231 images were combined to produce one of the most stunning pictures ever of a total solar eclipse. The new moon, illuminated by light reflecting from the Earth (ie. Earthshine), covers the face of the sun. Stretching away from the moon are the long tendrils of the sun’s outer atmosphere called the corona. Photo: Miloslav Druckmuller, Peter Aniol and used by permission

Awesome is the overworked word of the current day. Not only are truly awesome things described as such but also things like Paris Hilton’s cellphone or a nice haircut. At the risk of using that word one more time, let me share with you one of the most awesome photographs I’ve ever seen. Druckmueller and Aniol made the image of the March 29, 2006 total solar eclipse in the Libyan Desert with five separate cameras equipped with five different lenses. Later they combined the best images into the stunning photograph you see above.

Closeup of the 2006 total solar eclipse. The brush-like strokes in the corona are aligned with the sun’s magnetic field, similar to iron filings around a magnet. The pink flames of incandescent hydrogen gas at upper left are called prominences. Unless you have a special filter, they’re also only visible during an eclipse. Photo: Miloslav Druckmuller, Peter Aniol and used by permission

I’ve seen three total solar eclipses and Druckmuller’s pictures of the sun’s corona look closest to the real thing. The corona, the sun’s thin, hot outer atmosphere, is only visible during a total eclipse because it’s much too faint to see in full sunlight. To see more photographs by this amazing German team, and read about their adventures, I encourage you to visit their website.

When the moon lines up exactly between the Earth and the sun, it covers the sun, causing a total solar eclipse. As the moon orbits the Earth, its dark, inner shadow, called the umbra, sweeps across a narrow swath of Earth about 140 miles wide. Anyone within that path sees a total eclipse. Outside of it is a larger zone of partial eclipse. Credit: Sagredo

A total solar eclipse will occur tomorrow, August 1, but unfortunately will not be visible from the United States. The path of totality starts in the Canadian Arctic, travels across Greenland, Russia and China and wraps up in Mongolia. A partial eclipse will be visible from eastern Canada and across Europe. Total solar eclipses happen once or twice a year on average but only a narrow swath of Earth is treated to a view of totality under the moon’s shadow. The animation shows how small that shadow is, and how it moves across the Earth during tomorrow’s eclipse. If you’re hungry for more information about this eclipse, you’ll get all the details from this NASA website. 

Even better, you can view a live webcast of the eclipse here brought to you by the San Francisco Exploratorium. Be prepared to get up early though. The best place to see the eclipse is in China and the event happens between 5:30 and 7:30 tomorrow morning (Aug.1) Central time.

Enjoy the show!

Richard Bosman’s wonderful tableau of photographs taken throughout the past apparition of Mars. It shows the change in the planet’s size as it approached and receded from Earth, dark surface markings, and the growth of the north polar cap. Credit: Richard Bosman, the Netherlands

It’s early summer in Mars’ northern hemisphere where the high temperature at the Phoenix lander is 20 below zero. Scientists are still at work trying to figure a way to collect and deposit ice shavings from the surface into one of the lander’s ovens for analysis. As they do, let’s take a look at the past apparition of Mars. An apparition is a term astronomers use to describe the period of time when a planet is easily observable in the morning or evening sky.

No, the Internet is not out of register. This is a 3-D image made by the Phoenix lander cameras showing the rocky environment near the ship. With a pair of red-blue glasses, this landscape becomes strikingly real. Credit: NASA

We followed Mars into the sunset in early July and you can continue to follow developments online at the NASA Phoenix site. The site also has a special section of 3-D photographs taken by the lander that make you feel like you’re standing right there on the rusty soil. In some of these, you’ll see textural details and depth that ordinary photographs simply cannot reveal. Click here for the Phoenix 3-D gallery and here for the Mars Rover gallery. Want more? Check out this site too. These photos are as close as most of us will ever get to being an astronaut on another planet.

All you need to enjoy the experience is a pair of red-blue glasses. Stereo images are actually two photographs taken with two cameras from slightly different angles. When you don the glasses, the red lens transmits one of the images to your left eye, the blue transmits the other to your right eye. They’re combined in your brain to re-create the original 3-D scene. Our binocular vision is what allows us to see depth, and the dual-photograph method mimicks the effect very well.

If you don’t have a pair of red-blue glasses, you can buy them online very inexpensively here or here. You can even hold up squares of red and blue plastic to your eyes — whatever works. If anyone knows of a local or regional source for 3-D glasses, please send me an e-mail at: rking@duluthnews.com and I’ll update the blog.

