SBIG Astronomy Show Schedule Spring 2012
We hope to see a lot of you at astronomy shows this year. Here is our schedule for the next two months:
Northeast Astro-Imaging Conference (NEAIC)
April 26-27, 2012, Suffern, NY, USA. Hosted by the Rockland Astronomy Club.
Learn more here. http://www.rocklandastronomy.com/neaf/index.html
Northeast Astronomy Forum (NEAF)
April 28-29, 2012, Suffern, NY, USA. Hosted by the Rockland Astronomy Club.
Learn more here. http://www.rocklandastronomy.com/NEAIC/index.html
ATT – “Europe’s Biggest Astronomy Fair”
May 5, 2012, Essen, Germany. Hosted by the Walter-Hohmann-Observatory.
Learn more here: http://www.att-boerse.de/index_uk.html
The Symposium on Telescope Science
May 22-24, Big Bear, CA, USA. Hosted by the Society For Astronomical Sciences and the American Association of Variable Star Observers.
Learn more here. http://www.socastrosci.org/symposium.html
We will also be exhibiting later in the year at the International Astronomical Union’s annual meeting in Beijing, China, and as always at the OPT, PATS and AIC events. More on those in later posts.
Find our Events Page on the SBIG website for regular updates.
Galactic Hit-and-Run found in NGC4449 by UCLAn Michael Rich and the STL-11000
We are very excited to learn that SBIG had a role in a recent astronomical discovery by UCLA research astronomer Michael Rich and a team of fellow Southern California astronomers.
Find the report here: A Tidally Distorted Dwarf Galaxy near NGC 4449
Rich and his team used a telescope with a very wide field called a Centurion 28 (the diameter of the mirror is 28 inches) to discover a previously unknown companion to the nearby galaxy NGC 4449, located about 12.5 million light years from Earth. Attached to the telescope capturing the images was an SBIG STL-11000m!
NGC 4449 (Left) positive image of the NGC 4449 and NGC 4449B; 3.2 hr luminance filter image using an STL 11000m camera obtained using the Saturn Lodge 0.7 m Centurion10 telescope.(Right) ELLIPSE within IRAF was used to subtract a model halo that shows detail of NGC 4449B, including a plume extended NW toward the nucleus of NGC 4449.
They discovered the companion dwarf galaxy, which has “evidently experienced a close encounter with the nucleus of NGC 4449,” Rich said. Dubbed NGC 4449B, the dwarf galaxy has been stretched into a comet-like shape by the gravitational forces of the larger galaxy.
Rich collaborated with Francis Longstaff, an amateur astronomer (and, by day, professor of finance at the UCLA Anderson School of Management) in acquiring and using a specialized telescope designed to take images of wide fields of the sky at the Polaris Observatory Association site near Frazier Park, Calif, just north of Los Angeles.
The C28 telescope has a wide field which, combined with special image processing conducted by Christine Black, a UCLA research assistant, and David Reitzel of the Griffith Observatory, let astronomers subtract the light of the sky and that of the outer parts of NGC 4449 to reveal the new galaxy. NGC 4449B had never been detected because it is more than 10 times fainter than the natural brightness of the night sky and some 1,000 times fainter than our own Milky Way galaxy.
Rich and his team produced a rigorous report on their discovery, which was accepted to run in the February issue of Nature. (If you subscribe to Nature, open the article here.) We are glad to have been able to help this team make this wonderful discovery.
The deep images captured by the STL-11000 of the larger NGC 4449 revealed other surprises too:
- A strange arc of stars that might be an ingested galaxy
- A “remarkable halo” of old stars that appears to consist of two parts; the outermost part of this “halo” population was unexpected, and makes NGC 4449 equivalent in size to the Milky Way.
The origin of these old stars is not known, but they may have been acquired when galaxies similar to NGC 4449B fell into NGC 4449 and were shredded, postulated Rich.
“The larger, host galaxy, NGC 4449, may be “something of a living fossil,” representing what most galaxies probably looked like shortly after the Big Bang,” Rich said. “The galaxy is forming stars so furiously that it has giant clusters of young stars and even appears bluish — a sign of a young galaxy — to the eye in large amateur telescopes, he said.”
This discovery got a lot of coverage, in addition to the honor of being accepted as a scholarly report in the February issue of Nature. Below are some links. Our favorite headline was “Hit-and-Run” because in galactic terms, what the Rich team found is but a moment in time and will ‘rapidly’ disappear!
Perpetrator of Galactic Hit-and-Run Found!
The Astronomy Page on Activeboard.com
We are always looking for more images taken by SBIG cameras by astronomers around the world. Send them to images@sbig.com whenever you create or find one! Find our guidelines for submission here.
Adding Rogelio Andreo to our Website Hall of Fame
2011 SBIG Hall of Fame Member Rogelio Andreo
We have been remiss in posting the news that Rogelio Andreo now has his own page within our Hall of Fame on the SBIG website.
Please visit it to see all the amazing accolades Rogelio has received for his work in astrophotography.
And in case you missed it, one of his images appears in the 2011 Astronomer of the Year competition run by the UK’s Royal Observatory at Greenwich, although not as the top winner. Scroll down the page to find Rogelio’s image of Orion, and his description of the project.
The BBC made a video slide show of the winning entries, with a narrative by the judges that is worth viewing. You will have to be attentive to see Rogelio’s image as it goes by. Click to open the “Captions” text boxes in the lower right corner of the presentation.
