Starship Asterisk*

Indigo_Sunrise wrote:>snip<

Guest wrote:but the galaxies are just distractive.

Yeah, because there are just so many of them in the image.....


This is a really nice image, but I'm wondering about the meteors in the image - how enhanced are they? I ask because there are several that look like they were just sort of drawn in. For instance, at about one or two o'clock above the Andromeda Galaxy, and then the one directly to the left: to me, both of those look like lines that were drawn in, as they don't appear to have tapered ends or one end larger than the other, as many meteors show when imaged. Were they so faint that 'extra enhancement' was needed?
I do understand the need for some image manipulation or enhancement, but how much was done on the meteors? I did poke around on the imager's site, but under the section 'Photo Details', there isn't a lot of information.

It's a great image, though - especially for those of us that have been clouded out this year!

Beyond wrote:
I noticed some red in the explosion in the video. Rusty iron

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/10/02/a-meteors-lingering-tale/#.UhKojm1he1c wrote:

[b][color=#FF4000][size=115]You can see it there, the red twisty worm at the upper left, across the glow of the Milky Way. Image credit: Randy Halverson.[/size][/color][/b]

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A meteor's lingering tale
By Phil Plait | October 2, 2011 11:44 am

<<Randy Halverson is a photographer who makes stunning time lapse videos of the night sky. He’s currently in the process of making a new video, and in one of the frames he happened to catch a bright meteor, a bit of cosmic fluff burning up as it rammed through our atmosphere. What’s neat about this particular incident is that the meteor left behind a glowing streak that lasted for over half an hour!

Technically, that’s called a persistent train, and it’s not actually smoke. As a meteoroid (the actual solid chunk of material) blasts through the air, it ionizes the gases, stripping electrons from their parent atoms. As the electrons slowly recombine with the atoms, they emit light — this is how neon signs glow, as well as giant star-forming nebulae in space. The upper-level winds blowing that high (upwards of 100 km) create the twisting, fantastic shapes in the train. The actual details of how this works in meteor trains are not well understood, mainly because they are so difficult to spot and study. It’s hard to point a telescope at a position in the sky when you don’t know where or when a meteor will pass through!

I’ll note it’s not really friction that causes a meteor to burn up. Most of the heating is due to the meteoroid’s hypersonic passage through air, which compresses the gas, heating it up violently. The heat melts the rock (or metal) in the meteoroid, which then blows off, leaving behind a train that fades rapidly. But the glow from the ionized gas takes much longer to decay, leaving the persistent train.>>

Joe New wrote:Love this photo. Is there any way to save the annotated version in WinXP?

Adolfo Domínguez wrote:The meteor running under Triangulum goes toward Constellation Perseus and not in the opposite direction as I would expected. Is this ok?
All these annotations on the image are important for me; I'm just learning from all of you, guys.
I think the meteors not having the "normal" shape were not given enough exposition time to appear so.
Thanks!

henrystar wrote:And I should have said "galaxies etc" - my point wasn't that they aren't interesting - in fact they are far more interesting than meteors are...

Guest wrote:What a great picture! And I am always impressed with the APOD roll-overs. One nit about this roll-over, however: the constellations are great, for orientation, but the galaxies are just distractive.

Guest wrote:but the galaxies are just distractive.