Once the clouds blew out, last night’s sky was spectacular. I hope you were in a dark place to see the Scutum Star Cloud. A few meteors flew by over the housetops, early hints of the Perseid shower to come.

Any early risers out there? Tomorrow morning (July 31) an ultra-thin crescent moon will be visible very low in the northeastern sky during twilight around 5 a.m., 40 minutes before sunrise. I’m setting the alarm.

Last night was a gift night around here in Duluth. The forecast was for cloudy but the stars and fireflys came out anyway. Maybe some of you saw the late evening pass of the International Space Station (ISS). If you did, you noticed that instead of completing its arc across the north, the station faded out while still high overhead. Like all satellites, you can see the ISS because it remains in sunlight at its 200+ mile altitude. As it moves across the sky, the craft eventually encounters Earth’s shadow and fades rapidly from view. Late at night, the shadow has risen high enough in the sky that the ISS run into it before completing its arc.

Here are some more passes through Friday August 1. The ISS will first appear in the northwestern sky, cross the northern sky and disappear in the east.

Tonight and tomorrow night, the forecast looks good for stargazing. Have you noticed that the nights are getting darker earlier? I don’t know about you but my sleep deficit for the summer is in double figures so earlier sunsets and shorter twilights are most welcome.

You can find the Scutum Star Cloud about one fist above bright Jupiter in the southeastern sky around 10:30 p.m. Or you can use the Summer Triangle stars – Deneb, Vega and Altair – to point you there. — created with Stellarium

Let’s visit a special place in the Milky Way that’s easily visible to the naked eye from a dark location. It’s called the Scutum (SKOO-tem) Star Cloud and is one of the richest, brightest chunks of stars visible in the galaxy. The name comes from Scutum the Shield, a small and inconspicuous constellation below Aquila the Eagle.

The bright Scutum cloud is framed by dark dust, the better to make it stand out in the band of the Milky Way. Photo: Bob King/News Tribune

When you look at the Milky Way, the large dark swaths cut into the band are actually enormous clouds of interstellar dust that block the starlight from behind. The dust is the legacy of previous generations of stars that spewed the stuff into space as they aged or exploded as supernovas. 

We see the star cloud so clearly because little dust blocks our view. Just like cleaning the dust off your car windshield to see the road better. If you have reasonably dark sky, finding the Scutum cloud is easy. It’s one vertically-held fist above Jupiter, the bright planet in the southeastern sky around 10:30 p.m. If you see a brighter, puffy patch that stands out from the neighboring Milky Way, you’ve got it.

A diagram of the Milky Way galaxy with the sun’s location marked. When you look at the Scutum Star Cloud, you’re peering into the Scutum-Crux spiral arm in the general direction of the galactic core. Credit: NASA

Take you binoculars and do a little exploring. The cloud is not only rich in stars but has some wonderful dark dust clouds coiling through it, and a choice star cluster called M11, located on its northern edge. The cluster will look like a tiny, fuzzy patch. Over the next week, we’ll take a closer look at this rich cluster, one of amateur astronomers favorites. 

There are so many online resources available to skywatchers. Free sky charts, planetarium-style programs, atlases, Jupiter moon calculators – you can have it all. It all seems more than enough but the Internet never sits still.  Two big new Kahunas just cruised into the neighborhood — the NASA image archive and Microsoft’s World Wide Telescope (WWT).

A tiny sampling of the photos in NASA’s new image archive. Top: John Glenn entering the Friendship 7 capsule, the Sombrero Galaxy and lunar landscape from Apollo orbit. Bottom: Saturn, the Trifid Nebula and the Northern Lights seen from the Shuttle. Credit: NASA

Space aficionados have been waiting for something like NASA’s image archive
for years – a repository for all those amazing pictures from the space program since its inception after World War II. Here you’ll find everything from cool, old B&W images
of the X-15 test pilots, current and past photos from all the space probes to the planets, videos and much, much more. Think of something you’d like to see, type it in
the search box and watch what pops up. I typed in "Neptune" and 377
pictures appeared, 50 at a time. It’s easy to download anything you
like. There are even photos taken by amateur astronomers on the site.

Screen grab of the interactive sky chart featured on the World Wide Telescope website.

The World Wide Telescope is touted as a virtual telescope and sky exploration tool.
After you download and install the software — about 15 minutes with a high
speed connection — you’re presented with a sky map of the
constellations. Using your mouse, you can zoom deep into any patch of
sky, and tap into photographs taken with everything from a wide-angle
camera to the Hubble Space Telescope. And you can do it for any
wavelength of light. Tired of the visual sky? Click a box and see
everything in radio or ultraviolet light, or select another.

