Very Bright Light, Very Big Number

Researchers at the Kavli Institute in Beijing have reported potentially finding the brightest supernova ever seen. If correct this exploding star was about 600 billion times brighter than the sun; that's about 100 times brighter than your common to garden supernova and 2.5 to 5 times brighter than the previous brightest one depending upon who you ask. I have to caveat all this as it is not certain yet that it even was a supernova, it could also have been caused by the destruction of a star that passed a bit too close to a black hole; further observations over the coming months should help us find out. In any case, the explosion happened 2.8 billion years ago, about 700 million years before multi-cellular life evolved on earth.

Oh, and I calculated the brightness to be the equivalent of 2.3034e+36, or 2,303,400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 or 2.3 undecillion 100 watt lightbulbs.

Image courtesy of ESO

The Milky Way

On my first night of this particular trip to Romania last summer I got excited. As we were driving to my girlfriend's dad's house (personally I'd call it a farm), I looked out of the car window and saw stars. Not just a few like you get in London, but hundreds and hundreds of them; maybe a couple of thousand. And stretching out across the heavens, as clear as day, was the Milky Way. This wasn't the first time I'd seen it; I'd seen the galactic disc in lots of different places around the world and I've even been able to see it in the UK a few times; but this time I knew that I was going to be here for a couple of weeks and there should be plenty of opportunities to get some good pictures. I was excited.

One night when I had a spare hour or two I took the camera out onto the road beside the farm, I knew there wouldn't be traffic any time soon, and started taking a few tester pictures. First of all I decided to try and get a shot of stars with the landscape included for perspective. There were trees and a few farm buildings across the way. It wasn't easy as there was the odd streetlight here and there that made the exposure difficult to get right. The results weren't great but I wasn't too bothered as I knew this was just the preamble to the Milky Way shots I was going to get later.

Having got a fairly mediocre picture I moved round to the side of the farm where it was even darker and there were fewer lampposts. Now I was aiming almost directly up in the air to try and get a picture of just the Milky Way with nothing terrestrial in frame. The first few attempts were promising and not too long later I had the shot I had been waiting for. It looked great. The galaxy was clearly defined arcing right through the middle of the frame, the stars were bright and pin sharp and I knew I had a keeper. I was excited to think how it would look once I'd processed it a little to make it even clearer once I got back to Blighty. You can see the finished result below.

Pardon? What's that you say? You can't see anything? Am I sure I uploaded the right picture? Yes, I'm sure. Hmmmmm.... The problem seems to be that what I saw on the back of my camera that night was not representative of the data the camera captured. I can't really explain what went wrong but it goes without saying that once I got home I was very disappointed to see the result as, as you can see, it's rubbish. There is basically nothing there. I tried to process it every way I knew how but it seemed beyond rescue. I was gutted. I have posted it here anyway mostly just as a warning, I suppose. You can't always trust exactly what you see in camera. My advice would be to make sure you always check the histogram, especially if you're working in extreme light conditions, as this should give an unbiased account of the data you've captured; and keep taking pictures, even if you think you've got 'the one'. I hope you have more luck than I did.

365 Project: Photo 250

Infuriated. No, that isn't the theme of today's photo, it's just how I feel. This is actually my second attempt at writing this particular post because, for reasons unknown to me, no matter what I did, I could not get this damn photo to upload properly. It always just appeared as a plain, black, rectangle. The fact that I now have it uploaded is not, sadly, satisfying. This is the unedited version of the shot, the edited version had blacker blacks, I'd removed some of the red cast and boosted the saturation a little so that you could actually make out the colour of the stars as opposed to them all just looking white like they do here. Most of the stars were yellow and blue and provided a beautiful example of the variety of colour of stars that are out there. I suppose it's a good thing that I finally got the photo up but I am very, very frustrated.

365 Project: Photo 240

Considering I was really quite drunk when I took this photo, and I didn't have my tripod, I'm relatively pleased with how it turned out. You may, or may not, just about be able to make out a stripe of higher density of stars running top to bottom through the middle of the frame. That's the Milky Way.

365 Project: Photo 109

Today I am on prompt, but only by a fluke. The idea was On The Edge and it doesn't get much more on edge than this. This photo may not look like much but that streak in the middle represents one of the greatest achievements of all mankind; it's the International Space Station. Let's take a moment to reflect on what this means. That streak of light is is an inhabited, man-made, 100 metre diameter science facility orbiting 200 miles above the surface of our little planet at 17,000 mph. There are 6 human beings currently living and working on it in what is now its 12th year of constant inhabitation.

That is amazing.

That's us. That's what humans can do when we put our mind to it. When we're not busy killing each other or trying to screw each other over we can come together and do awesome things, just to satisfy our curiosity; because we can.

