August 1st 2008 will see a solar eclipse visible across much of Asia, Europe, the Middle East and some portions of North America. Maximum totality is seen in Siberia, but you can also see the Moon totally obscure the Sun in many parts of China (and the North Pole if you’re about). The eclipse is often being called the 2008 Olympic Eclipse because it comes just days before the commencement of the Summer Olympics in Beijing.

In other parts of the Old World, a partial eclipse will be seen. The regions covered by partial eclipse are seen in the above diagram outlined in light blue, with totality in dark blue. If you want to know the details of what can be seen in your area, then I’d use the very handy Google Map provided by NASA.

This map allows you to double-click anywhere and find the start, maximum and end times for the eclipse that is visible in your locality. For example, in Cardiff the eclipse begins at 0930 (BST) and ends an hour and a half later.  You are also told the eclipse magnitude, which is basically a measure of how much of the Sun’s face, the Moon will cover. In Cardiff this will be around 21%.

Check out the site for info on your own area and if you plan to watch the eclipse, don’t forget to either project the Sun’s image onto a piece of paper, or order a set of eclipse viewing glasses.

Universe Today is reporting what I have seen other sites reporting on over the past few days: a lack of sunspots. It seems there is “a small worry” that something untoward may be afoot with the current lack of magnetic activity on the Sun two years after Solar minimum.

Where are the Sunspots? Are we in for a Quiet Solar Cycle? | Universe Today

This one could just be filed under ‘this is really cool’. Also, I can’t believe it has passed me by my entire life. Have you ever heard of a solar furnace? It’s a James- Bond-esque creation which focusses light from the sun on a massive scale to heat a very small area to a very high temperature. They built on in the Pyreness in 1970, a big one, and it can produce 1000 kW per square centimetre!

A solar furnace is a structure made up of a parabolic mirror, which reflects light on to a focal point. In the case of the furnace at Font-Romeu in the French Pyrenees, several small mirrors catch light from a hillside and focus it onto the main mirror as well, adding to the power of the construction. The heat produced can be used to generate electricity or to perform experiments in high-temperature physics.

The solar furnace at Odeillo, Font-Romeu in the Pyrenees of France (pictured here) was opened in 1970 and is the largest in the world. According to Wikipedia, the rays are focused on to an area the size of a cooking pot and this means that they can reach a temperature of up to 3,000 degrees Celsius.

The first modern solar furnace is is still in place at Mont Louis, near to Odeillo. It was built in the 1940s. The Pyrenees were chosen as the site because the can recieve 300 sunny days a year.

Take a look at the large Odeillo furnace on Google Earth, via this KMZ file.

Today is February 29th, the ‘extra’ day we are given every four years to bring the calendar back into sync with the actual time it takes the Earth to go around the Sun. Leap years are actually much more complicated than most people think with exceptions every 100 years, but not every 400 years. Why? It all has a lot to do with decimals and in fact the Bad Astronomer recently posted explaining the whole thing with his calculator if you wish to try it out.

I’ve always thought that February 29th should be a national holiday. With Britain needing to add a few national holidays to come into line with Europe, why not make February 29th a ‘free’ day, instead of having it stolen away from us each year?

Traditionally of course this is the day that women are ‘allowed’ to propose to men. In fact I was proposed to in 2000 by my friend Emily before an upcoming Las Vegas trip. We had hoped to have acquired an ex-spouse before we went to university. It never happened which is probably for the best.

So what will you be doing with your extra day? Even if you’re at work, some effort should be made to mark the occasion. If you can: have a baby. I’ve always liked that people can be born on a day which leaves them one-quarter the age of everyone else born that year. It acts as a great reminder that try as we might, we can’t quite get such a seemingly straight-forward thing as the calendar right. Why? Astronomy’s fault, of course!

In my previous post, detailing tonight’s Lunar Eclipse (the last until December 2010), I included a YouTube video I made showing what you might expect to see if it is clear. Well included here is the same video plus two more showing the same event from the perspective of the Moon and the Sun.

The night-side of the Earth has been lightened, in this video as seen from the Moon, to show where the countries are. Viewing location is the Sea of Tranquility where Apollo 11 landed in 1969. Note the parts of the Earth that can been ’seen’ here. These are the only places you will see the eclipse from.

This is the video from my previous post about the eclipse. This is the view from Cardiff, UK. Note that toward the end, the horizon comes into view as the eclipse only visible until sunrise here.

In this video from the perspective of the Sun, the Earth’s penumbral shadow on the Moon is drawn on as a circle behind the Earth. Interestingly the Moon is partially shadowed even when the Sun is shining on it from another angle. This is the effect of the different penumbral and umbral shadows, explained here on Wikipedia, or in this exaggerated image:

Enjoy the eclipse is the weather is good where you are. I think I shall have to suffice with photos from last year.

