- Snapping the Nightscape Above
- ATV-5 Completes Its Mission Ending an Era in European Spaceflight
- Predicting the Cosmic Background
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Posted: 15 Feb 2015 01:34 PM PST
Sky at night offers vast number of stars that could tell remarkable stories about the universe. For astrophotographers, snapping a picture of a starry nightscape is not just a craft, but it’s more like the art of storytelling. “When you see a nightscape, all elements of the picture could tell a story,” Franck Séguin, picture editor in chief and director of Photo Nightscape Awards (PNA), told astrowatch.net. “For me, a great nightscape is not just a technical shoot of stars. A great nightscape is a well composed picture with a good foreground and background.” PNA, organized by the French Astronomical Association, has just started and rewards the most beautiful pictures of night landscapes.
The contest is open to hobbyist and professional astrophotographers from around the world and is offering awesome prizes like a trip to Chile to visit the Very Large Telescope, a trip to the Alqueva Dark Sky Reserve in Portugal, cameras, telescopes and binoculars. The winners will be announced in four categories: Nightscape, In Town, Timelapses and Junior.
“The idea of PNA was born when I received the first picture set by [astrophotographer] Rogelio Bernal Andreo. He sent me 9 very nice nightscapes. For me it was a proof that we could create in France - the country of photography - a great nightscape contest,” Séguin said.
The prize is intended to reward the best nightscape shooting (photo or timelapse) in different categories and fulfilling these criteria: shootings (photo or video) must represent a nocturnal landscape, composed of both heavenly and earthly elements—shootings must occur after sunset and before sunrise.
This is the second edition of the contest. The award ceremony will take place on Nov. 7, 2015, at the planetarium of the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie in Paris. A selection of the best photographs and timelapses will be presented.
So what does the jury of the contest consisting of well-known astrophotographers like Miguel Claro and Nicolas Outters, look for? Séguin advises that the contestants shouldn’t focus on special features. “I'm not looking for special features like auroras,” he said. “As you can see in 2014 winner video, the jury members selected generally best pictures, not necessarily special features.”
Photographers can send their application forms to Sept. 30, 2015. To enter the contest, simply visit:www.photonightscapeawards.com
Séguin concludes: “It's not very hard to make a nightscape. You don't need specific cameras. You could take it with a smartphone! So everyone has a chance to win!”
The PNA is organized in partnership with the European Southern Observatory (ESO), Nikon, La Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie de Paris, AIP, the Alqueva Dark Sky Reserve, the Refuge aux Etoiles, Médas and Picto Laboratory.
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Posted: 15 Feb 2015 11:25 AM PST
ESA’s fifth automated cargo ferry completed its mission to the International Space Station today when it reentered the atmosphere and burned up safely over an uninhabited area of the southern Pacific Ocean. The end of the mission as the craft broke up as planned at about 18:04 GMT (19:04 CET) marks the end of the Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) programme. The programme has served the Station with the most complex space vehicle ever developed in Europe, achieving five launches in six years following its 2008 debut. “With ATV-5, the success story of the most complex spacecraft ever developed and constructed in Europe, which began in 2008, comes to a close. But this technology will not burn up with the re-entry of ATV 'Georges Lemaitre.' Instead, it will bring a multitude of new space projects to life,” said Francois Auque, head of space systems at ATV prime contractor Airbus Defense and Space. “This success has only been possible thanks to the unparalleled European and international cooperation over the last two decades. This cooperation and the ATV’s world leading technology will live on long into the future with the [NASA] Orion program taking astronauts into Earth’s orbit and beyond – a real testament to everyone who worked on this fantastic program.”
ATVs delivered more than 31 500 kg of supplies over the course of their five missions. They boosted the Station to raise its orbit numerous times and similarly moved it out of the way of space debris.
The vehicles demonstrated European mastering of automated docking, a technology that is vital for further space exploration.
This last ATV, Georges Lemaître, set the record for the heaviest Ariane 5 launch when it climbed into space from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana on 29 July 2014.
