Prograde Vector

Amateur Astronomer | Astrophotographer | Hard SF Worldbuilder/Writer | Space Artist | Leftist | They/Them | Opinions my own

[hardspaceships]

Art by @hailsanta.bsky.social

[formerlyluckymanticore]

Reblog if you will never. Ever. Use AI in your writing.

[progradevector]

Since the Moon has been obnoxiously bright and inhibiting my ability to do precision photometry and deep sky imaging, I instead tried some planetary photography. Here's Saturn and a few of its moons! It turned out a lot better than I expected. I was planning on hitting Jupiter after but it clouded over.

From left to right, there's Rhea and Dione, two somewhat unremarkable icy moons, Enceladus, whose fractured crust hides a warm salty water ocean underneath, the famous two-toned moon Iapteus high above, tiny Mimas just near the rings, and distant Titan, shrouded in haze hiding methane seas.

It's actually almost impossible to photograph both Saturn and the moons at the same time. Any photo long enough to bring out the faint moons would leave Saturn itself overexposed and blown out. Instead, the trick is to first image Saturn at the proper exposure, then a longer exposure to capture the Moons, and carefully mask out and replace the overexposed planet with the properly exposed one to create the finished composite.

[medusadyke]

academic dishonesty is not something you can spin as moral lol i do not want to share a career field let alone a social sphere with a bunch of chatgpt using ass bitches

[medusadyke]

"you're just scared your diploma is going to devalue" i'm afraid you dumb bitches are going to become my colleagues and drag social services to hell

[hylianengineer]

I'm afraid they'll become scientists and data that lives depend on will turn out to be wrong - and people will die.

I'm afraid they'll become engineers and sign off on bridge designs that collapse - and people will die.

I'm afraid they'll become medical professionals who don't know what they're doing - and people will die.

The assumption that academic dishonesty is okay is rooted in the idea that what you're learning to do doesn't matter.

[constance-mcentee-deactivated20]

"The assumption that academic dishonesty is okay is rooted in the idea that what you're learning to do doesn't matter."

[progradevector]

Now that Orion is back up in the sky, I decided to re-image the Horsehead Nebula but in color this time. About 1 hour, 42 minutes total integration time, 34 minutes per channel (2 minute subs).

[progradevector]

Had a much better imaging opportunity for the infamous interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS the other night and assembled this color composite. Just two minutes per channel, to avoid significant trailing.

In addition, I was also able to make an animated timelapse of 3I/ATLAS's motion over the course of about 26 minutes. The average rate of motion is about 2 arcseconds per minute.

[themanwhoateastronomy]

so we all know about the patron saint of one-way trips

but how about:

the patron saints of last messages and quiet goodbyes

the patron saint of overstaying your welcome

the patron saint of being small, afraid, and doing it anyway

the patron saint of first steps you can never take back

the patron saint of flying for the ones who couldn't

the patron saints of asking "are we alone?" and only hearing your echo

[progradevector]

Finally, conditions are right to see interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS from my location. Here is a small GIF taken in the brief moments between when it emerged from behind the treetops and when the dawnlight became too overwhelming for my sensor. In just those 4 minutes, its rapid motion is readily apparent. As is the fuzzy coma made from outgassing icy material from its ancient surface.

It's quite humbling and awe-inspiring to consider that this object formed around another star untold eons ago before being cast off to wander the galaxy alone. Now, after billions of years adrift in the dark spaces between stars, it once again briefly feels the warmth of sunlight before passing back into the void, never to come near our Sun again.

[progradevector]

The aurora had a decent display tonight!

[progradevector]

And now for some more science, also from last night. This is a plot of brightness for the Delta Scuti variable star SZ Lyncis. These regular dips and peaks are a result of the star physically expanding and contracting in cycles of rhythmic pulsation, driven by changes in opacity in its chromosphere!

I think Delta Scutis are some of my favorite variables just because of how dramatically they change over the course of a night, often swinging up and down in brightness by half a magnitude or more. Seeing the data get plotted point-by-point as AstroImageJ churns through the differential photometry is neat!