We had a talk yesterday from Dr. Fabio Favata titled “Space Astronomy in ESA’s Cosmic Vision 2015-2025 plan”. Cosmic Vision is the European Space Agency’s peculiar name for its plan over the next decade and a bit. The talk was very good, and covered almost the whole breadth of ESA’s big activities that are either currently running or up-and-coming.

So where is ESA right now? Currently ESA is supporting or in some way dealing with about a dozen missions in operation. Between now and 2015, ESA has 8 more spacecraft due to launch. In this post I will briefly overview those upcoming launches. In my next post, I shall discuss the future beyond 2015.

This year will see three payloads put into orbit: Chandryaan, Herschel and Planck. Chandrayaan is an unmanned lunar mission in association with the Indian Space Agency. Herschel and Planck are ESA endeavours and Herschel particularly is seen as a flagship mission. Herschel will be a big step forward technologically and will usher in a lot of Far Infrared data for people like me in the area of star formation, and indeed for anyone else who likes to look at fairly cold, dusty things.

2010 will see something called Microscope go up. This is an experiment to test Einstein’s equivalence principle, which is a key postulate in the characterization of space-time and the theory of gravitation. 2010 also sees the LISA Pathfinder mission launch, which will test the viability of LISA, a much talked about gravity wave experiment which always seems to be 5 years away.

In 2011, GAIA, another flagship mission will be sent up to measure the precise distances and velocities of a billion stars. It will track the motions of stars down to 10-20 microarcseconds and a magnitude down to 15. This mission will revolutionise the way we model our galaxy, as we will begin to see how the stars that make it up are moving about.

In 2013, the James Webb Space Telescope will launch, which is seen by many as the successor to Hubble although it will really be looking at non-visible wavelengths. Also in 2013 is the wonderfully named BepiColombo, a Mercury mission which will also test the theory of relativity.

Finally in 2015, ESA will launch the Solar Orbiter which will produce images of the Sun at an unprecedented resolution and perform closest ever in-situ measurements.

You can find out more about any of these mission at ESA’s website.

This Wednesday there will be a total eclipse of the Moon. Totality will last for 51 minutes and will be visible throughout Europe, North America, the Pacific region and Northern Africa. The show kicks off at 00:35 GMT when the Earth’s penumbra touches the limb of the Moon. Totality occurs at 03:26 GMT. This will be the last total lunar eclipse until December 2010.

Update: new post shows eclipse from perspective of the Moon and Sun [Link].

During Lunar eclipses the Moon does not go completely black, but rather turns a nice deep red. Last year’s March eclipse was particularly good as the weather was very clear. We can only hope for the same this year.

For more information you can visit NASA’s eclipse page, or check out their handy, one-page guide which I have embedded below.

The embedded video was created using Starry Night at 300x normal speed and the photo shown is one my wife took last year. Nice isn’t it?

A new 11-year sunspot cycle is about to begin, according to some blogs and other sources. I know very little about the Sun but am pretty sure that nothing disastrous is going to happen when a new cycle begins.

The Sun runs an 11-year cycle, which affects the number of visible sunspot as well as some other things. If you wish to track the cycle over the next 11 years please do so without directly looking at the Sun. I really can’t tell enough people this.

I love NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day, known to its friends as APOD. So to honour that Great website, which has been running for more than a decade, I here present my own personal top ten list of APODs. They may not be quite the same as anyone else Top Ten but they represent some of the best things about the APOD site as well as being some of the most impressive images.

10: Mars Then and Now

Two images of Mars taken over 100 years apart. The first was drawn by Eugene Antoniadi in 1894, the second is from Hubble during the close approach of Mars in 2003. Its interesting to see what they got right and what they got wrong. Notably the extensive system of Martian Canals, which Percival Lowell was so adamant existed and proved the presence of Martians.

Credit: Tom Ruen, Eugene Antoniadi, Lowell Hess, Roy A. Gallant, HST, NASA
More Historical APODs - Yuri Gagarin, Voynich Manuscript

9: The Surface of Europa

Back in January 1998, when this image appeared on APOD, the Galileo Mission was still sending back amazing new pictures from Jupiter and it’s Moons. This was around the time I first discovered APOD and have been checking it ever since.

Credit: Galileo Project, JPL, NASA
More Groundbreaking APODs - Shadow of Saturn, Pluto’s True Colours

8: Bubble vs Cloud

This 2005 APOD captured my imagination for some reason. You can really see a three-dimensional effect in this beautiful picture. The actual title of the image is ‘ NGC 7635: The Bubble Nebula’ but the phrase ‘Bubble vs Cloud’ stuck with me somehow. It just got me thinking about how dynamic all of these giant objects are, even if we will never see it for ourselves.

