An image of the Progress 21 coming into the ISS on April 26th. Progress 21 is carrying about 5,000 pounds of supplies to the ISS crew. Commander Pavel Vinogradov and Flight Engineer Jeff Williams are unloading supplies and putting them away.

A different Progress craft is supplying the station with air as necessary. That particular craft is being loaded with trash and will be undocked in mid-June to be incinerated in Earths atmosphere.

An important maneuver will take place on Thursday, May 4th; an engine will be fired which will raise the ISS orbit.

Credit: NASA
Image Credit: NASA TV

From Moonflake: Chainsaw + tree = no problem. Yep, the comet was directly behind the tree. Moonflake was spot on! The electric lines running through the tree is what is keeping me from doing it. Good advice.

I did have to burst out laughing, there I am in the dark all alone, except for the skunk that was somewhere around, that comet could not have possibly been in a worse spot. Well nobody came and took me to the rubber room.

I count the night as a success despite the absence of a comet image. I did see it through the branches, but didn’t bother trying to image it. I was using the wedge I had built last year. It’s kinda bouncy, sturdy, no problem there, but bouncy. The scope moves the least little bit and it sends stars into a very fast tight circle that takes about a half minute to go away. I have to figure out a way to dampen that. The image above is a couple of frames of M104; I took more but the scope must have been doing its bouncy thing because there is some distortion. The alignment went pretty well, except I need to come up with a better way to do the side-to-side mechanical adjustments. It also took about three times as long as I had anticipated. I have it all figured out, just need to get to a hardware store for a quick and cheap fix. Once done the alignment should take about 15 minutes.

The image here of M104 is just two 2-minute exposures. It appears with the wedge I could probably take exposures to at least 5 minutes, and likely much longer. It would look a whole lot better had I been able to take the time, alas I had to work this weekend so couldn’t stay out and play too late. Just wait till next weekend it’s a 4 day so I hope the sky cooperates. I’m going to try for a stack of 50, and I will try and get the focus a bit tighter too. The image stack alone will improve the image tremedously.

I’ll go after the comet tomorrow night in Alt/Az.

Wow! Go to the spacetelescope.org to see more spectacular shots!

If the sky stays clear, even I might get to see the comet tonight. It could signal and end to the bad observing luck I’ve had lately. I am itching to try out the wedge; aligning the scope well enough to obtain images is another matter. There is one little thing that could mess things up, other than alignment; where the wedge is (it’s on a pier), and there is a tree in….let me put it this way, at about dark: Arcturus is on one side of the branches and the comet is somewhere on the other.  I’m hoping it is just far enough away to get a shot. If things don’t work out I’ll go with Alt/Az on Saturday night.  I can get a shot for sure with Alt/Az, but exposure times will be less.  The important goal for tonight is to get a good algnment.  I will have a few alternate targets just in case.
Image Credit: Hubble / NASA / ESA / Spacetelescope.org

Sort of anyway. This is a Spitzer Space Telescope Release showing NGC 2207 and IC 2136 merging. Can you imagine what the sky would look like from a planet in either one of these galaxies? In one way it would be glorious and in another it could be down right scary; if you knew what was about to happen at least.

It isn’t happening over night though, it started something like 40 million years ago and they will merge as one in about 500 million more years. In the spiral arms there are clusters of newborn stars, and since they are dotted along the arms they are called “beads on a string” by astronomers. It’s the first time this has been seen in either of the galaxies, in fact this is the most elaborate case of beading seen in any galaxy.

To my eye this the image above isn’t the scary version of the image, you can find that here; don’t ask me why but I’d call this scary.

The galaxies are located about 140,000,000 light-years away in Canis Major.

Oh and since I needed a desktop image for a computer I just rebuilt, here is a 1024 x 768 version, 84 K.

Credit: Spitzer Space Telescope

Comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 has broken into more than 30 pieces and the main component is called fragment C. Fragment C will reach perihelion on June 6th. The comet is not going to be as bright as predicted earlier, but that stands to reason, since it smaller and, well, more spread out.

Now, all of the fragements will pass no closer than 5.5 million miles of us, that’s still pretty close and will occur on May 12. We will perhaps learn quite a lot about comet break ups, at least what may be driving them, there are lots of possible causes. The other interesting thing I have not looked into as of yet, is which side of our orbit will the comet pass – ahead of or behind us? Given the breakup into at least 30 pieces, there is more than a good chance there are many thousands of tiny particles; might they be in our path? It would make for a good meteor shower I would think. I’ll have to check into it a bit further, should be easy enough to find out.

In the mean time, if you’re going to be wanting a look at what is left of the comet, you’ll need to know where to start looking. NASA has a good place to look, not only for this comet but many other objects as well. You can find it HERE.

I’d note there is some difference between NASA’s ephemeris and those listed on MPC 55524; not a lot mind you, but if you are looking for it using high power on a “largish” telescope you might have to do a bit of tweaking, depending on which ephemeris you are using. I don’t know which is more accurate; I suspect I’ll be finding out.

I have my fingers crossed for another imaging attempt on Friday.

A Chandra Press Release:

By studying the inner regions of nine elliptical galaxies with Chandra, scientists can now estimate the rate at which gas is falling toward the galaxies’ supermassive black holes. These images also allowed them to estimate the power required to produce radio emitting bubbles in the hot X-ray gas.

The composite image of NGC 4696 shows a vast cloud of hot gas (red),surrounding high-energy bubbles 10,000 light years across (blue) on either side of the bright white area around the supermassive black hole. Images of the other galaxies in the study show a similar structure.
(The green dots in the image show infrared radiation from star clusters
on the outer edges of the galaxy).

Surprisingly, the results indicate that most of the energy released by the infalling gas goes, not into an outpouring of light as is observed in many active galactic nuclei,but into jets of high-energy particles. Such jets can be launched from a magnetized gaseous disk around the central black hole, and blast away at near the speed of light to create huge bubbles.

An important implication of this work is that the conversion of energy by matter falling toward a black hole is much more efficient than nuclear or fossil fuels. For example, it is estimated that if a car was as fuel-efficient as these black holes, it could theoretically travel more than a billion miles on a gallon of gas!

Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/KIPAC/S.Allen et al; Radio: NRAO/VLA/G.Taylor; Infrared: NASA/ESA/McMaster Univ./W.Harris