Starship Asterisk*

ISS and the Summer Milky Way

Explanation: Clouds on a summer night frame this sea and skyscape, recorded earlier this month near Buenos Aires, Argentina. But planet Earth's clouds are not the only clouds on the scene. Starry clouds and nebulae along the southern hemisphere's summer Milky Way arc above the horizon, including the dark Coal Sack near the Southern Cross and the tantalizing pinkish glow of the Carina Nebula. Both the Large (top center) and Small Magellanic Clouds are also in view, small galaxies in their own right and satellites of the Milky Way up to 200,000 light-years distant. Alpha star of the Carina constellation and second brightest star in Earth's night, Canopus shines above about 300 light-years away. Still glinting in sunlight at an altitude of 400 kilometers, the orbiting International Space Station traces a long streak through the single, 5 minute, star-tracking exposure.

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Nice picture, even with the streak in the middle caused by a bunch of Fast people. Never heard of a summer milky way before. But i have heard of the tropical Hershey bars of WW2, that didn't melt in the heat of the tropics. My father said that the GI's didn't eat them, as they were too hard to chew, but the tropical kids loved them.

Still waiting to see some pics from the CPC 9.25 aboard the ISS. Nothing on the SERVIR website, either.

Clouds and clouds! The cirrus kind and the Large and the Small Magellanic kind! And then the pink Carina kind - surely "nebula" means "cloud"? And then the cloud which isn't a cloud but a sack, the Coalsack!
I was struck by how "spiral-like" the Large Magellanic Cloud looks here. Compare the appearance of LMC in today's APOD with this (old) image of NGC 7741, which is an accepted spiral galaxy. (For a recent image of NGC 7741 by Adam Block, see here.

What? Oh, we can see ISS in the picture, too. That's nice!

Ann

When I first got a small telescope I became aware of an affliction common to most astronomers: Aperture Fever. It affects both professional and amateur alike, for one will always desire a better view.

Today’s APOD induced a flare up of another condition I have observed in myself and others: Hemispherical Location Envy, which can occur whenever astronomical sights or events are on the wrong side of the earth from one’s vantage. Like AF, HLE can cause one to spend vast sums of money, so beware.

Man, I have got to get below the equator someday.

Nice image. Someday I'll have to travel south of the equator for a view of the sky there.
One question though, Is the Hard Line at the bottom of the image a different image that got spliced in?
There appears to be Bright clouds at the Hard Line and darkening with visible stars below

Hi all, the photographer speaking (writing)

Thank you for the comments and thank you to the editors for liking my photo, it's a great honor to me.

BMAONE23 wrote:Nice image. Someday I'll have to travel south of the equator for a view of the sky there.
One question though, Is the Hard Line at the bottom of the image a different image that got spliced in?
There appears to be Bright clouds at the Hard Line and darkening with visible stars below

It's a single shot, it's the ocean what you see below. With the Moon behind the waves got very bright in the long exposure. There are no stars below but noise, probably thermal noise because of the very long exposure.

I totally miss-calculated how long the ISS would took to cross the scene I planned for a 2 minutes exposure and ended with 288 seconds I was afraid the photo would be overexposed but I was lucky it worked. The ISS is really slow in such a wide field!

I'm happy you like the skies down under, I've never seen Andromeda high, or the double cluster or Polaris... and I never ever see Cassiopea, it's opposite Crux and Crux is circumpolar to me.

luigi wrote:
With the Moon behind the waves got very bright in the long exposure.

Ah...moonlit cirrus clouds

They didn't look like summertime Noctilucent clouds:

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap071028.html
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap060718.html
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap070705.html
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120822.html
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap110720.html
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap090711.html
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap090624.html
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap080702.html
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap050619.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noctilucent_cloud

Fascinating the he could get all that in one shot. Nicely done.

:---[===] *

I would love to know what our galaxy looks like from one of the Magellanic clouds, must be quite a sight I should think.

winstond wrote:I would love to know what our galaxy looks like from one of the Magellanic clouds, must be quite a sight I should think.

