Astrophoto Friday - the Whirlpool Galaxy

M51, the Whirlpool Galaxy, is 37 million light years distant but still a jewel of the heavens. Here it is as captured by the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) survey using Palomar's 48-inch Samuel Oschin Telescope.


For those keeping score, the PTF survey has discovered 882 supernovae.

The Whirlpool Galaxy can be found in the northern constellation of Canes Venatici (the hunting dogs).

Astrophoto Friday: Bonus Palomar in Science Fiction Edition!

Here are a couple of classic Palomar images from the early days of color astrophotography.

The Andromeda Galaxy (aka M31) as photographed with the 48-inch Schmidt telescope (now called the Samuel Oschin Telescope).


The Ring Nebula (aka M57), a planetary nebula in the constellation of Lyra as photographed by the 200-inch Hale Telescope.

Both of these images were part of a 1959 article in LIFE magazine, The Hues of Heaven, that showed off the first ever color astrophotos. These and other images from Palomar, were inspirational to people like me. They also worked their way into popular culture. My favorite example is that they were used as set dressing for the bridge of the Starship Enterprise in the first season of the original series of Star Trek. The shot below shows M31, M57, Lt. Uhura and Mr. Spock from the episode, The Naked Time (By the way, it is a pretty good episode and you can watch it here.).

In their day these photos were revolutionary and looked futuristic enough to have them displayed on the bridge of the Enterprise. Times have changed. We have moved on to doing things like imaging exoplanets. The big, familiar objects like the ones shown above can now be easily by amateur astronomers with off of the shelf equipment.

In another 44 years what kinds of images will professional and amateur astronomers be able to take?

Astrophoto Friday - Milky Way over Palomar

It is Astrophoto Friday. Today instead of a photo taken with one of the Palomar telescopes, it is time to see the sky from Palomar.


The Milky Way Galaxy over the Hale Telescope as captured by Wally Pacholka of AstroPics.com.

Wally recorded this image just over a week ago on the night of Thursday June 10, 2010. His photo serves as a reminder that the battle between astronomy and light pollution has not yet been lost and that the skies over Palomar are still beautiful and worth fighting for.

Palomar Zoo

The Galaxy Zoo is coming to Palomar on Sunday night. If you are not familiar with the program here is a short introduction from their website:

The original Galaxy Zoo was launched in July 2007, with a data set made up of a million galaxies imaged with the robotic telescope of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). With so many galaxies, the team thought that it might take at least two years for visitors to the site to work through them all. Within 24 hours of launch, the site was receiving 70,000 classifications an hour, and more than 50 million classifications were received by the project during its first year, from almost 150,000 people.

Sunday night the 200-inch Hale Telescope will be used to follow-up on what some of the Galaxy Zoo team has discovered. Specifically, the team will be looking to confirm gravitational lens candidates. A gravitational lens is produced when the mass of an object, like a galaxy cluster, bends and magnifies the light of a more distant objects behind behind it. Here is an illustration to show how that happens:


By carefully studying how the light of the distant objects is bent/magnified/distorted it is possible to map out the distribution of matter and dark matter. For more information have a look at their Zooite Guide to Strong Gravitational Lenses.

From the research team observing at Palomar:

Through visual inspection of ~900,000 galaxies in the SDSS, Galaxy Zoo participants are discovering potential lens candidates at a prodigious rate. Our sample includes blue arcs and multiply imaged sources around early-type galaxies. The data will provide key constraints on the dynamics and mass distribution of both luminous and dark matter in a large sample of intermediate redshift elliptical galaxies.

The Zoo project also running The Hunt For Supernovae which is helping to discover supernovae and transients first photographed with Palomar's Samuel Oschin Telescope via the Palomar Transient Factory project. Head on over to check it out.

And the Winning Thesis is . . . . .

I just learned that the Astronomical Society of the Pacific is presenting their 2009 Robert J. Trumpler Award to Kevin Bundy. The Robert J. Trumpler Award is given each year to a recent recipient of the PhD degree in North America whose research is considered unusually important to astronomy.

From the ASP:

In his Caltech thesis, Dr. Bundy used observations with the Wide Field Infrared Camera (WIRC) at Palomar Observatory to quantify the galactic process called "downsizing," in which the sites of active star formation shift from high-mass galaxies early in the history of the universe to lower mass galaxies as time goes on. His study indicated that there is a galaxy mass limit beyond which some mechanism inhibits star formation so that massive galaxies become quiescent. Bundy's analysis of the evolution of the star formation rates and of galaxy morphology has been widely cited and is considered an important constraint on theories of early galaxy formation.

Congratulations Dr. Bundy! He is currently continuing his research at UC Berkeley.

Here is an image on edge-on spiral galaxy NGC 891 that Kevin helped obtain a few years ago using the Hale Telescope's Wide-field Infrared Camera (WIRC). It is a composite image from Palomar (Bundy) and the 10-meter W.M. Keck Observatory (Patrick Shopbell and Judy Cohen). Yellow colors in this composite correspond to the near-infrared image which was obtained at Palomar. The blue colors correspond to the visible light image which was obtained at Keck.

Palomar Transient Factory Captures the Andromeda Galaxy

Using Palomar Observatory's 48-inch Samuel Oschin Telescope, the Palomar Transient Factory captured M31, the Andromeda Galaxy:


This false-color image of our glowing galactic neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy, was created by layering 400 individual images captured by the PTF camera in February 2009. In one pointing, the PTF camera has a seven-square-degree field of view, equivalent to approximately 25 full moons. (Palomar Transient Factory/Peter Nugent, Berkeley Lab).

Pushing the limit

Rudolph Minkowski, after a long and distinguished career in astronomy, had his last night of observing on Palomar's 200-inch Hale Telescope on March 29, 1960. It proved to be a good night as he measured the distance to the central galaxy in a cluster of galaxies known as 3C295.

With a redshift of 0.46, 3C295 held the record as the most distant known galaxy cluster until 1975. How far away is it? About 4.8 billion light years.

Modern electronic detectors are much more sensitive to light than the old photographic plates used by Minkowski and others and as such galaxies of vastly greater distances are now known making Minkowski's find seem almost close.

Speaking of Fritz Zwicky and Supernovae . . . . .

I mentioned earlier this week that Fritz Zwicky used the Palomar 18-inch Schmidt to make the first surveys of the night sky. Dr. Zwicky's hunt for supernovae (exploding stars) began on September 5, 1936 but he didn't catch his first supernova until five months later. On February 16, 1937 he discovered a supernova in spiral galaxy NGC 4157, located in the constellation of Ursa Major.
NGC 4157 is shown above with Zwicky's 1937 supernova arrowed.

According to his article published in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific:

From September 5, 1936, until the end of May, 1937, about 300 photographs were obtained covering as often as possible the Virgo cluster of nebulae as well as its northern and southern extensions into Coma Berenices, Canes Venatici, Ursa Major, Hydra, and Centaurus, respectively. In addition, some of the nearby nebulae, such as the great nebula in Andromeda, Messier 33, 51, 80, 81, 101, NGC 55, 247, 253, 2403, 2366, 4236, IC 342, 1613, etc., were frequently photographed. It is estimated that, in the period mentioned, between 5000 and 10,000 nebular images were carefully searched for new stars.

Before anyone knew what a galaxy was it had been the convention call them "nebulae". Today the word "nebula" refers to a cloud of gas in space. At the time of his writing Zwicky knew that the "nebulae" he was referring to are all what we call galaxies. Edwin Hubble's discoveries about galaxies was less than a decade earlier and the term was a holdover from that previous age.