Before undocking, the Station crew loaded it with waste material, freeing up space on the weightless research centre.
The European cargo ship undocked on 14 February at 13:40 GMT (14:40 CET) and manoeuvred itself into a safe descent trajectory.
ATV was conceived in 1987, when ideas for an international space station to succeed Russia’s Mir complex were beginning to surface. In 1994, ESA and Russia discussed the possibility of using the vehicle for a new station. The decision to build it was taken in October 1995 and development began the following year.
The ATV programme was part of a barter arrangement between ESA and its international partners through which ESA pays its share of the running costs of the International Space Station by supplying vital equipment and systems.
The spacecraft formed part of the Station’s supply fleet, alongside Russia’s Progress and Soyuz, Japan’s HII Transfer Vehicle and America’s Dragon and Cygnus commercial ferries.
The knowledge gained by ESA and European industry from designing, building and operating the complex ATV missions has been instrumental for ESA’s participation in NASA’s Orion spacecraft that will fly astronauts to the Moon and beyond.
ESA’s industrial partners are already building the European Service Module, ATV’s technical successor, a critical module for Orion that will supply power, air and propulsion during the test flight in 2017.
“It is with a feeling of pride that we look back at our accomplishments on the ATV programme,” says Thomas Reiter, Director of Human Spaceflight and Operations .
“We look forward to applying the experience and knowledge we gained from designing, building and operating five ATV spacecraft with excellent results to future exploration missions using the successor European Service Module of the Orion vehicle.”
Credit: ESA, airbusgroup.com
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Posted: 15 Feb 2015 10:46 AM PST
One of the common accusations made about cosmology is that it is just a kludge model to explain away all the strange things we see in the universe. Galactic redshift? Invent the big bang. Galaxies don’t move the right way? Invent dark matter and dark energy. Tweak any model enough and you can make it fit data. Part of the reason for this is the way scientific discovery is represented. The lone genius has a revolutionary idea that clears away all the stuffy old models. But that’s not how science gets done. Scientific models are often proposed to explain strange data, but the real test is whether the predictions they make hold up under scrutiny. Take, for example, the story of the cosmic microwave background.
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) is often cited as definitive proof of the big bang. Discovered in the 1960s by Penzias and Wilson, it has since been used to understand the evolution of the cosmos, aspects of dark matter and dark energy, and might even tell us about early cosmic inflation. But the big bang wasn’t invented to explain the CMB, rather the CMB was a prediction made twenty years before its discovery.
The first proposal for a “big bang” model is typically attributed to a 1931 paper by Georges Lemaître. Based on the properties of general relativity, Lemaître argued that the universe must have began as a “primeval atom.” The idea didn’t attract much attention because the “static universe” was the dominant model at the time. When Edwin Hubble demonstrated a correlation between a galaxy’s distance and its redshift, it became clear that the universe was expanding. At that point Lemaître’s idea gained attention. Still, there was opposition to the idea, mainly because it was seen as extending the evidence too far. After all, if we watch bread dough rise it is clear that the dough is expanding, but to conclude from this that bread begins as an ultra-dense “primeval flour” is ridiculous.
Then in 1948 Ralph Alpher, and Robert Herman published a paper predicting a consequence of the big bang model. The paper was actually focused on the relative abundance of elements in the universe, but it noted that if the universe began hot and dense as the big bang model claimed, then there must be a thermal remnant. That is, the universe must be bathed in thermal microwaves from the big bang, and the spectrum of that background must match that of a blackbody. In the paper they estimate the temperature of that background to be about 5 Kelvin.
Twenty years later, it was found that the universe is indeed bathed in a microwave background, with an almost perfect blackbody spectrum at a temperature of about 3 Kelvin.
Written by: Brian Koberlein
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Brian Koberlein is an astrophysicist and physics professor at Rochester Institute of Technology. Author of "Astrophysics Through Computation" with David Meisel. Creator of the science outreach project Prove Your World, developing a science television show for children."
Check out Brian's blog 'One Universe at a Time' at: briankoberlein.com
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