Zooniverse 4.3: Old Weather (Again)

Recently I have continued working on Weather Reports of the HMS Acacia. I'm currently working my way up in the "ranks", and am close to another promotion! It's pretty motivating, knowing that you're being "rewarded" for completing these reports!

APOD 4.5: The Antenne AND Zooniverse

This is really cool, and tied to what I did in Zooniverse this week. Here we have a picture of Galaxies colliding, galaxies NGC 4038 and 4039. The galaxies can be found in the constellation Corvus, the Crow. When one thinks of a collision, people thing explosions, crashing, wrecking, etc. However, in a Galactic Collision, they just merge through each other. As if sliding ones hands together, the parts of the galaxies mesh, and form one large galaxies. The gravitational influences of the Galaxies on each other, they stretch and warp.

This APOD also matches with my Zooniverse this week, which was Galaxies colliding. It was the first project I did, but I returned to it to mash some galaxies again. It was fun. I simulated atleast 100 galaxy simulations, and modified them.

APOD 4.4: Elephant's Trunk Nebula

 3000 light years away, The Elephant's trunk nebula is the visible evidence of a new star at the heart of this dark giant. A dark globule is a typical place for stars to form, being made up of mostly Hydrogen and Helium. Dark globules are also extremely cold, and are still a topic of an immense amount of research. The density of the nebulae is unknown, and some astronomers theorize that parts of the globules may be near solid, and it might be possible to stand on them (assuming there was gravity).

APOD 4.3: Yuri's Planet

Approximately 50 Years Ago..well, 50 years from when this APOD was posted on the NASA site...the Soviet Russian "cosmonaut" Yuri Alexseyevich Gagarin was shot into space about the spacecraft Vostok 1. He achieved altitude of 200 miles above sea level, and circled once around the entire planet.

An approximate view of what Yuri would have seen.

His competition, the US astronaut Alan Shepard,  wasn't launched until about a month later. When not pursuing pleasure flying through space, Yuri loved to practice flying Soviet Jets and dying while piloting said jets. In 1968, Yuri's MIG jet crashed in a training flight. Not combat, but in a training flight. They then took what was left of him and stored it in the Kremlin Wall. Because what else do you do with your dead heros?

The image itself was taken in 2003, aboard the International Space Station.

Zooniverse 4.2: Old Weather

This week I worked on Zooniverse's Old Weather Project, which actually was a lot more interesting than it sounded. I followed the HMS Acacia, which was a British Sloop from WWI as it traveled around the coast just outside the Straits of Gibraltar, and eventually proceeded through them. It really was interesting, decoding the genuine naval logs from the various days. What was even more interesting was the deviations on some of the logs from the regulations...even though it sometimes made my job harder. It was all in good fun though!

Observations 4.1: Trash Night

So I was taking out the trash...but then I looked up! The winter sky really is fantastic. I easily identified my personal "Big Four" of the sky: Orion, Gemini, Taurus, and Auriga. Those four always seem to stand out to me, being right there in the center of the sky. Canis Major was there too of course, but I never really seem to notice it as much...even though it has the brightest star in the sky, Sirius, in it. Some of the other stars I identified were Rigel, Betelgeuse, Bellatrix, Alnilam, Alnitak, Mintaka, Castor, Pollux, Aldebaran, Capella, and "The Kids". I also picked out the Pleiades star cluster, and easy spot. 

APOD 4.2: Spiral Galaxies

Well, here I go again on another entry concerning Spiral Galaxies. So, Exhibit A: M74.  This galaxy doesn't seem to have a real name, but everyone just loves calling it "The Perfect Spiral". The galaxy is 32 million light years away, and scientists estimate it has over 100 billion stars.

M74: "The Perfect Spiral"

You can clearly see why everyone loves this one so much, since it really does have a perfect spiraling appearance. Although the disk looks flat to us from this vantage point, the reality is that the center of the spiral really bulges out to be over twice as thick as the rest of the galaxy is. Below is another shot of M74, in a slightly different lighting. Perhaps this photo was taken in a different spectrum, and converted differently.

Another shot of M74

Zooniverse 4.1: Merging Galaxies

This week in Zooniverse, I participated in the "Galaxy Zoo: Mergers" project. The project involves matching simulated galaxy collisions with actual colliding galaxies. I had to run several simulations, and then I had to manipulate factors within each collision in order to get a more accurate match. The galaxy that we were trying to match was galaxy SDSS ID 758877153600208945, seen below:

APOD 4.1: Boston Moonrise

I love brilliant Moon rises. And Boston. Therefore, it only makes sense for me to cover this extraordinary picture this week. The shot depicts the Bostonian skyline with a rising, red tinted moon in the background.

The Boston Skyline + A Moon = Brilliance

I covered the Moon Effect in a previous posting, but here we once again see the unexplainable enlargement of it's appearance. Some other noteable aspects about it: It appears to be really red, and really blurry. The red tinting is a side effect of the light's refraction upon entering the atmosphere, and possibly combined with any pollutants in the air above the city...but since Boston isn't really hardcore industrial, I doubt that
's a significant factor. The blurriness can possibly be attributed to rising heat distorting the air above the city, and I would suspect that as a likely factor. All in all, it's a pretty cool picture.