On camera, probably. To our eyes, not much different from the dim glow we see at night from being within the Milky Way.

winstond wrote:I would love to know what our galaxy looks like from one of the Magellanic clouds, must be quite a sight I should think.

I found this tidbit in wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Mage ... om_the_LMC

the Source of all knowledge wrote: From a viewpoint in the LMC, the Milky Way would be a spectacular sight. The galaxy's total apparent magnitude would be −2.0—over 14 times brighter than the LMC appears to us on Earth—and it would span about 36° across the sky, which is the width of over 70 full moons. Furthermore, because of the LMC's high galactic latitude, an observer there would get an oblique view of the entire galaxy, free from the interference of interstellar dust which makes studying in the Milky Way's plane difficult from Earth.[40] The Small Magellanic Cloud would be about magnitude 0.6, substantially brighter than the LMC appears to us.

luigi wrote:Hi all, the photographer speaking (writing)

Thank you for the comments and thank you to the editors for liking my photo, it's a great honor to me.

BMAONE23 wrote:Nice image. Someday I'll have to travel south of the equator for a view of the sky there.
One question though, Is the Hard Line at the bottom of the image a different image that got spliced in?
There appears to be Bright clouds at the Hard Line and darkening with visible stars below

It's a single shot, it's the ocean what you see below. With the Moon behind the waves got very bright in the long exposure. There are no stars below but noise, probably thermal noise because of the very long exposure.

I totally miss-calculated how long the ISS would took to cross the scene I planned for a 2 minutes exposure and ended with 288 seconds I was afraid the photo would be overexposed but I was lucky it worked. The ISS is really slow in such a wide field!

I'm happy you like the skies down under, I've never seen Andromeda high, or the double cluster or Polaris... and I never ever see Cassiopea, it's opposite Crux and Crux is circumpolar to me.

This is such an interesting photo - I've spent ages looking at it and working out what everything is. Is the ISS actually visible with the naked eye? Also, I wonder if I would be able to see Canopus from here in Tenerife? I had not realised how near to Sirius it is. We are 28°N 16°W.

Margarita

MargaritaMc wrote:
I wonder if I would be able to see Canopus from here in Tenerife? I had not realised how near to Sirius it is. We are 28°N 16°W.

Yes, provided that you have a clear view to the South, Magarita.

It should be highest around 11:15 PM local time due South (but at only about a quarter of the height of Sirius).

neufer wrote:

MargaritaMc wrote:
I wonder if I would be able to see Canopus from here in Tenerife? I had not realised how near to Sirius it is. We are 28°N 16°W.

Yes, provided that you have a clear view to the South, Magarita.

It should be highest around 11:15 PM local time due South (but at only about a quarter of the height of Sirius).

Many thanks!

Margarita

Truly a great picture!!
How low was the sun at the time?
Was the ISS illuminated by the sun (or possibly by the moon)?
I am asking since the sun needs to be low to get such a dark sky, but rather high to get a long pass. I guess the pass was about as long as the exposure (5 minutes)?
Thanks for sharing the picture!

MargaritaMc wrote:

neufer wrote:

MargaritaMc wrote:
I wonder if I would be able to see Canopus from here in Tenerife? I had not realised how near to Sirius it is. We are 28°N 16°W.

Yes, provided that you have a clear view to the South, Magarita.

It should be highest around 11:15 PM local time due South (but at only about a quarter of the height of Sirius).

Many thanks!

Margarita

Canopus is almost exactly south of Sirius, so (from the northern hemisphere) whenever Sirius is at its highest due south, Canopus will also be at its highest due south as well.

This is a fascinating picture! I love all the layers: the ocean, the clouds, the International Space Station, the stars and nebulae in our galaxy, the Magellanic clouds ... . It makes me a bit dizzy. Thanks very much for the picture, Luigi, and for describing some of the technical challenges of such a long exposure. I love watching the ISS move across the sky, and it's often a bit surprising to me how long it takes to fly from one horizon to the other. And then I think about the fact that it orbits the Earth every 90 minutes, and realize that it's flying really fast, even though it moves fairly slowly across the sky.

