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Re: Recent Submissions: 2012 February 24-

Posted: Tue Feb 28, 2012 4:20 am
by Ann
Oh, so many images; so little time to comment!

First of all, there are many splendid Juiter-Venus-Moon images here! Rothko, you have submitted some fantastic images. My favorite is the one where Mercury seems to fly like a fireball across the sky, leaving a thin trail of smoke behind! Of course, that "trail of smoke" was just a cloud. Wonderful image, though!

Oliver Schneider, you have submitted a very interesting image, showing the effects of thin clouds in the sky and dust on your lens. Indeed, that is very interesting, particularly colorwise.

Seantos, your images of Jupiter, Venus, the Moon and Mercury over Tucson, Arizona, are also beautiful.

There are more planets here. Marion Haligowski, you make Mars look like a big, plump, fat red giant star among a retinue of small blue dwarfs!

Efrain Morales, that's a splendid series of Mars images. The structural detail is just great, and I can even see a blue-white-looking cloud superimposed on the disk of Mars in the last Mars image.

C. Eric Chesak, that's an absolutely lovely daytime "smilie" Venus! Tell me, what kind of tree is that?

And Jesper Grønne, that's a fine Venus transit poster! I guess the real solar transit photo is your own, where we can see the illuminated Venus atmosphere glow white against the blackness of space.

Saturn and its largest Moon also makes it into this thread. Christopher Go, those are two fine images of Saturn, even though I can't remember what a NED remnant is. And the North Pole of Titan in infrared is of course a very interesting series of images.

Comet P1 Garradd also shows up many times in this thread. Greg Parker brings out the green color of the comet coma, while Robert Pölzl makes the comet coma a little bluer and brings out the blue color of the thin ion tail. zema88 puts the comet in a sky beautifully divided into elegant constellations. Marion Haligowski brings out delicate color differences as the comet is sailing past three stars in Draco that are either a little bluer or a little yellower than the Sun. I think, however, that my favorite comet image is the one by Karsten. I love the nuanced colors of the comet coma, and it is lovely to see this nearby visitor sail past a galaxy, NGC 6015, which may be about fifty million light-years away.

As long as we are staying in the solar system, Jochen Gerlach has captured a bright fireball for us, and Millan Milloradowich has taken a lovely image of a Sun pillar. It is so interesting to think that all the colors we can see in this image are made by the Sun. As the Sun is setting, its light becomes increasingly golden-yellow, and the undersides of the clouds reflect this golden light. The tops of the clouds are unilluminated and therefore dark. But why is the snow so blue? It is because it reflects the color of the sky. So why is the sky blue? It is blue because much of the blue light of the Sun has been scattered all over the sky. Is the Sun yellow? Only when its light is blue, too!

But not all stars are the same color as the Sun. Most stars are smaller, cooler and redder than the Sun, among them the M-type star GJ1214, which was recently found to have a planet, GJ1214b. The planet may be a waterworld, and Thierry Lombry has made a wonderful picture of what this planet might look like if you were there to have a look.

Now I'm afraid that I have no more time, but I will be back later!

Ann

Re: Recent Submissions: 2012 February 24-27

Posted: Tue Feb 28, 2012 9:05 am
by Ann
Okay, a few more comments! :D

Francesc Pruneda, I absolutely love your image of Canis Major and Sirius (and Puppis) reflected in water. The constrast between the obvious shallowness of the water and the "depth" of the reflected sky is awesome. I love those star colors, too!

Alistair Symon, you've managed to make that "strip of Orion" so festive that it looks like a stellar box of many-colored chocolates! There are very many flavors to choose from here, to be sure!

M. Raşid Tuğral, I love your Milky Way and airglow images. Particularly in the last two images, the stars appear to rise over the mountains like glittering sparks. That is particularly obvious in the third image, where a plume of glittering stars appear to emerge from the caldera of a volcano. Fantastic!

José Joaquín Pérez, that's a delightful portrait of NGC 2451 and NGC 2477. On your own homepage, you wrote about NGC 2477 and called it one of the best open clusters visible from the northern hemisphere. Teh stellar richness of it rivals a globular cluster without a central condensation. Your image makes it clear that the cluster contains a few relatively bright red giants, and that most of the other relatively bright stars appear to be stars of spectral class F and possibly A. I found a source on the net, which I don't have time to look up now, that estimated the age of NGC 2477 to 700 million years. NGC 2451 looks fascinating, too. I checked the parallaxes and proper motions of the brightest stars, and it would seem that the red giant is a background object and therefore very bright indeed.

Lynn Hilborn, your image of the Christmas Tree et al won't open right now, but I have looked at it before and admired it very, very much. It is incredibly beautiful. I love the soft colors and the beige ton of dust underlying it all. I love how you bring out the brightness of the blue reflection nebula and the blue starlight. And I love how you bring out that the brightest red emission nebulosity is to be found around the Cone Nebula and around the corresponding "rounded hill-tower" on the other side of the hot O-type star, S Mon. All in all, what a lovely image!

And now I don't have time to comment a lot more at all. But I very much appreciate the fine galaxy images that were posted here, and there are some very fine emission nebulae here, too. So thank you all very much for your submissions! :D

Ann

Re: Recent Submissions: 2012 February 24-

Posted: Tue Feb 28, 2012 5:35 pm
by Rothkko
Thank you, Ann[