01-08-2013, 03:20 PM
Thanks, ericlp, that's really nice! Theres a professional photographer called Wally Pacholka who has taken the most stunning photographs of the night sky and Milky Way from Hawaii. If you haven't heard of him or seen his photography I strongly encourage you to do so, the pictures are amazing. Links are Big Island pictures, Kauai pictures and Maui pictures.
The number of stars and planets out there is simply overwhelming. We've been doing a project at UKIRT for the last seven years (we've just recently completed it) called the Ultra Deep Survey (UDS). We've been observing one small spot in the sky as often as possible at infrared wavelengths - an area roughly the same size as the full moon. It is by far and away the deepest infrared survey of its kind and has been my favourite project over the last few years. The guy in charge of the project, Omar Almaini is a very good friend of mine, and in fact I was his support scientist when he first visited the island to observe at UKIRT 16 years ago when he was still a student.
If you're curious, they have put some of the data online in the form of a zoomable image. Personally, I could play around for hours with this image, but that's just me! It's the BzK one at the UDS gallery. The data are from UKIRT (infrared) and Subaru (optical). Red objects in the field are ones only detected by UKIRT, and are very distant galaxies (optical light is shifted to infrared wavelengths due to the expansion of the universe, so UKIRT sees them but Subaru doesn't). The image doesn't look impressive on its own, but start zooming in and moving around...
So, we now think the majority of stars have planets, a typical galaxy such as ours has 200 billion or so stars, and then look at that picture and have a guess how many galaxies are in it. And then remember that's only a tiny patch of sky.
So sorry for blabbing on!
Tom
http://apacificview.blogspot.com/
The number of stars and planets out there is simply overwhelming. We've been doing a project at UKIRT for the last seven years (we've just recently completed it) called the Ultra Deep Survey (UDS). We've been observing one small spot in the sky as often as possible at infrared wavelengths - an area roughly the same size as the full moon. It is by far and away the deepest infrared survey of its kind and has been my favourite project over the last few years. The guy in charge of the project, Omar Almaini is a very good friend of mine, and in fact I was his support scientist when he first visited the island to observe at UKIRT 16 years ago when he was still a student.
If you're curious, they have put some of the data online in the form of a zoomable image. Personally, I could play around for hours with this image, but that's just me! It's the BzK one at the UDS gallery. The data are from UKIRT (infrared) and Subaru (optical). Red objects in the field are ones only detected by UKIRT, and are very distant galaxies (optical light is shifted to infrared wavelengths due to the expansion of the universe, so UKIRT sees them but Subaru doesn't). The image doesn't look impressive on its own, but start zooming in and moving around...
So, we now think the majority of stars have planets, a typical galaxy such as ours has 200 billion or so stars, and then look at that picture and have a guess how many galaxies are in it. And then remember that's only a tiny patch of sky.
So sorry for blabbing on!
Tom
http://apacificview.blogspot.com/