Credit: Russell Croman
More APOD Nebulae - The Eagle Nebula, Orion Nebula, Carina Nebula

7: Close Up of the Face on Mars

After years of being told by people that there was a giant human face on Mars that an ancient civilisation had once created it was satisfying to see it for real and notice that ‘hey, there is no face’.

Credit: Malin Space Science Systems, MGS, JPL, NASA
More Debunking APODs - Equinox Eggs, Green Flash, The Moon Illusion

6: Binary Black Hole

This composite image shows the x-ray in blue and the radio in pink. You can see two black holes in the middle, which are each streaming out relativistic particles. These two objects are 300 million light years away! This APOD from April 2006 was the first time I had ’seen’ a black hole in any convincing sense.

Credit: X-Ray: NASA/CXC/D.Hudson, T.Reiprich et al. (AIfA); Radio: NRAO/VLA/NRL
More Unseeable APODs - Dark Matter, Neutrinos

5: A Sun Pillar

One of the things APOD does best is show not only planets, nebulae and other distant objects, but also some cool, Earth-bound astronomical tit-bits. This Sun Pillar is created by ice crystals in the atmosphere. They are best seen during the colder months.

Credit: Stan Richard
More Earthbound APODs - Giant Machine, Lenticular Clouds, Aurora

4: Earthrise

This is a Christmas Eve APOD from 2004. The site has never been afraid to put up historical pictures or to be a little poetic when it feels like it. This image was taken around ChristmasEve when the three Apollo 8 astronauts were orbiting the Moon. They returned safely on December 27th, in time to see the 1967 Sunrise back on the Earth.

Credit: Apollo 8, NASA
More Poetic APODs - Martian Love, Huygens Discovery, Liberty Bell

3: Hyperion

Like a 250km sponge, Saturn’s Moon Hyperion is covered in odd craters and has a density so low that it has led researchers to assume it made up of vast deep caverns. This image shows the moon in excellent detail. The images on APOD have steadily improved with improving technology over the years and this amazing Hyperion picture is a great example.

Credit: Cassini Imaging Team, SSI, JPL, ESA, NASA
More High Resolution APOD - Annual Eclipse, Mars HiRISE, ISS Silhouette

2: Blue Lagoon

Sometimes you see a picture that just takes your breath away. This APOD was just such a picture. This wonderful Lagoon Nebula picture, which to me, looks like a painting, was not taken by Hubble as many might think but by a 20″ telescope on Earth.

Credit: Russell Crowman
More Artistic APODs - Moon from Space, Sombrero in IR

1: Venus Near the Moon

Not a grand finale in one sense, but a stunning picture never-the-less. What APOD has always done best are images like these, taken not by massive telescopes but by normal observers with affordable equipment. The stuff you can see with your eyes and appreciate instantly without explanation. This crisp, detailed image of Venus near the Moon sums up what so many of us like about astronomy, and why the subject remains accessible to just about anyone.

Credit: Jay Ouellet
More Backyard APOD - Moon Animation, Station and Shuttle, Blue Moon

So thank you to Astronomy Picture of the Day for many years of service to the internet. May you long continue to wow us on a daily basis.

APOD is also available as a Google Homepage Gadget, a Netvibes Module, an Apple Dashboard Widget, a Wordpress Widget, a Yahoo Widget, a Windows Vista Gadget , as a Twitter Feed and probably loads more.

If you have other APODs you think deserve attention, leave a link in the comments thread so we can all see.

I recently saw a Digg article which linked to a space.com page about the 10 Strangest Things in Space. All but 2 of the items were not pictures at all but computer simulations, or artists impressions. So here to correct this injustice to phenomena everywhere I present the REAL 10 Strangest Things in Space - or at least in my opinion. Feel free to suggest any others in the comments.

V838 Monoceroti Expansion (Hubble)

It wasn’t anything interesting until it happened but the star V838 Monoceroti, which had simply sat in obscurity, flared up in 2002 to become 600,000 more luminous than our own Sun. It didn’t take long for the star to fade back into the darkness but the Hubble Space Telescope managed to get quite a few pictures of it during its active phase. (Click for animated version)

In this series of images you can see how the star’s outer layers were first expelled and then cut away by the powerful radiation from the star. The event was made even more interesting by the fact that a ‘light echo‘ was seen. During the expansion the object appeared to expand faster than the speed of light - the effect was however merely an astronomical optical illusion.

The Egg Nebula (Hubble)

Also known as CRL2688, the Egg Nebula shows a pair of mysterious ’searchlights’ bursting out from a dense cocoon of dust surrounding a hidden, Sun-like star. We see the light escaping in the directions where the cocoon is thinner. Objects like CRL2688 are rare because they are in a phase of their evolution that is short-lived. Images like this one are very important to understanding how stars like our Sun will ultimately die.