[progradevector]

My first image since getting my mount repaired, the core of the Andromeda Galaxy (M31)! This is only about 3 hours of total integration time (about 1 hour in each color channel). I decided to switch targets after it crossed the meridian…

[progradevector]

Another example of some of the amateur astronomy I've been up to recently. This is the red dwarf EV Lacertae. It's a very young star at just 300 million years old, and also one of the closer stars to the Sun sitting at a distance of 16.5 lightyears. EV Lac is known as a flare star, a class of stars which have extreme and unpredictable surges in brightness that last several minutes. This kind of flare activity is quite common among red dwarfs, especially ones as young as EV Lac. Our best understanding of why this is has to do with the fact that young stars rotate quickly. This rapid rotation drives an immensely strong magnetic field. As in the Sun, it is the reconnection of field lines that is thought to drive these flares. But in the case of stars like EV Lac, the field strength is such that the flares produces can dwarf those of the Sun by orders of magnitude. Indeed, EV Lac has been known to produce flares tens of thousands of times brighter than the brightest solar flare on record. All this from a star a third the size of the Sun.

While I didn't manage to see any such super-flares, I have recorded several outbursts over the last few months. The first and brightest resulted in an overall brightening of the star by a factor of 1.3, which is quite impressive! I intend to follow this star for a good while as part of an observational campaign for the AAVSO. I'm excited to see if it has any surprises in store!

[maidthings]

does anyone have a chip manufacturing plant I have a really bad idea

[progradevector]

Transit of Exoplanet TrES-1b From My Backyard

It might seem silly to suggest that you can see a planet many hundreds of lightyears away orbiting another star from your own house with off-the-shelf equipment, but amateur astronomers like myself have been doing it for over a decade! How? Using the same method professionals do - specifically the transit method. Modern commercial CCD and CMOS cameras are sensitive enough to detect the minuscule change in brightness as an exoplanet passes between its parent star and us. And it is a tiny drop in brightness, between 10 and 20 parts per thousand for the largest of planets.

It's these large, close-in planets that are accessible to amateur astronomers, thanks to the relatively deep transits and fast orbits that are easily detectable and can be fully captured in a single night of imaging. This is one of my most recent observations of such a transit. The planet in question is TrES-1b, a world a little larger than Jupiter in a scorchingly-tight orbit that lasts just 3 days. Such planets are called hot Jupiters for obvious reasons. They are large, low-density volatile-rich worlds whose proximity to their star heats their atmospheres to many hundreds to thousands of degrees. In the case of TrES-1b, the average temperature was directly measured with the Spitzer infrared space telescope to be Over 786 °C.

Using the software package AstroImageJ, I produced a lightcurve showing the change in brightness over the course of the night. It is readily apparent when the transit begins, as the star's light drops off and then stabilizes. There's a lot that can be inferred from just this portion of the plot, but the primary information that can be gleaned is the planet's radius (from the depth of the dip) and the length of the orbit (from the frequency of transit events and the duration of each transit). The field image on the right shows the target star itself (circled in green) and the comparison stars (in red) used as references to measure the brightness against.

[progradevector]

M33, the Triangulum Galaxy

This is perhaps the top contender for my favorite photo I've taken so far. The Triangulum Galaxy the third-largest galaxy in the Local Group, the first being Andromeda and the second being our own Milky Way. It's also the second-closest major galaxy (excluding our own satellite galaxies), sitting at around 2.7 million light-years. Curiously, Triangulum lacks an obvious nuclear bulge, and its core also does not appear to harbor a supermassive black hole like other large galaxies. Instead, models suggest an intermediate-mass black hole of around 1500 solar masses lurks within the nucleus. If this is indeed the case, the reason for such a relatively low-mass central black hole is unknown.

Of particular note in this galaxy are the large H-II emission regions. There are two that are most prominent in this photo, the first being near the bottom right-hand region. This is NGC 604, which is not only the largest star-forming region in Triangulum but also one of the largest known anywhere. It spans over 1500 light-years, dwarfing the famous Orion nebular complex in our own galaxy. The other, located just a little bit leftward from the core, is NGC 595, which is also quite vast at around 440 light-years across.

There's so much detail here thanks mainly to how close this galaxy is to us. You could spend hours looking at all the structure and nebular complexes hidden inside. It makes me wonder what our own galaxy would look like from such a distance. A shame that's a view we'll never see.

[progradevector]

Hmmm, what if I started posting my astrophotography and amateur astronomy stuff here

[progradevector]

Ad astra coniuncte - To the stars, together. Arm in arm to wonder and love and learn. Ethically, sustainably, and cooperatively. We go together, or not at all.