To view Rogelio’s own image catalogue, visit his Deep Sky Colors site.
Andreo prefers taking his equipment on the road to a fixed observatory. This image is from his own site.
Australia Hogs Transits and Eclipses in 2012
Will you capture an image like this in June?
For those that chase solar eclipses or want to catch a great view of the Venus Transit, you will have to head to Eastern and Northern Australia this year:
- A full view of the Venus Transit will occur June 5-6 in Eastern Asia and Eastern Australia (and various islands states in the Pacific.) The rest of us get partial views or none at all (don’t head to the Atacama, for instance!)
- A total solar eclipse will pass over Northern Australia November 3. This makes three years in a row that the Pacific region got to view solar eclipses. (And in 2013 it will happens again!)
Those in other parts of the world who like to view and images these events will have to settle for annular solar eclipses and lunar eclipses.
For details, check into articles on Sky & Telescope, which will direct you on to further resources:
Alan Holmes Reports on the Congreso Austral de Astrofotografia
This sculpture at the Observatorio Astronomico Andino points at the south celestial pole.
SBIG’s own Alan Holmes traveled to Santiago, Chile last November for the Congreso Austral de Astrofotografia. The event was organized by Daniel Verschatse, Alejandro Nunez, Guillermo Yanez and Diego Cartes. The conference took place at the European Southern Observatory (ESO), with a companion star party located at the beautiful facilities of the Observatorio Astronomico Andino.
To read Alan’s full travelogue and view the photographs he took to chronicle the adventure, click here.
Astronomy retailers are astronomers, too. Ask them to share their stories!
Posted by Ron Bissinger
I recently returned from a trip to Asia, and especially enjoyed spending time with our dealers in Japan and Singapore. One thing I notice is that every one of our dealers has some unique story of how they became involved in the astronomy business.
Some of our dealers started out as enthusiastic amateur astronomers themselves and saw an opportunity to combine business and pleasure. Even as businesspeople, their enthusiasm continues to show. Often they do a lot of astronomy outreach to schools and the public, and can be found doing imaging or observing themselves on clear nights.
Other dealers built similar businesses, perhaps selling other optical products to the public. They saw an opportunity to expand with astronomy gear, and they often seem to be able to attract many new amateur astronomers as they are shown some of the latest and greatest telescopes that are now available.
In my own past, I recall knowing Dr. Jack Marling, the founder of Lumicon. Lumicon was started in Livermore, near San Francisco and near where I live. Dr. Marling I think began his career at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories as an optical physicist. He started Lumicon with a line of astrophotography filters, and he grew it into a dealer of telescopes, mounts, and accessories, all aimed at astrophotography. He was one of the few sources of hypered film for deep sky imaging. I spent many a Saturday morning at his showroom with my cup of coffee, talking to him and his knowledgeable staff and doing more impulse buying than I will admit. He left the business after the 9/11 attacks caused a softening in the market.
By coincidence, I was having lunch a few weeks ago when I saw someone who looked like Dr. Marling. It has been over 10 years since I last saw him, but it was indeed him. Looking great and enjoying retirement, he enjoyed hearing about some of the advances amateurs have been making with their CCD cameras. But it was he, his filters, and his hypered film that helped many of today’s great astroimagers get their starts.
So next time you walk into an astronomy shop, do spend time with the owners, and ask how they got involved in the business. I’m sure they’ll have many a great story.
ALMA Radio Telescope Comes Online in Chile
We seem to be talking about Chile a lot as we launch this blog, but interesting news keeps coming and we want to report it.
The world’s most powerful radio telescope has come online high in the mountains of Northern Chile, positioning enough of its multiple antennae to start its quest to view the formation of the first stars in the Universe. The Atacama Large Millimetre/Submillimetre Array (ALMA) telescope is located on the Chajnantor plateau, 5000 meters (16,250 feet) above sea level in Chile’s eponymous Atacama desert.
Here is a BBC video about it.
The installation will grow to close to 70 dishes
ALMA is a single telescope of revolutionary design, composed initially of 66 high precision antennas. It measures waves in radio spectrums rather than light, and uses a number of them simultaneously to capture faint signals.
ALMA is an international partnership of scientific government agencies in Europe, North America and East Asia with the Republic of Chile, and is the largest astronomical project in the world.
Calibrating the telescope
In some ways, this immense telescope is no different than our own more human-sized units. It still needs to be calibrated, for instance, and what a process that is! Click here for a description. This certainly puts my own occasional calibration issues into perspective.
Viewing Time Already Sold Out!
Scientists wishing to observe with ALMA have already submitted over 1,000 proposals, “about nine times the number of observations that are expected be carried out during the first phase of Early Science,” according to a recent press release. “This demonstrates how excited researchers are to use ALMA, even at this early stage. Furthermore, the proposals cover a very broad range of scientific topics, emphasising how ALMA will have a wide-reaching transformative effect on astronomy and astrophysics.”
Each individual radar station can be repositioned depending on the project.
These scientists don’t get to (or don’t have to) travel to Chajnantor to carry out the observations: They will be dynamically scheduled to run remotely, depending on weather conditions and the array configuration. Observations will be carried out 24 hours per day by ALMA astronomers.
We expect ALMA to have a dramatic impact on what we know about the universe’s origins, although with full operations still a few years away (2013), we have to wait a bit longer to find out exactly what this new instrument will find.