Observation of Comet 17/P Holmes

Comet 17/P Holmes is has spread little more on 26th Oct, but overall naked eye brightness remained same as of 25th Oct. The core has become little faint and little larger and is little off center in the surrounding Halo of dust. The Halo of dust is also spread. The spreading has not affected much to the surface brightness.

I tried to photograph again on 26th Oct. and I think my hands are getting better on it. I used Sony Cybershot 6 megapixel camera in afocal arrangement with 5" f/8.2 telescope with 25mm eyepiece.



See further Images on
http://picasaweb.google.com/sandykul2005/CometHolmes26thOctober

For nice sketches of the Comets visit the Blog of "Sameer Thakur" at
http://celestiallog.blogspot.com/

Comet 17/P Holmes

Comet 17/P Holmes, a 17th magnitude comet till 3 days ago had suddenly acquired a magnitude of 2.8 due to its core bursting on 24th October and on yesterday (25th October)it was looking like a star of magnitude 2.4-2.5 to naked eyes.

I rushed to terrace to see the comet when I got its information through net. I was shocked to see the the comet by naked eyes looking as a bright yellowish star. I turned my 5 inch telescope to it and confirmed that it is the Comet. The core was visible as a bright star like central region and the bursted dust encircled it as a bright halo. It is the first tailless comet for me. Do see this comet as soon as possible as it may fade down shortly.

I and my friend Anup tried photography of the comet using afocal arrangement of my camera Sony DSC S500. I was not having camera mount so all images I got was shaky. All images contain lots of noise.


F Ratio: f/8.2
Magnification: 85 x

See further images at
http://picasaweb.google.com/sandykul2005/Comet17PHolmes

Sunita Williams at IIT

The department of Aerospace Engineering of IIT Bombay had arranged a beautiful afternoon with a talk of United States Naval officer and a NASA Astronaut Sunita Williams. The department is celebrating its annual event “Zephyr” for the Golden Jubilee year of the institute. The lecture was open for all and was arranged in the convocation hall which has a capacity of 1700 people. Though having such a large capacity the hall became houseful in a while. I got the admission with my college Icard.

The Head of the Department formally introduced the speaker. He told that from the day of announcement of the lecture his inbox got crowded with emails. One kid emailed him that “Oh, she is with us for just 2 hours; it is just a 0.04% of the time she spent in the space!” The people especially the students all over Mumbai and outside rushed to IIT to see their IDOL. It was really astonishing moment for all present there.

Sunita Williams started her talk saying that everyone goes to freak out in summer. I went to space for my summer vacations. I stayed there for long time, I did some work but I really enjoyed the vacation. She showed a video presentation and explained how they feel in the gravityless world. Everyone in space station has their sleeping room where they sleep, clean the teeth, bath with wet towel, and everything that they do on Earth. There is no shower or a sink. They have to use the water carefully as it is limited. Water is recycled whenever possible and it is also used to create the oxygen. All the food is already packed for them. They do have to exercise for 2 hours daily to keep the bones and heart muscle least affected. To maintain the sensation of up and down the space station is designed in such a way that the lighting of the station is done in so called ceiling and the floor is also designed in such manner. Otherwise there is no up or down there.

Astronauts have to know each and every thing of the space station and they periodically check the systems. They do scientific experiments and check the results for zero gravity environment. They also experiment on themselves. These experiments are carried to know how things behave in such situations and what are the effects of long stay in such environment. These experiments will help to understand the requirements of the manned mission to mars. The spaceship with the today’s technology will take 8-9 months to reach the mars and the personnel will have to live there for at least one and half year before they start coming back.

After the speech people asked her lots of questions and she gave the fair answers without being tired. In the question answer session one small girl bravely asked her that “I want to congratulate you. Can I come on stage?” Sunita Williams for a while stunned due to the unexpected question but she allowed her and also came 2-3 steps ahead to meet her. This was a wonderful moment of the lecture and the cameras got flashed off continuously over the two.

Lecture on "Excitement of Modern Solar Astronomy"

On Saturday, 1st September I went to Nehru Centre for the lecture “Excitement of Modern Solar Astronomy”. This was the 2nd lecture of the lecture series ‘Vistas of Astronomy’. The lecture was addressed by Prof. S.S. Hasan.

Mr. Pande introduced the Speaker. Prof. Hasan is the Director of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bamglore. He and his institute, along with the international collaborations, are doing the research in the field of Solar Astronomy. He has published lots of research papers.

