Your one stop portal for the latest astronomy discoveries and news.
You will find the meteor shower at the direction of constellation Orion this weekend. The meteors are the dust from the Halley’s Comet. Earth is going to come across with them. The best time to look is Saturday morning, Oct. 21st, just before local dawn
Click on the sky map above to learn about the exact direction. The sky map is courtesy of SpaceWeather.com.
I don’t think the haze here will allow me to see any.
The Jupiter Red Spot Junior is officially named Oval BA (Bad Astronomy?). It is getting reddish as its elder brother, the Great Red Spot. The wind is currently boasting at 640km/h. It just takes 1.5625 seconds to travel from the southest of Malaysia (Johor Bahru) to the northest (Perlis), roughly 1000km, imagine!
Left: The spot in the middle is the Oval BA
As suggested, as the storm has grown stronger it probably picked up red material from lower in the Jupiter atmosphere, most likely some form of sulfur which turns red as part of a chemical reaction.
I just discover that configuring a theme is such a tedious work. I am currently working on the latest theme, K2. Please tell me if you like it! 
Click on the images for larger versions. Both of them are the stunning images from the Cassini Imaging Team. They are actually the same photo, just the latter of which colour contrast is exaggerated. The colour variation of the latter image imply that the sorting of particles in different sizes. The image is a stack of 165 images taken by the Cassini wide-angle camera in nearly 3 hours.
For more information, please visit In Saturn’s Shadow
SWEEPS (Sagittarius Window Eclipsing Extrasolar Planet Search) used Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys to monitor a portion of the galactic bulge in Sagittarius continuously for seven days, shooting one picture every six minutes.
There were 180 planet-transit candidates and only the best 16 was choosen. Two of them have been confirmed as outer planets. Each one of the candidates is a roughly Jupiter-size body that orbits its host star in just 4 days or less. Five of the candidates whip around their stars in less than an Earth day. They are grouped into a new category, ultra-short-period-planets.
Adobe Photoshop CS2 is such a common digital photography software that almost every computer users know it. It is to edit every digital photographs. However, you need some powerful tools or the so called plugins to turn it into an astronomical image editor.
Photoshop is not able to export an image file as FITS extension (.fits), commonly used between scientific organisations and now become popular among amateur astronomers who own decent imaging platform.
FitsPlug is written by Eddie Trimarchi to enable photoshop to export astronomical image in fits extension. You get the plugin by email and a lifetime upgrade for USD30. It worths the price. If you can’t afford it, you may opt for the free version which is no longer supported and updated. For more information regarding this plugin, please visit FitsPlug.
There is a second choice and it’s free! It’s the ESA/ESO/NASA Photoshop FITS Liberator v2.0. It can only support up to 16-bit FITS while FitsPlug can support up to 32-bit FITS. The difference isn’t obvious for amateur astronomers. However, I suggest you to experiment it yourselves. Its main page is here.
With either one of the plugins above, your Adobe Photoshop is now has the ability to export astronomical data in FITS.
Recent Comments