With WWT, you can pick a planet and tour it in detail. The site uses photos from orbiting space probes and rovers on the surface of Mars to make you feel like you’re there.

It’s just as fun with planets. You can zoom down to the surface of
Mars, study a canyon and then back off and rotate the planet to a
different position to study new features. The smooth feel of panning
and manoevering with the mouse makes it seem like you’re inside a
virtual spaceship. Unbelievable. Guided tours are also available.
Bear in mind that since this program involves so much data, you’ll need
a fast Internet connection and speedy computer with Windows XP or
higher to use it. Here are the links:

* NASA Image Archive

* World Wide Telescope

Next time it’s cloudy, pay a visit to the archive or fire up the WWT.
You’ll be up all night.

Good news this morning. The dreaded haze has moved on. Today’s sky is a rich, transparent blue where you can once again see the moon in daylight. Last night, the path of the International Space Station (ISS) took it through Cassiopeia the Queen, the familiar constellation in the shape of the letter "W". As luck would have it, the ISS will lead skywatchers tonight (July 27) directly to Cassiopeia during both the 9:20 and 10:55 p.m. passes. See yesterday’s blog for more details.

If you look toward the northeast after 10 o’clock, you can see the familiar "W" of Cassiopeia. Below it are the stars of Perseus and Andromeda that we’ll look at in more detail in mid-August around the time of the Perseid Meteor Shower. – created with Stellarium

When we last met Cassiopeia in an April blog, she was slinking down toward the northwest horizon ready for some quiet time by herself under the Pole Star. She never did completely disappear — at least from northern latitudes, Cassiopeia is one of the several circumpolar constellations that never set for our region. The others are Ursa Major (Big Dipper), Ursa Minor (Little Dipper), Cepheus (the Queen’s husband), Camelopardalis (the Giraffe) and Draco the Dragon.

Circumpolar stars or constellations are those that are close enough to Polaris, the North Star, that the paths they describe in the sky as the Earth rotates, don’t get cut off by the horizon. In effect, they never set. Polaris is the same height above the horizon as your latitude — about 47 degrees in Duluth. At the north pole, Polaris is directly overhead and every constellation is circumpolar. The zippy little animation (at right) created by Mjchael and used by permission, helps to explain the concept visually.

Any way you look at it, it’s nice to get a visit from the Queen these July nights. Tea anyone?

It happens every summer. The sky’s clear and blue one day, and it’s white with haze the next. This happened yesterday. Gone was the rich blue of recent weeks, replaced with an angel food cake version. It still looks clear, and you can still see the stars but last night’s sky was washed out. Especially so near the horizon. If any of you tried to find M22 and M8 in binoculars last night, you may have struck out.

So what’s the deal? I called Amy Liles, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service office in Duluth. She suspects it’s haze from wildfires in Canada. "I’m not certain but it does look like it’s coming from forest fires way up north in Canada," said Liles. "It looks like we’ll stay in this pattern through the weekend with the northwesterly airflow."

The International Space Station cut through the Bowl of the Big Dipper during a pass over the region last night July 25. Taken with a 16mm lens, f/2.8, ISO 800, exposure about 80 seconds. Photo: Bob King/News Tribune

The good news is that this pattern is likely to change by early next week. In the meantime, watch for the sun to look like a crisp orange ball around sunset and sunrise. Haze or not, you can still watch the International Space Station (ISS) make bright passes over the region.

The current Expedition 17 crew aboard the International Space Station. They’re pictured in the station’s Unity node with Russian and American spacesuits. Photo: NASA

Here are some times for viewing. On all passes, the ISS will first appear low in the northwestern sky, glide across the northern sky and disappear in the northeast. If you’d like to learn more about the crew, their mission and the history of spaceflight, visit this website.

I didn’t get to see the Willy Wonka movie until later in life. My children loved it so I sat with them once and finally learned the story of Charlie and the Golden Ticket. Like Wonka’s candy factory, the summertime Milky Way is filled with its own delectable treats for binocular and telescope users.

To find M22 and M8, look low in the south-southeast starting around 10:30 p.m. Jupiter is the only brilliant "star" in the area. You can use it to help you find Sagittarius, also known as the Teapot. — created with Stellarium

Two of the easier ones to see are the globular cluster M22 and M8, better known as the Lagoon Nebula. A few weeks back we met Charles Messier, the 18th century observer who was a passionate comet hunter. In the process of scanning the sky for them, Messier created a catalog of 110 of the sky’s best known clusters, galaxies and gas clouds (called nebulas). They’re called "Messier objects" and each starts with the letter M. The brighter ones with distinctive shapes or characteristics are often given nicknames like the Blackeye Galaxy or the Trifid Nebula.

