Star light, star bright
Star light, star bright,
first star I see tonight,
wish I may, wish I might
have the wish I wish tonight.
By now, you might have guessed what we've been up to.
Thanks to the huge balcony we now have (and will give up within the four months) and the surprisingly clear night skies recently, we've taken to spotting stars.
And despite the light pollution, with a pair of binoculars, you can even see the deep space stuff - spots of light 1,600 light years away. It's an amazing thought that you're looking into history when you look up into the sky - that light took that long to reach the earth to be seen. Goodness knows if it's still there.
For instance, take the Orion Nebula or M42 - its this smudge you can see just next to Orion's belt with your naked eye. And when you look through the binos then you can see the smattering of stars and this cloud...
This is not going to appear in your binos of course - ahem - but it is pretty nontheless isn't it? According to Gene and sources like the Wiki, the Orion Nebula is like a nursery for stars and planets. There's all this cosmic dust, and gravity draws the particles together to form well, cosmic dustballs. The more mass, the more gravity right? (errhh right?) then it keeps coalescing...
According to Wiki - "Observations of the nebula have revealed approximately 700 stars in various stages of formation" - whaaa.
And the cheem explaination about the star formation from Wiki: "Stars in the Orion Nebula form when clumps of hydrogen and other gasses contract under their own gravity, experiments in space also show that particles can form together by sharing electrons, and forming bonds.
"Pressure in the clump heats to extreme temperatures, and if enough material is in the clump, nuclear ignitions may ignite and form a protostar. Once the protostar is born it creates enough energy to halt it's own collapse.
"As the protostar drifts away from it's original birthplace, it carries a cloud of dust and other gasses with it. Inside the remnant cloud is the protostar's protoplanetary disk. Over millions of years excess material gets blown away by stellar wind from other stars.
"What is left of the protoplanetary disk forms objects such as planets. Once the protostar enters into it's main sequence phase, it is classified as a star.
"Even though most planetary disk form planets, observations have shown that proplyds that form too near the Trapezium cluster end up being destroyed by the intense stellar radiation from the cluster, which means the stars lose the material to form planets."
Hwriiiiiight.
G has also pointed out Pleiades: which also looks like a blob until you look through the binos and you can see amazing the star clusters ... pix from Net on the right:
We can also see Mars pretty clearly and Saturn: G's going to reassemble his telescope - apparently you can spot the rings (!) and the space between the rings around the planet with his celestron.
first star I see tonight,
wish I may, wish I might
have the wish I wish tonight.
By now, you might have guessed what we've been up to.
Thanks to the huge balcony we now have (and will give up within the four months) and the surprisingly clear night skies recently, we've taken to spotting stars.
And despite the light pollution, with a pair of binoculars, you can even see the deep space stuff - spots of light 1,600 light years away. It's an amazing thought that you're looking into history when you look up into the sky - that light took that long to reach the earth to be seen. Goodness knows if it's still there.
For instance, take the Orion Nebula or M42 - its this smudge you can see just next to Orion's belt with your naked eye. And when you look through the binos then you can see the smattering of stars and this cloud...
This is not going to appear in your binos of course - ahem - but it is pretty nontheless isn't it? According to Gene and sources like the Wiki, the Orion Nebula is like a nursery for stars and planets. There's all this cosmic dust, and gravity draws the particles together to form well, cosmic dustballs. The more mass, the more gravity right? (errhh right?) then it keeps coalescing...According to Wiki - "Observations of the nebula have revealed approximately 700 stars in various stages of formation" - whaaa.
And the cheem explaination about the star formation from Wiki: "Stars in the Orion Nebula form when clumps of hydrogen and other gasses contract under their own gravity, experiments in space also show that particles can form together by sharing electrons, and forming bonds.
"Pressure in the clump heats to extreme temperatures, and if enough material is in the clump, nuclear ignitions may ignite and form a protostar. Once the protostar is born it creates enough energy to halt it's own collapse.
"As the protostar drifts away from it's original birthplace, it carries a cloud of dust and other gasses with it. Inside the remnant cloud is the protostar's protoplanetary disk. Over millions of years excess material gets blown away by stellar wind from other stars.
"What is left of the protoplanetary disk forms objects such as planets. Once the protostar enters into it's main sequence phase, it is classified as a star.
"Even though most planetary disk form planets, observations have shown that proplyds that form too near the Trapezium cluster end up being destroyed by the intense stellar radiation from the cluster, which means the stars lose the material to form planets."
Hwriiiiiight.
G has also pointed out Pleiades: which also looks like a blob until you look through the binos and you can see amazing the star clusters ... pix from Net on the right:
We can also see Mars pretty clearly and Saturn: G's going to reassemble his telescope - apparently you can spot the rings (!) and the space between the rings around the planet with his celestron.
Well, I suppose we're not going to have this balcony forever.
Thinking back, perhaps this star gazing has something to do with our trip to Africa, where light pollution is realtively minimal. You can see the entire night sky twinkling when you are out in the African plains/mountain country. In fact, you can see stars behind the stars: Absolutely amazing.
