Astronomy.com blog : deep sky

Behind the scenes of Hubble 3D IMAX movie

Bill Andrews — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 16:17:00 GMT

STS-125 astronauts Mike Massimino (lower left) and Mike Good (right, on arm) rehearse Hubble Space Telescope repairs in NASA’s NBL in this IMAX footage from Hubble 3D. NASA photo

Toni Myers is my kind of big-time Hollywood director. She’s worked on such famous space-themed IMAX movies as Space Station 3D, Destiny in Space, and 1985’s The Dream is Alive. I remember seeing Dream is Alive when I was just a kid, and it played no small role in my fascination with the skies. She’s also the director, writer, and editor of the upcoming IMAX movie Hubble 3D, due to be widely released in IMAX theaters March 19, 2010. Even though she’s still hard at work editing, I talked to Myers recently about NASA, movies, and the tyranny of deadlines. Here are some of the highlights, slightly edited for clarity.

Astronomy: What made you start making movies about space?

Myers: Well, at the time of the first IMAX space film, I was part of a team founded by Graeme Ferguson (the co-inventor of IMAX). When the IMAX projector was put in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, Mike Collins, the director at that time [and an Apollo 11 astronaut] saw IMAX and said, “This is the medium. This is the only thing that can really convey what we experienced.”

Graeme heard that loud and clear. We’d made other films on other topics before, but once he heard [how Collins felt] we launched a campaign to try and get the IMAX camera into space. That was the start of actually making films in space, and it was really spearheaded by Graeme, who founded the unit.

IMAX camera operator Peter Kragh (left) films STS-125 astronauts Mike Good (foreground) and Mike Massimino (to the right inside the Hubble mock-up) as they rehearse Hubble repair activities at NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Lab (NBL) in Houston, Texas. NASA photo

Astronomy: Have you ever wanted to branch out beyond space and try making other types of movies?

Myers: We do do other films, though we seem to specialize in airless environments. Our units have produced three 3-D underwater films. We make those in collaboration with a very wonderful cinematographer/director by the name of Howard Hall, and we first made one in 1994, Into the Deep. That’s an adventure of a different kind in a different direction. But we do seem to come back to space a lot. One thing just leads to another, and it is a topic of endless fascination. I’d love to go myself!

Astronomy: Speaking of going to space, you must work pretty closely with NASA to make these films. What’s that like?

Myers: The collaboration has been absolutely wonderful, right from the beginning. We supply the training and the cameras and the filmmaking expertise; NASA supplies the astronauts and the spacecraft. I think NASA could see right away how these films bring an experience that is only the privilege of a small sector of people to absolutely everybody, from the age of 3 to 103. Actually, I think the biggest fans of the films are the NASA engineers and crews because they’re seeing things in the film that they don’t get to see normally. There’s a level of detail that isn’t readily available anywhere else. Even when we saw the first footage come back for The Dream is Alive, all of us sat absolutely jaws-on-the-floor at seeing what the Earth looked like 6 stories high. It was absolutely like being there.

Astronomy: With your latest film, Hubble 3D, are you focusing on the science the Hubble Space Telescope has done, or the story of getting it to work, or something else entirely?

Myers: There will be some early material of its original deployment in space, and we’ll track the story a little bit about the flawed mirror and the first service mission. But the main mission that we’ll focus on is last May’s STS-125, which is the last service mission. We also plan several flights through Hubble data, which we’re animating in 3-D — for instance, one is from Earth right to the heart of the Orion Nebula. We basically want to allow people all over the world to see some splendid examples of how Hubble has changed our whole idea of what our universe is. But, it won’t be everything, that’s for sure!

Hopefully, as with some of the other films, we can inspire people to pursue a career in astronomy. An example of that – totally unexpected by us – is when Susan Helms was going to be one of the first permanent “inmates” of the International Space Station. She was interviewed on the Today show, and they asked her what had inspired her to become an astronaut, and she said, “The IMAX film The Dream is Alive.” We didn’t plan that one, believe me! You can’t begin to cover all the science there is on any given topic in 40 minutes. What you can do is really open people’s eyes as to what is out there. Our goal is to have people leaving the theater wanting to know more.

In this footage from the upcoming film Hubble 3D, Astronaut Andrew Feustel transfers the Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement unit from the telescope to its temporary stowage position in the space shuttle Atlantis cargo bay. NASA photo

Astronomy: Do you know what your next project might be?

Myers: I actually don’t. We were doing our last underwater film, Under the Sea 3D, in conjunction with this one, so the two films were going in parallel for about 18 months. I haven’t had a minute to think forward. I should, but I think my biggest challenge right now is getting this one finished. I’d love to do more space films, and there are lots of science films that are very interesting. But I really just have been so totally immersed in this I haven’t given it much thought.