Prof. Hasan started his talk with the ancient evidences of the Solar Observations done by the rock observatories. Sun was the main worshiping God and was the unknown mystery for many centuries. To know our mysterious Sun we have sent many spacecrafts that keep watch continuously on the Sun. These spacecrafts are looking at the Sun in different spectral regions such as visible, X-ray, Infra red, H-alpha, etc. In present scenario though we have collected lots of information about the Sun many things regarding the Sun are unknown till date.

In his talk Prof. Hasan gave a brief account of the statistics of the Sun, its internal structure, Sunspots and their 11 year periodicity, Solar wind, Prominences, Flares, etc. He showed many animations and videos showing the violent changes occurring on the visible surface of the Sun. He told how the Sun’s interior is studied using the audio waves generated inside the Sun which are very similar to the seismic waves of the Earth. This field is known as Helioseismology.

While explaining these modern concepts and theories about the Sun he was telling us the open questions and unsolved mysteries regarding the Sun like how the temperature of the corona - the outermost part of the Sun, is about 1 million degree Kelvin, what is the depth of the Sunspot?, does they extend upto the core?, how the prominences or flares occurs?, etc.

He concluded his lecture with the Indian contribution to the modern solar research. India is developing a 2 meter large solar telescope known as NLST (National Large Solar Telescope). This will help the researchers in India as well as outside India to accelerate their work. After the lecture audience bombarded him with lots of questions. The lecture was a good conceptual lecture and the response of the Audience was also very good.

Lecture on New Advances In Optical Astronomy

On Saturday, 4th August there was a lecture arranged by the Nehru science centre, Mumbai. Nehru Science centre is going to conduct a lecture series “Vistas In Astronomy” and Saturday’s lecture was the inaugural lecture. The topic was “Advancement in Optical Astronomy”. Prof. Ram Sagar, Director of Aryabhatta Research Institute
of observational SciencES (ARIES) was the honorable speaker for the lecture. The ARIES is situated in the high altitude Manora peak of Nainital. ARIES has 4 giant telescopes and it is building a 3.6 m huge telescope in the Devasthal near Nainital.

In his speech Prof. Ram Sagar briefly discussed different kinds of telescopes (detectors) used for the different wavelengths of light. Then he gave the statistics differentiating the abilities of human eye and telescopes and discussed the need of having bigger aperture for light gathering. He also discussed the difference in ground based telescope and a satellite telescope and mensioned the new techniques implemented to overcome the difficulties like air turbulence. He described the new technique of auto correcting the curvature of large diameter telescopes used with comparatively less thickness. This technique has decreased the cost of building the large diameter telescopes. Then he described the advantages of using photographic plate over human eye and the charge coupled devices (CCD’s) over the photographic plates.

After he finished his lecture I asked him the first question: “Why the interferometry is not yet been used effectively with optical telescopes?” On this question he gave the answer as, “The incoherence in the coming beam of light is the main problem implementing the interferometry in the optical region. In radio interferometry we are working on the specific wavelength and hence the problem does not occur. But in case of optical observations we are dealing with a band of spectrum and hence we have to take into consideration the incoherence.”

The overall lecture was very good and informative. The response to the lecture was also very good. From Khagol Mandal, I, Anup, Nilesh, Sameer, Jay, Vikrant, Anshulee, Akshaya, Vineeta and Juie attended the lecture.

Picture Of Our Universe

This is the picture of Our Universe. Each and every dot in this picture represents one galaxy.

Venus Occultation Tomorrow

Hi guys,
There is a special astronomical event tomorrow named venus occultation which means Venus will go behind the moon. Venus is very bright these days appearing -4.4 in magnitude and it is in a waxing crescent phase showing 44% illuminated, whereas moon will be 3 days old appearing a 15% crescent. So spotting Venus is easier than the moon on 18th. Let's hope that we get clear skies at least for the east sky for watching the beautiful event.

On 18th June night around 21h 37m 46s Venus Occultation will start for Mumbai region. It would take the Moon almost a minute to cover Venus completely. Angular size of Venus will be 26.41 arc seconds. However since only half of Venus is what we can see the event would be over in less then a minute. Venus will not reappear for Mumbai as it will set before reappearance, but some cities in India can see the reappearance very close to the horizon. Venus will disappear from the darker side of Moon.

Something interesting that observers with sensitive video cameras and telescopes might do is to see if the dark side of Venus can be seen at all just after the bright part of the planet disappears behind the Earthlit dark side of the Moon. Some observers have claimed to have seen a faint "ashen light" on the dark side of Venus [which has no moon to illuminate the dark side, like Earth has], but this has not been confirmed. A good video tape could answer and prove the "ashen light", or show that it may be just some sort of optical illusion.

For disappearence times for other cities visit:
http://www.iucaa.ernet.in/~scipop/Sky/venus_occultation.htm