Like Bruce, I hope to do some skywatching from the southern hemisphere one day. I'm thinking the Atacama desert in Chile ... .

Anthony Barreiro wrote:This is a fascinating picture! (Snipped) I love watching the ISS move across the sky, and it's often a bit surprising to me how long it takes to fly from one horizon to the other. And then I think about the fact that it orbits the Earth every 90 minutes, and realize that it's flying really fast, even though it moves fairly slowly across the sky.
.

Is the ISS naked eye visible?? I wouldn't have the first idea of where to look for it.

Margarita

MargaritaMc wrote:

Anthony Barreiro wrote:This is a fascinating picture! (Snipped) I love watching the ISS move across the sky, and it's often a bit surprising to me how long it takes to fly from one horizon to the other. And then I think about the fact that it orbits the Earth every 90 minutes, and realize that it's flying really fast, even though it moves fairly slowly across the sky.
.

Is the ISS naked eye visible?? I wouldn't have the first idea of where to look for it.

Margarita

Click on this address-->http://www.isstracker.com/ After you're there, just hit the favorite button, or pull it down to the tray, like i did, in windows 7.
I got to see it not to long after it started. It looked like a silver bullet zipping overhead. Or, a silver jet going about 4-times faster than normal, or so.
Naked eye will only be able to see the metallic reflection.
IF you know it's comeing, and have really powerful binoculars, and the sun isn't reflecting off it at your face... well, maybe you could actually see it. I don't really know.

MargaritaMc wrote:

Anthony Barreiro wrote:This is a fascinating picture! (Snipped) I love watching the ISS move across the sky, and it's often a bit surprising to me how long it takes to fly from one horizon to the other. And then I think about the fact that it orbits the Earth every 90 minutes, and realize that it's flying really fast, even though it moves fairly slowly across the sky.
.

Is the ISS naked eye visible?? I wouldn't have the first idea of where to look for it.

Margarita

Yes, the ISS is sometimes visible at magnitude -4, as bright as Venus. It's a little bit tricky: you can only see the ISS after sunset or before sunrise, when your location on the surface of the Earth is in the Earth's shadow, but the ISS is high enough to be in sunlight. We mostly see sunlight reflecting off the ISS's solar panels, which are about the size of a football pitch.

There are a number of websites that will tell you when the ISS will be visible from your location. I use http://www.calsky.com/ . Calsky will automatically send you an email alert when the ISS will be visible from your location, with times, directions, and magnitudes.

Anthony Barreiro wrote:
There are a number of websites that will tell you when the ISS will be visible from your location. I use http://www.calsky.com/ . Calsky will automatically send you an email alert when the ISS will be visible from your location, with times, directions, and magnitudes.

You are a Star! I'll sign up straight away. Thank you.

This is one of the most interesting APODs I've seen recently. It's especially interesting to us Northern denizens.

MargaritaMc wrote:
You are a Star! I'll sign up straight away. Thank you.

Watching for the ISS is a great way to learn the compass directions from your observing location, as well as altitudes above the horizon. It's also a great way to develop patience, as you watch for a second magnitude flicker climbing from the horizon, or waiting for a negative magnitude "supernova" to burst into view overhead as the ISS passes into daylight.

I always wave when they fly over. Maybe the crew will finally see me with their new 9.25 inch Celestron telescope.

Anthony Barreiro wrote:
Watching for the ISS is a great way to learn the compass directions from your observing location, as well as altitudes above the horizon. It's also a great way to develop patience, as you watch for a second magnitude flicker climbing from the horizon, or waiting for a negative magnitude "supernova" to burst into view overhead as the ISS passes into daylight.

I always wave when they fly over. Maybe the crew will finally see me with their new 9.25 inch Celestron telescope.

I will be receiving my first telescope in the next week or so and it is ALSO a Celestron - Celestron 76mm Firstscope... Not quite in the same league as the ISS!

Waving as they go by is lovely! I'm sure that they will see you and wave back. Ever since seeing that great video that Sunita Williams did, showing us round the vessel - including the toilets - it has become real in a way that it wasn't before. And then the Canadian astronaut who TWEETED from the ISS!