My photo, in of itself, is not a good one; but in fairness this is my first ever attempt at photographing a moving target in the night sky from a car park. The bright blob is the moon and the 'star' to the right of the trail is the planet Jupiter. It's a 13 second exposure and one of only two I was able to get before it streaked off into the eastern horizon.

One of the current inhabitants of station is a Canadian, Commander Hadfield. He isn't the first person to go up there with a camera but he is certainly the first to produce so many impressive images of the Earth and the station at large and publicise them. I highly recommend his Tumblr feed.

If you want to see the man-made wonder for yourself then it's pretty easy. There are loads of apps on your phone that you can download that will alert you, just search. You can also use the Heavens Above website which is an excellent resource for tracking many objects in the sky. It'll definitely be handy later in the year when comet ISON starts getting excitingly close.

Eyes to the skies, people.

Starry, Starry Night

First of all, a spoiler. The last photo in this post is a very special one. It's not one of mine and in of itself it is unremarkable but its importance can't be understated. More later.

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At bloody last. For over one and a half years I had been waiting and I was finally going to get a chance. For 18 months I had been waiting to be in a rural location with a clear, cloud-free night. My goal was to take pictures of the stars and so I needed to be somewhere rural so as to avoid light pollution and I needed it to be cloudless for, well, obvious reasons. 

I am passionate about stars and the cosmos they sit in. I read more about physics, and astronomy in particular, than any other topic; more than the biology of my day job and the photography of my spare time. Asides from their preternatural beauty I love that they give up so many of their secrets simply by our study of the electro-magnetic radiation they give off; of which the visible light we can see is but one segment.

Within about 17 minutes of the Big Bang nearly all of the matter and anti-matter initially created in the universe had annihilated each other and left only hydrogen (75%) and helium (25%); all the other elements of the periodic table, which today make up about 2% of the matter in the universe, was created in the extreme conditions found inside stars where the intense temperature and pressure literally fuses protons together. What this means is that every single thing you can see is made of atoms that were created in the inferno of a star - we are all made of star dust.

In my first two photos here I have tried to capture the Milky Way, running top to bottom through the centre of the picture, with mixed success. The first one probably shows it most clearly but the exposure was a bit on the long side (188 seconds) so the stars are starting to move; they're in an awkward stage where they're not in sharp focus but they're not drawn out enough to be a proper star trail so it just looks a bit blurry, which isn't great. But I do like the garden being in the bottom of the frame as it gives the shot some context and sense of scale. What did surprise me was the orange glow in the lower portion of the sky, there was no hint of that with the naked eye. It looks as if I'm still in London and there is a city's worth of light pollution just around the corner but the nearest street light was about half a mile away in a small village, the nearest town was over 4 miles away; and yet there is still so much light pollution.

I tried to address the glow with the second picture by not including the horizon and pointing the camera straight up into the sky which seemed to do the trick although the exposure, again, is a little too long at 147 seconds.

The picture I was most pleased with was this next one, which was the first I took. I ended up taking five photos in all over the course of an hour starting at about 3am. Given this was my first attempt and, if I'm honest, I was quite drunk, I think it's not too bad. This was a long exposure of just over 9 minutes and so that nasty orange glow is back but this time the stars have moved enough for it to give a proper star trail effect. Next time I'm going to see if a soft ND grad filter will help with the orange cast at all. I deliberately aimed at Polaris to get a pin wheel effect; Polaris remains motionless in the centre and all the other stars have an increased degree of movement as they radiate out. What I really like about this photo is how the long streaks allow you to see the actual colour of the stars for what they are; very few are white, most of them are blue or a yellow/orange colour which you just can't make out with the naked eye. If you're reading this on your phone then you might struggle to make out the detail, I recommend having a proper look at home on your laptop (does anyone still have a desk top these days), click on the picture to engalactify it.

Overall I was quite pleased with how the session went, I learnt a lot. Hopefully I won't have to wait so long for my next chance to refine my technique. Next month we are going to Iceland and if there are clear skies then there will be a decent chance of seeing the aurora borealis so no prizes for guessing what I'll be blogging about in October.

I'm going to end this post with that special photo I promised you. It is a photo taken by a machine and inspired by one of my personal heroes. The machine was the Voyager 1 spacecraft, the person was Carl Sagan. In 1990 the primary mission was over and he finally persuaded NASA that this was an important image to try and get. NASA were reluctant as they would effectively have to point the camera at the sun and they were afraid it would fry it and, also, there was no scientific merit in the endeavour. Sagan knew better, though. You can see the Earth halfway down the brown streak on the right hand side. It is a pale blue dot (as this photo is now known) only  0.12 pixels in size; the streak itself is lens flare from the sun. This photo of our planet was taken by a man made object from 6 billion km away. Think about that; it's amazing. We did that. I'll let Dr. Sagan close up.....

'From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.'

Dr. Carl Sagan