Carla Antonella Gatti’s Post

One of my hobbies is astrophotography. Earlier this year, in May, I tested some new equipment. To verify its functionality, I pointed my telescope toward the galaxy M101, also known as the Pinwheel Galaxy, and captured images for around an hour before clouds rolled in. A few days later, I discovered online that the supernova SN2023ixf had been found by amateur astronomer Kōichi Itagaki in Japan, within M101. Upon reviewing my data, I realised I had captured the same supernova before its official discovery. Analysing its brightness (magnitude) and the time it was shot, I recognised that this might be an early photo of the supernova. Little did I know what was to come… I posted and tagged the supernova photo appropriately on a webpage for astrophotographers (astrobin.com) and was soon contacted by an astrophysicist at Berkeley. They invited me to contribute my observations to a paper they were preparing. In short, a few others and I had gathered the earliest observations of a supernova ever recorded. 🌟 I'm sharing this to let you all know and to express my appreciation for the technical innovations of the last decade. These advancements allow amateurs like us to participate in “real” research. The progress in imaging sensors, primarily developed for consumer cameras and cell phones, now enables us to acquire equipment that only institutions could consider a mere decade ago, not to mention social media, which facilitates contact with individuals worldwide. For more details, you can read about it in Nature 😊 https://lnkd.in/dAhGnD-h

While our visual fine arts editor Paul Carey-Kent is recuperating from a big operation and is unable to visit galleries, he has been enjoying catching up with some of his favourite artists. Recently artist Laura Santamaria spoke to him about her work ‘Lissajous mind pattern’ (2023). From their conversation, Carey-Kent writes: These drawings were made on a residency in A Coruña, Spain, where Santamaria had access to a harmonographic table (third image). That derives from the work of the French scientist Jules Antoine Lissajous (1822-80), who studied the dynamic and harmonic movement of the planets and proposed the Lissajous orbit as a means of showing and calculating their quasi-periodic orbital trajectories. His work remains relevant to, for example, predicting the orbits of space stations. The table, originally developed to model such orbits, works through mechanical force with three balls operating as pendulums and one plane that you move by hand, so there are four different energies involved – it’s as though, says Santamaria, the hand adds the mysterious fourth dimension. By varying the frequency and phase of the pendulums relative to one another, different patterns are created. Santamaria was attracted by the thought that planets make invisible drawings through their movements, and by the combination of micro and macrocosmic whereby small drawings stand in for galactic events. ‘The process is interesting,’ says Santamaria, ‘as you can make many drawings, but the result is always different, and the table allows you to experiment with your own interpretations of orbits’. That has allowed her to consider how chaotic orbits might look, with the idea that they could relate to how Black Holes might disrupt orbits. She can then transfer the drawings into groups at differing scales, feeding into prints and wall drawings (last image). It makes for an original way to build an aesthetic language out of a scientific methodology. 📸 ‘Lissajous mind pattern’ (2023) by Laura Santamaría, from drawing series, graphite on paper (2017-2023). ______________________________________ #paulcareykent #laurasantamaria #sciart #seismamag #science #art #astronomy #physics #artandscience #scienceandart

3D View: The Dragon's Egg Nebula & HD 148937 Binary Star System | ESO FriendsofNASA.org: This 3D animation of the beautiful nebula NGC 6164/6165, also known as the Dragon’s Egg, imagines what it might feel like to fly close to these swirling clouds of gas and dust and approach the star pair HD 148937 at its heart. This video is based on a real image from the VLT Survey Telescope, hosted at ESO’s Paranal site, but the 3D view is not real—the location of the stars shown here is only indicative. Nebula NGC 6164/6165 surrounding the HD 148937 star system as seen in visible light. Most of the image is taken up by a cloud-like structure shaped like an egg, slightly tilted to the right. It is colored in shades of orange and pink, with certain areas brighter than others. In a gap at its center, a white sphere shines brightly, with white, blue and green rays coming out of it. Surrounding the cloud are stars of different sizes and colors over a dark background. Distance: 4,000 light years This image, taken with the VLT Survey Telescope hosted at the European Southern Observatory’s Paranal Observatory, shows the beautiful nebula NGC 6164/6165, also known as the Dragon’s Egg. The nebula is a cloud of gas and dust surrounding a pair of stars called HD 148937. In a new study using ESO data, astronomers have shown that the two stars are unusually different from each other—one appears much younger and, unlike the other, is magnetic. Moreover, the nebula is significantly younger than either star at its heart, and is made up of gases normally found deep within a star and not on the outside. These clues together helped solve the mystery of the HD 148937 system—there were most likely three stars in the system until two of them clashed and merged, creating a new, larger and magnetic star. This violent event also created the spectacular nebula that now surrounds the remaining stars. Credits: European Southern Observatory (ESO)/M. Kornmesser, VPHAS+ team Acknowledgement: Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit (CASU) Duration: 16 seconds Release Date: April 4, 2024 Dan Goldin Jennifer (Jen) L Penland, Ed.D. William Santelli Vern Hupp Deacon Michael Hogan Monika Didiova Ljiljana Milić Jankovic Tony Liolio MBA, CDCMP, CDCTP Tymothy S. F. X. Carroll2 Jocelyne Hericher Pere Mir Hartmut Schöne Jonathan Hipps Hana Tran Jonathan Wolf Pee-Shang Teh Amanda Rodriguez Valdés Sama Khanjani Bob Sullivant Elif Pekeroglu Temurtas Zahra T. Mitra Nikpay Karen Franklin Zepherina Darcy Bruce Foshay Marc Hamelin Jacob Hart #NASA #ESO #Space #Astronomy #Science #Nebulae #Nebula #NGC6164 #NGC6165 #Stars #StellarNursery #HD148937 #Norma #Constellation #MilkyWayGalaxy #Cosmos #Universe #3D #Animation #HD #Video

Tweaking, warping, mosaicking, stacking, combining, drizzling, flagging, patching... There's a LOT involved in making accurate and beautiful astronomical images! The latest paper in the #ProTools series by Aaron Robotham is on the arXiv today, with all the details on #ProPane. This R package has all the routines necessary to manipulate astronomical images. Have a read: https://lnkd.in/gmEqBDpA Whether you're needing to combine images from different telescopes, or just need a good reference for imaging techniques, this is the paper for you! Check out the difference that excellent image alignment can make ⬇