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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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Physics Photo of the Week

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  Physics Photo of the Week Total Lunar Eclipse of March 14, 2025 Moon Photos by Donald Collins The weather improved last week for an excellent viewing of the total lunar eclipse.  The Moon was totally within Earth's shadow between about 2:30 am to about 3:30 am.  The Moon takes on this reddish color when totally within Earth's shadow.  The animation below consists of three frames: 1-Near the beginning; 2-near the middle of eclipse; 3-near the end of the hour-long totality.  If you look carefully you can see two stars in the right half of the images.  The stars are stationary relative to the tracked telescope.  In the hour-long totality the Moon has moved approximately one radius relative to the stars as the Moon orbits the Earth.  The Earth's shadow also moves due to the Earth moving in its orbit around the Sun, but the Earth's shadow is much slower than the Moon's motion.  Unfortunately, I did not get any partial phases of the Earth's shado...
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