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Physics Photo of the Week - November 8, 2024

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Physics Photo of the Week - November 8, 2024 Aurora from Swannanoa On May 10, 2024, much of North America experienced a "solar storm" that produced aurora as far south of the Carolinas.  Aurora (northern lights) are usually confined to the Earth's polar regions (northern Canada, Alaska, Norway, Sweeden, Russia, ...).  The aurora are produced by charged particles (electrons and protons) that are emitted by the Sun ( solar wind ) which are guided by magnetic fields in the solar system.  The Sun had emitted a massive amount of high energy electrons and protons a couple of days earlier - called a " Coronal mass ejection ".  When these particles reach the Earth, t hey strike the atoms and molecules in the Earth's upper atmosphere and cause the atmosphere to glow.  This is analogous to the glow on an old-fashioned TV picture tube when electrons strike the coating on the inside of the tube.   With a coronal mass ejection, the number of charged particles ejecte...
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Physics Photo of the Week

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Physics Photo of the Week December 20, 2024  Galaxy M33 - Color photo by Donald Collins, College View Observatory Several weeks ago I published a monochrome image of the Galaxy M33 . The gray scale of astronomical photos are rather dull compared to the photos printed in color.  The color in astro photos also reveal much more about the physics of the astronomical objects - especially galaxies.  In this deep sky image of the galaxy that is several million light years distant from our planet Earth, all the discrete stars that we see in the image are foreground stars that exist rather close to us within our own Milky Way galaxy.  The billions of stars in the distant galaxy are so far away and so numerous that they blend together to resemble clouds.  Notice that the clouds of stars in the outer spiral arms of Galaxy M33 appear bluish, while the star clouds near the core of the galaxy are more reddish.  These colors mainly refer to the average temperatures of th...
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Physics Photo of the Week

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Physics Photo of the Week February 21, 2025 The Horsehead Nebula (IC 434) - Photo by Don Collins - College View Observatory The Horsehead Nebula in Orion is a famous icon of deep sky astronomy for it's unusual well-fitting image of a horse.  It is also unusual in that it is a dark nebula -  a giant cloud of dust suspended in the cosmos - rather than a luminous nebula.  The size of the horse's head is about 7 light years across.  The head appears as an extension of a larger cloud of dust and molecules in the constellation Orion.   This color photo was obtained with the CCD camera on the College View Observatory telescope over a span of one week in late January, 2025.  The process involves taking about an hours' worth of pictures in one night for several nights during the week.  Each night would concentrate on a single filter eventually obtaining a stack of white light monochrome photos and a stack of each of the red, green, and blue filtered images...
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