The entire universe in blog form
Last week was the peak of the annual Taurid* and Leonid meteor showers,
when the Earth plows through the debris sloughed off by the comet
Tempel-Tuttle, treating the denizens of our planet to a cascade of
shooting stars.
I’ve seen a lot of photos from the event, but I should’ve known that my pal Randy Halverson—a gifted astrophotographer and maker of stunning time lapse videos—would take one that would make my jaw drop to my desk.
Taurid meteor streaking past Orion. Click to ablatenate.
Image credit: Randy Halvseron, used by permission.
Image credit: Randy Halvseron, used by permission.
Holy. Wow. You absolutely want to click that picture to embiggen it.
Ignoring the meteor for a moment—if you can!—Orion dominates the
frame, with the bright star Betelgeuse glowing orange-red on the
Hunter’s right shoulder (on the left in the picture, since Orion is
usually depicted as facing us). Someday, almost certainly in less than a
million years, Betelgeuse will explode as a supernova, and for a few weeks will be so bright you could read by it.
To the lower left of Orion is Sirius, the brightest star in the night
sky. It’s a binary star, two stars orbiting each other, one about twice
the mass of the Sun and far more luminous, the other a faint spark of a
white dwarf, a dead star too faint to see without a telescope. They’re
only about 9 light years away, which is why they appear so bright.
Proximity means power when it comes to the starry night. Usually…
But not always. Rigel, the star marking Orion’s left knee (on the
right to us) is roughly a thousand light years away and still one of the
brightest stars in the sky; that means it’s an actual superstar, over 100,000 times more luminous than our Sun! If it were as close as Sirus, it would be comparable in brightness to the Moon.
So, yeah.
I could go on and on, describing what you see in this picture. Randy
shoots most of his work in South Dakota, where skies get very dark. This
was on the White River, and he used a 30 second exposure to capture
this shot. You can just see the stars trailing a bit in the higher-res
version, streaking a little as the Earth turns underneath them, carrying
them east to west across the sky. The meteor, though, isn’t blurred
because it screamed across the sky in less than a second! It was
probably no bigger than a tiny grain of sand, but moving at 70
kilometers per second (40+ miles per second), dozens of times faster
than a rifle bullet—fast enough to cross the continental United States
in just over one minute. Its tremendous energy of motion was converted
into heat, causing the air around it to glow, and the meteoroid (the
grain itself) to vaporize.
It was part of a comet for billions of years, found itself freed of
that icy domain just a few years ago, then ended as brilliant flash of
light and drama in our atmosphere in less than a single second. If
there’s a lesson in that, feel free to find it.
And you might think that Randy was lucky to capture this shot, but
luck had very little to do with it. He goes outside at night all the
time to capture the beauty of the heavens. It’s not luck, it’s
inevitability. Go out enough and you will see all manners of amazing things.
Go. Look up. See what there is to see. You’ll be amazed at what’s going on just over your head.
Correction, Nov. 25: The article originally
omitted the Taurid meteor shower, which occurs at the same time as the
Leonid. The photo caption originally misidentified a meteor as being
from the Leonid shower, when it is actually from the Taurid shower.
posted by Pieface @ 2:07 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home