Taken at the summit of Mauna Kea during the Kamaaina Observatory Experience. This adventure was presented by Maunakea Observatories and ‘Imiloa Astronomy Center. It is a free monthly community event that seeks to inspire a passion for astronomy and an appreciation for the cultural and environmental future of Mauna Kea among Hawai‘i residents. Awesome!
Pu’us, Mauna Kea Summit
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Every wonder what Van Gogh might have painted if he had a nice telescope? And why does the Sombrero Galaxy look like a hat? Reasons include the Sombrero’s unusually large and extended central bulge of stars, and dark prominent dust lanes that appear in a disk that we see nearly edge-on. Billions of old stars cause the diffuse glow of the extended central bulge. Close inspection of the bulge in the above photograph shows many points of light that are actually globular clusters. The spectacular dust rings harbor many younger and brighter stars, and show intricate details astronomers don’t yet fully understand. The very center of the Sombrero is thought to house a large black hole. Fifty million-year-old light from the Sombrero Galaxy can be seen with a small telescope towards the constellation of Virgo.
Base Image and description Credit: NASA/Hubble Heritage Team
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Ironically, perhaps, on the same day NASA announced the exceptionally exciting discovery of seven Earth-size plants around a nearby star, one of my Kai ‘Opua Outrigger Canoe Club brothers ask me to apply my impressionist vision to one of the Hubble Telescope images he found on the Hubble website. As luck would have it, I learned that the Hubble images are in the public domain. However, any derivative images such my abstract rendering, if the nebula wasn’t already abstract enough, provide appropriate acknowledgement to NASA and STScl (Space Telescope Science Institute). How wonderful! So be it!
The image I selected was a region of the Carina Nebula. By definition, a nebula is a cloud of gas and dust in space. Some nebulae (more than one nebula) are regions where new stars are being formed, while others are the remains of dead or dying stars. The Carina Nebula contains at least a dozen brilliant start that are 50 to 100 times the mass of our sun.
As I think about this, I also think of Tom Robbins who wrote in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues “Perhaps everything was connected to everything, in a discernible if nebulous way, and if one might only trace the fibers and filaments of those connections, one might… One might what? Observe the Grand Design? Untangle all the puppet strings and discover whose hands (or claws) are pulling them. End the ancient search for order and meaning of the universe?”
What is the meaning of the universe?
Three cheers for NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)! Keep up the phenomenal, exceptional, exciting work!
After our recent Kama’āina Observatory Experience on Muanakea, I was inspired to visit the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFTT) website where I discovered their wonderful work with time-lapse movies.
With permission from CFHT, “Lighting Storm Over Muanakea” is a “derivative” work from the Time-lapse Cloud Camera mounted to the catwalk of CFHT. The digital rendering is a composite of three separate individual frames selected from a 1 minute, 56 second MPEG4 clip with a final layer of my impressionistic interpretation.
CFHT’s Cloud Camera is an experimental high sensitivity camera which takes pictures every 30 seconds and compiles time-lapse movies from those pictures.
More information about CFHT, their work, their Cloudcam and some wondrous time-lapse movies can be found here.