Today's distraction from my work: the results of the Royal Astronomical Society's Bullying and Harassment Survey. It's not good. Or surprising.
"[The] survey... showed that disabled people, women, Black and minority ethnic, and LGBTQ+ people are much more likely to be bullied and harassed than men and White, straight, and non-disabled people.
...Two-thirds of respondents who reported complaints felt their concerns had been handled inadequately."
Today in my Astro Sci-Comm class we tried something new: we watched clips of 4 astronomers, & discussed the wildly different speaking/presenting styles. Of course I chose these to be VERY different in style. Only 1 was a chaotic train wreck (spoiler, it was me from +10yrs ago) #astrodon#academicchatter#astronomy
Hier ist ein Vergleich von gestackten Bildern, die ich von M101 mit meinem #EvoGuide 50ED und #SkyWatcher Az-GTi aufgenommen habe.
Das erste Bild wurde letztes Jahr im Juli mit einer ASI224MC aufgenommen. Es ist ein Stack von 2550 Bildern mit jeweils 3s Belichtung, insgesamt 7650s.
Obwohl es letzte Nacht windig war, konnte ich 50 Bilder mit 120s Belichtungszeit aufnehmen (6000s Gesamtbelichtungszeit). Diesmal wurde eine ASI533MC-Pro verwendet.
Who says you cannot shoot dark nebulae from the city? This is LDN694, one of my most beloved targets. A copious star field just barely blocked by a dark nebula which resembles a void.
Not that your Hercules cluster is no good, it's just not as good ;-)
This is a spherical collection of (up to) millions of stars, that orbits the Milky Way outside the plane of the disk. When you look at it, you should think of the sound of a swarm of bees.
It's about the same size on the sky as the full Moon and is naked-eye visible from a moderately dark location.
Wow 300 images captured by Curiosity to build a panoramic survey at her Sol 4175 location, ten days ago. This video shows them at a rate of 10/second. It took about 50 minutes for the rover to complete this scan with her left mast camera.
What did we do & why is this interesting? Deep technical dive ahead!
We learn about accreting #BlackHoles studying their spectra & short-term (~millisecond) variability, called timing. However, individually, both approaches leave us with a lot of puzzles - so we try to combine them in spectral-timing.
In the past, we could only do so above 3 keV using RXTE (and a bit using XMM, but not quiet that well - for this kind of study, one needs many short observations at different times and this is not the XMM observing strategy). Utilizing NICER, we can push down to 0.5 keV and thus finally, finally, probe details of the disk variability in different spectral states of the source!
Generally and kinda unsurprisingly, things are a lot more complex at low energies!
People have shown in the past (and M. Böck & I have really driven home for Cyg X-1 in 2011 & 2014) that power spectra (ways to measure contributions to overall variability at different timescales) are highly energy dependent. We confirm that this trend is crucial at low energies.
This means also that when calculating coherence and lags, we cannot work with a broad reference band (lots of literature does!). So this is going to be fun - people will need to change their methods.
We also see a clear change in how the noise at low and hard energies is connected depending on the spectral shape of the source: when the spectrum is hard, the noise at different energies is coherent, implying a connection between the processes producing the noise (or the same process). When the spectrum is soft, this is not the case anymore.
We also see a rather puzzling feature in the hard state at low energies- a jump in time lag, accompanied by a loss of coherence.
We have some ideas what it may be, but no definitive answer. But we do see it in other sources, too! (We haven't seen it before because there was no instrument with NICER's spectral and timing coverage!)
Citizen scientist Gerald Eichstädt made these images using raw data from the JunoCam instrument, applying processing techniques to enhance the clarity of the images.
Image credit:
Image data: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS
Image processing by Gerald Eichstädt
While we were all oohing and aahing over the Southern Lights on Saturday night I had my trusty Dwarfii with me. We'd been joined by a middle aged lady with a cellphone and enthusiasm but no knowledge, so between Aurora visits I cast about for an interesting galaxy to show her.
Rob suggested Centaurus A. This amazing celestial spectacle might be a spiral galaxy colliding with a larger elliptical galaxy, and there's a relativistic jet emitting from the supermassive black hole in the middle of it - heady stuff.
What is known for certain, from the party observing on Saturday night was that it looks a lot more like a hamburger than the galaxy nicknamed the Hamburger Galaxy ( NGC 3628 looks more like a hotdog to me) - specifically something from the Hungry Jack's / Burger King stable.
So I'm going to call it the Aussieburger Galaxy. It's possible that the supermassive black hole is the beetroot. We could definitely see the sesame seeds and the pickles.
This image is less than 200 frames, but with a bit of tweaking in Google photos it's acceptable viewing, and a bit of fun. I think the cloud coming in might have halted my stacking. I'd like to revisit this one again soon.
And the nice lady who'd wandered down to get a shot of the aurora with her old iphone? With the help of some advice and my monopod she caught it, and apparently is all fired up to get a Dwarfii of her own, and we have already set a stardate with her this week. Lovely!
More than a beehive, a swarm of bees! Cannot deny the beauty of the M44 open star cluster, filled with hundreds of red dwarfs, five very luminous red giants, and quite a few very energetic blue stars.