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Sky Candy: Just the Sweets

Charlie Martin | 2:14 PM on December 06, 2024
AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky

I try to have a theme for each of these pieces. And this one has a theme, honest. I'm picking things I like. I think they're pretty. 

This first one is an example. Its only excuse for being here in Sky Candy is it has the sky in it. But I don't care, it's cool.

I mean, think about it. The only opportunity is at the full moon, which is roughly once a month. The sky has to be reasonably clear, it has to be at a fairly specific time of the night. I'm not surprised it took six years to get the shot. But once the planets aligned, the composition is just impeccable.

Honestly, the composition on this is pretty cool, albeit a lot less formal. But it's still a gorgeous picture, and it has a lens flair that would make J.J. Abrams proud.

I don't know about you, but to me, pictures of a comet are always cool. My first naked-eye comet was Ikeya-Seki in 1965, and I was kind of disappointed. I had this image that the tail would flutter in the solar wind like a flag in a gale, and it doesn't. It just sits there. Still, I can see it in my mind's eye 60 years later.

The Carina Nebula is another favorite. I tried to include it a couple of weeks ago, but for some reason, the tweet wouldn't render even though it showed up in the preview. Um, the post, we're supposed to call them posts now. 

Often the most spectacular images are in areas in which star formation is happening. It makes sense — stars form in regions with a lot of gas and dust; that's what stars are made of. But once fusion in a protostar lights up, it illuminates the sky around it for light years. Our time scales are too short to see it, but with imagination's eye, you can see the spark of a new star, and the light expanding in a wave-front around it, lighting up in a years-long cascade.

Jupiter is always good for a flashy shot. For a long time, Jupiter was kind of cool looking, but honestly a little boring. Stripes and a big red spot. Okay, fine.

With a little thought, honestly, it should have been obvious that there was a lot of detail missing. Turbulent flow on a Brobdingagian scale would have to be complex, chaotic in the literal mathematical sense.

Juno settled that one.

This is another example where what you see depends on where you stand. Both Jupiter and Saturn have complicated storms at the poles that apparently endure for decades at least. Saturn's polar storm forms a hexagon. Jupiter, that showoff, has an octagon. Both of them have a central vortex that would swallow whole continents on Earth.

To me, it looks like the gods pulled the plug and Saturn is draining out.

You'll always get my attention with a picture of the Seven Sisters. I don't know how this got named for the Seven Sisters when there are only six bright naked-eye stars, but there it is.

A bit of trivia: the word in Japanese for the Pleiades is subaru. Now you know where the Subaru autos logo comes from.

We really only see the vaguest hint of the real sky with naked eyes. I don't think there's anything particularly scientifically interesting about this picture, but you know what? I don't care.

Here's another picture of the Carina Nebula. The last one made up for the one I promised and couldn't deliver; this one is just for show.

Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space. ―Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Andromeda was really the first galaxy outside the Milky Way that science identified. If you read old really old books about astronomy — which I did; that's what they had in the library in Alamosa Colorado in 1962 — they talk about the Milky Way as our universe. Edwin Hubble, the man for whom the telescope was named, was the first to realize that Andromeda was a whole 'nother galaxy and that other galaxies were racing away from us.

As I said. I'm a sucker for comet pictures. Go ahead and click through on this one, the PJ HTML doesn't show the whole picture.

Again, my justification for this one is really just that it's a pretty picture. Like pretty girls and puppies, sometimes that's justification enough.

So that's it for this week. I'm thinking that next week I'll concentrate on planetary pictures. If you all have any other ideas for themes I could follow, drop them in the comments. 

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Charlie Martin

Charlie Martin writes on science, health, culture, and technology for PJ Media. For media inquiries, please contact [email protected]

Category: COLUMNS
Tags: SPACE

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