellites around planets.

      Also, the Moon orbits the Earth on an orbit which can be quite well approximated by an ellipse. This means that sometimes it is father away from the Earth (farthest point being named apogee) and sometimes closer (closest point named perigee). The numbers for this would be: average distance - 384 399 km , apogee distance - 405 410 km and perigee distance - 362 570 km, only a 14% difference between the farthest and closest points! :)

      To put in in context, the Wikipedia animation below shows the Earth, Moon and their average distance to scale (with the yellow line simulating a beam of light travelling from Earth to the Moon in real time). I placed the arrow about where the perigee of the Moon would be.

                                                                                                                                                                                                  perigee   |

                                                                                                                                                                                                                   |

                                                                                                                                                                                                                  V

                                                                                                                                                                 

                                                                                                                       

      Imagine yourself noticing from 100m away that a plant has grown from 45cm to 48 cm, seeing it one month after the first time. Most people will definitely not notice the size difference, but the power of suggestion is strong enough that it might really seem that it is smaller, or larger (depending on what that person was told).

        It is quite fashionable today for the mass-media to report the weirdest things and not discriminate between being informative and the opposite. We will most likely have this "supermoon effect" for the next years, just as we have the "Mars Hoax" every late august since 2003, when Mars came closest to Earth in many years (still some 55 million km away though). 

       Speaking of weird things that some people say without any kind of research whatsoever: do you remember the devastation that last year's March 19 brought? No? Well, the Moon was then even closer than now when full, yet nothing out of the ordinary happened. The March 11 Japan earthquake took place when the Moon was just leaving the apogee, being 398 000 km away.

The rise of  March 19th 2011 "SuperMoon" over the DHL Tower in Bonn, Germany

      In conclusion: enjoy the Moon, whether it's half, full or a beautiful thin crescent and while thinking that some things in astronomy can only be measured with a more precise device than the human eye.

Celestial highway

Planets wander on the sky on their own highway: the zodiacal band. Even dust in the solar system is somewhat confined to this plane and you can see it here as a lighter conical region in the middle of the image. Sometimes the planets and the Moon catch up in meetings as beautiful as this one:

Moon-Venus-Jupiter conjunction

Sitting on the caldera edge of the Taburiente supervolcano in the Atlantic ocean, a true photon feast!