The Sun in UV (SOHO)

The surface of the Sun is far more active than most people would think. This ultraviolet video taken by NASA’s SOHO spacecraft gives brilliant detail. It allows us to see one full revolution of the Sun on its axis, which normally takes about 25 days. In this video you can make out large flares erupting from the surface and the striking magnetic loops that seem to whirl about them as they go. (Full 512×512 MPEG Here)
Red Square Nebula Nebula (Hale/Keck)

Discovered in 2007, this ruby-like nebula may be the result of two interacting stars. If one star is dying then the material from it may be dragged into a disc around the orbits of both objects. Material can then only escape from the system along the poles of the disc, resulting in two cones leading out of the stars. When viewed from the edge these cones seem like two triangles. Here the system is seen in the infrared. Structures like this are rarely seen in nebula but there is in fact a Red Rectangle Nebula which is less symmetric but still quite interesting to look at.

Abell 39 (NOAO)

Here we see an almost perfect planetary nebula that sits about 7,000 light years away in the constellation Hercules. The dot at the centre is the original star, which - as it died - released the expanding gas shell also seen clearly here. The ghostly appearance of the shell is due to the blue-green filter used to take the image, which picks out the oxygen emitted light at 500.7nm.

Saturn’s Rings (Cassini)

This marvelous panoramic view was created by combining a total of 165 images taken by the Cassini wide-angle camera over nearly three hours on Sept. 15, 2006. Cassini was sheltered from the Sun’s glare by positioning itself behind Saturn. Ring structures are revealed here in detail as they brighten substantially at viewing angles where the Sun is almost directly behind the objects. These observations allowed Cassini to detected two new faint rings.

The Horsehead Nebula Swallowed Something (SCUBA)

Observers used the JCMT submillimetre telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii to take this image of the familiar Horsehead Nebula, who’s outline can be seen here. When observed at 850 microns, we are seeing the cold dust at temperatures close to absolute zero. This dust is deep inside the optical nebula normally seen, which is transparent at this wavelength. It seems from the image that the Horse has swallowed a ‘lozenge’ which is in fact a region of dense dust that may be collapsing under gravity. In fact this could be a star system in the making.

Gomez’s Hamburger (Hubble)

Arturo Gomez found this odd object in 1985 and it became known as Gomez’s Hamburger for obvious reasons. It is actually a proto-planetary nebula, an earlier version of Abell 39 perhaps. The curves of light (the bun) are reflecting light from the star which is being obscured by a thick band of dust (the burger). The whole thing is only only a fraction of a light year across and located 10,000 light years away in Sagittarius.

The Solar Spectrum (NOAO)

If you could catch a rainbow and put it under a microscope you would see that it was not a continuous blend of colours. Along the width of it would be seen, scattered irregularly, dark patches. Atoms and molecules in the Sun’s atmosphere pick out specific frequencies of light and absorb them, diminishing their intensity by comparison. This images shows the spectrum of light from the Sun stretched out to make these absorption lines visible. We use the reverse of the idea (emission lines) when we make coloured lights. For instance, we excite sodium atoms to emit a signature orange light in street lamps. In this image you can see two prominent dark bands in the yellow-orange section which are the absorption due to sodium.

Update to This Entry

The Sombrero Galaxy in Infrared (Spitzer)

By looking at things in different wavelengths we can see much more than meets the eye. This image is a perfect example. Just as with the Horsehead image above we are seeing cooler material. This time it is dust in the Sombrero galaxy. The red ring is a thick band of dust encircling the whole galaxy. In the optical, this dust ring is what gives the Sombrero its distinctive black, obscuring line.

Oddities in the Orion Nebula (Hubble)

Deep within high resolution images of the Orion Nebula taken by Hubble we can see dark blobs. When you take a closer look you can see that these are like little flattened blobs. Some show a dim, red glow at their centres, others are just dark. These are proto solar-systems.

The red glowing is a protostars attempting to burst through and the dark disks are thick dust regions where one day planets may form. 6 billion years ago, this is what our Solar System may have looked from very far away.

The morning sun burns into the clouds…Originally uploaded by hole-in-one.

This image from Flickr shows the rising Sun as it glows through the clouds. It is quite reminiscent of nebula containing or reflecting powerful light from stellar nurseries and is a good reminder that sometimes these nebulae are not always as they seem. By that I mena than in this image, the Sun is not actually in amongst the cloud but does look a lot like it could be.

But its a lovely picture never-the-less and if anyone has a similar effect captured on video I’d be very interested to see it.