You can use this photograph to help guide you to M22 and from there, to the Lagoon Nebula. Notice that Jupiter, the globular cluster and the nebula are aligned in a nearly straight line right above the Teapot. To best see these delicacies, find a location with reasonably dark skies. Photo: Bob King/News Tribune

M22 is one of the brightest globular clusters in the sky and very much like the cluster M4 in Scorpius that we met last month. Globular clusters are dense swarms of tens of thousands of stars packed into a compact ball. M22 is 10,400 light years away and some 97 light years across. That’s positively huge! Big enough to see in a pair of 7x or 10x binoculars as a small, fuzzy spot to the right or west of Jupiter near the star at the top of the Teapot. To find it, focus first on Jupiter, then move about one binocular field to the right. See that small milky glow? There’s 100,000 stars jammed into that bit of fuzz.

Continue westward — to the right — and you can’t miss M8, the Lagoon Nebula. It’s a little patch of stars swaddled in the soft glow of interstellar gas. The Lagoon gets its name from a dark, river-like patch of space dust that wends through the bright nebulosity. Like the more familiar Orion Nebula, the Lagoon is a vigorous stellar nursery. Within its deep clouds, new stars are condensing from cosmic dust and gas. Jim Misti’s photographs show how spectacular these objects really are.

The globular cluster M22 in Sagittarius. Globulars are very ancient. They were among the first objects to form in the collapsing cloud of dust and gas that became the Milky Way galaxy. Photo by Jim Misti

The Lagoon Nebula (M8) reveals clouds of bright bright and dark gas and dust. Photo by Jim Misti

Whenever I show people globular clusters for the first time in the telescope, I ask them to look for a pile of spilled sugar. That’s how thick the stars look in a moderate-sized telescope. In that spirit, and taking a cue from Mr. Willy Wonka, I present the first edible globular cluster made of … spilled sugar. Happy crunching.

The first edible globular cluster. Any suggestions for a name? Photo: Bob King/News Tribune

The waning gibbous moon "in conjunction" with the old Central High School clocktower yesterday morning (July 23) at 9:45 a.m. Bob King/News Tribune

Have you noticed the moon in the daytime sky the past few mornings? You back the car out of the driveway and there it is, hanging like a frosty nickel in the blue sky above the trees. It’s a common sight during the summer and early fall months.

Sunrise (left) and Full moonset (right) as seen in the Sierra Nevada mountain range in Bishop, Calif. on July 19. Photos by Andrew Kirk

You’ll recall that the Full Moon is directly opposite the sun in the sky. When the sun sets, the full moon rises, and when the sun rises the next morning, the moon sets. This is beautifully illustrated in this pair of photos submitted by Andrew Kirk of Bishop, California. He recorded both events on July 19. 

As our planet circles the sun (counterclockwise in the illustration), the sun appears to travel around the celestial sphere from one zodiac constellation to the next along an imaginary circle called the ecliptic, the outer red circle. Illustration by Tau’olunga

As the Earth orbits the sun during the year, the sun appears to describe a great circle across the sky, swinging from a high point in summer to a low point in winter. This circle is called the ecliptic. The moon and all the planets also travel along the ecliptic, which passes through the 12 constellations of the zodiac. The sun reaches its highest point in the sky during the summer months. Since the Full Moon is directly opposite the sun, it occupies the lowest place on the ecliptic in summer. Think of the June and July full moons, which barely clear the treetops from northern latitudes.

The sun’s path yearly path along the celestial highway called the ecliptic. The top of the curve, at right, is the sun’s position during the summer. The low part of the curve is the sun’s location during winter. The up-and-down path is a reflection of the 23 1/2-degree tilt of the Earth’s axis. The tilt makes the sun appear to ride high and then low in the sky over the course of a year. Illustration and animation by Dr. John Lucey, Durham University. Click here for his informative website.

After Full Moon during the summer months, the moon continues along the ecliptic as it orbits the Earth, moving northward and up toward the sun. Each and every night, the moon moves about one outstretched fist to the east and rises about 50 minutes later, while climbing higher and higher up the ecliptic. By the time the moon is nearing third or last quarter phase, it’s up high enough in the sky during the early morning hours to be easily visible to kids on their way to school or the legions of workers heading into town. That’s where we are now.

The moon will continue to rise ever higher as its phase shrinks from quarter to crescent. If you watch it over the next few mornings, you’ll notice it closing in on the sun until new moon phase on August 1. One that day, the moon will be nearly directly in line with the sun and invisible because of solar glare. However, if you happen to be in the right place in Russia or China, you’ll be treated to a direct lineup and a solar eclipse! More about that next week.

Take a look up high these early mornings and watch a familiar face journey towards the sun as it circles our home planet.

Did anybody catch the brilliant flare from the International Space Station (ISS) during its 10:22 p.m. pass last night? My daughter, her friend and I watched the ISS slide across the Big Dipper when all at once, it became as bright as Venus. A few seconds later it faded back to normal. Flares are possible anytime during a space station pass, as sunlight glints briefly off solar arrays and other reflective parts.

As a teenager, one of my favorite songs was Gloria by the Shadows of Knight. It was a hot little tune about the usual teen desires. The best part was when the lead singer shout-spells the letters of his heart’s desire — G-L-O-R-I-A! Click here for a listen.

 
The Earth’s shadow rises over Lake Superior as seen from Hawk Ridge in Duluth last night July 22. Photo: Bob King/News Tribune

My ear always heard the band name as the Shadows of Night. I didn’t hear the silent "K" until many years later, probably due to my preoccupation with astronomy. I thought about the band last night when I saw the real shadow of night rise in the eastern sky as the sun set in the west.

As the sun sets, the shadow cast by the Earth moves up from the east,climbing above the observer’s horizon (red line) and into the sky. Illustration: Bob King/News Tribune

Every night when the sky is clear, the shadow our planet is visible as a dark curtain against the atmosphere. You may have seen it without even knowing it. It’s a large, ominous-looking, grey arc in contact with the horizon, directly opposite the setting sun. The size of it really gives you a sense of how large our planet is. As the sun sinks further, the shadow rises higher until it blends with the darkening sky.

You’re probably wondering what that pretty pink band is atop the shadow. It’s called the Belt of Venus, and is caused by reddened sunlight from the setting sun reflected and scattered by our atmosphere. Below the Belt, the sun has set from the atmosphere’s viewpoint, and the shadow takes over. Above the Belt, the sky is still its normal blue because the atmosphere high up "sees" the sun well before it sets and reddens.

A celestial seesaw is another way to look at the rising of Earth’s shadow after sunset. As the sun goes down, the shadow goes up. Illustration: Bob King, Sxc photo

The sun sets for the Duluth area around 8:52 p.m. tonight. If you want to see the shadow, find a place with a horizon view to the east, and go out about 10 or so minutes before sunset. The shadow starts as a thin dark strip but gradually fattens as the minutes tick by. I noticed that by 9:10 p.m., it had already blended with the sky. Catch it while you can. I guarantee the sight will be G-L-O-R-I-O-U-S!

Good weather’s in store tonight. Here are times when the International Space Station (ISS) will pass over the region for the next few nights. Tomorrow night’s 9:10 p.m. pass should be especially bright because the ISS will fly directly overhead. Since it occurs just 15 minutes after sunset, you’ll see the craft in twilight against a blue sky. Very cool.

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF) photograph recorded some 10,000 galaxies in a tiny region of the sky 1/10 the size of the full moon. Learn more about the photo here. Credit: S. Beckwith, HUDF Working Group, STScI, HST, ESA, NASA

We spent some time talking remote galaxies yesterday. There’s no sense leaving the topic without going all the way. With the Hubble Space Telescope’s (HST) help, let’s break down the door. Between September 24, 2003 and January 16, 2004, the HST was focused on a blank region of the sky just 1/10 the size of the full moon in Fornax the Furnace, below the constellation Orion (see NASA illustration at right). During that time, the scope made 800 exposures averaging 21 minutes each for a total time exposure of 11.3 days.

Can you imagine leaving your camera shutter open for 11 days? It boggles the mind. The resulting image, called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF), records galaxies 13 billion years light years away, taking us back to a time when the universe was only 800 million years old. It may look like there are stars in the picture but virtually every point you see is a galaxy — and there are an estimated 10,000 of them!

Scientists took the photo to learn more about what things looked like in the early universe. One difference they see is how irregular and distorted the galaxies appear. It’s believed these early galaxies merged over time to form the large, classic spirals and elliptical-shaped galaxies common in today’s universe.

Got some extra time on your hands? Why not explore a VERY LARGE, high-resolution image of the HUDF. For a few minutes you’ll feel like an astrophysicist, as you marvel at the curious characters who performed on the universal stage so long ago. 

Noctilucent cloud display from last weekend as photographed from Hurricane Ridge in Olympic National Park. Details: 8-second exposure at ISO 400 taken at 10:30 p.m. Photo: Rick Klawitter

I received some wonderful photos the other day from Rick Klawitter, who lives in Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. He’s a regular skywatcher and has had great success this summer spotting noctilucent clouds. Enjoy his ethereal image.