Astronomy: Maybe a vacation’s in order?

Myers: Uh, yeah! That always looms as a nice thing, but then you start worrying, “Well I better get the next project going!” You know how it goes with deadlines.

Astronomy: A little too well, in fact. On that note, then, my last question: Anything else you’d like to add?

Myers: I’d like to say that the crew of the final repair mission (STS-125) was absolutely superb in terms of the work they did. They had an incredibly difficult mission in terms of the intricacies of what they had to do outside on their spacewalks, and I’m in awe of what they accomplished. Also, we wouldn’t be doing this film if it weren’t for Warner Brothers. Going into space was a new adventure for them, and I’m just so thrilled that they wanted to do it. So I do want to give them credit for agreeing to launch with us to the stars!

And finally, I just wanted to highlight the fact that I think the legacy of Hubble itself is absolutely astonishing. Every time I look at the Hubble Ultra Deep Field and some of those gravitational lens photos and things, it’s just life altering, isn’t it? I think a lot of people haven’t had that experience, and I hope this film gives them a little bit of it.

On the road: Al Nagler shares scoop on new Tele Vue product

Michael Bakich — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 23:13:00 GMT

I’m at the 2009 Pacific Astronomy and Telescope Show (PATS) that runs Saturday and Sunday.

Early Friday, I ducked into several sessions of the Riverside Astroimaging Workshop (RAW). Organizers of RAW this year found speakers to present sessions on “affordable” and “advanced” imaging. Don Goldman from Astrodon Filters gave more seasoned astrophotographers a 2-hour talk on narrowband imaging. Don contributes fabulous deep-sky images to Astronomy, and his talk had lots of details astroimagers could try.

The sessions I saw were hands-on. Participants brought laptop computers, and they followed along as the speakers unveiled new processing techniques. About 50 people attended this daylong workshop.

Later, as I was walking to the then-empty convention hall where PATS would occur, I saw Al Nagler, founder of Tele Vue Optics.

Nagler has been a fixture in the telescope scene since the early 1980s when he introduced the first Nagler eyepiece, the 13mm, that revolutionized observing. People who know Nagler call him “Uncle Al.”

We chatted for more than an hour, and Al showed me lots of pictures he’d taken during the past 2 weeks. He’d been to several star parties and also had stopped by Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. On Saturday morning, he presented the first talk at PATS, “Choosing Eyepieces.”

Al shared with me details of a new product Tele Vue is developing — a ParaCorr, which stands for “parabolic corrector. The ParaCorr corrects an optical defect called coma. This defect causes stars far from the center of the eyepiece’s field of view to appear to have tails (like comets — hence the name). Coma is present in all Newtonian reflectors, but it’s especially noticeable in those that have a fast focal ratio.

Some telescope manufacturers install mirrors with ultra-short focal lengths (below f/4) in their telescopes so they can shorten the scopes. This benefits observers who don’t want to climb a ladder all night to observe faint objects. For example, consider a 20-inch telescope with a focal ratio of f/3.3. The eyepiece of such a scope would be only 5.5 feet off the ground when the scope is pointed at the zenith (the overhead point).

Such a short focal ratio introduces lots of coma. That’s where Tele Vue’s new product comes in, Nagler told me. The ParaCorr model will deal with coma in scopes with focal ratios in the low-2s. That’s incredible. And it’s just one of the cool new things I’ve learned since I arrived at this year’s PATS.

Previous post: 2009 Pacific Astronomy and Telescope Show

Deep-sky observing at Rancho Hidalgo

David Eicher — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 15:03:00 GMT

Following the dedication of Astronomy magazine’s observatory, and of Pluto discoverer Clyde Tombaugh’s telescope at Rancho Hidalgo, New Mexico, desert adventure awaited us. Astronomy’s publisher Kevin Keefe had joined me to trek out to visit developer Gene Turner and Loy Guzman, our hosts at Rancho Hidalgo. With the many guests from the night before now departed, we set about exploring nearby attractions surrounding the Hidalgo site — Portal, Arizona, with its Cave Creek Canyon and delightful birds, Turner’s Arizona Sky Village settlement, and some Native American sites near Hidalgo that still sport amazing relics dating to 1,000 years ago or even older.

Editors note: You can see the full image gallery of Dave and Kevin's trip to Rancho Hidalgo in our Online Reader Gallery.

The Chiricahua Mountains are amazingly beautiful, and we stood in awe of the perilous ride up the mountain that holds the 24-inch Cassegrain telescope associated with Arizona Sky Village. After exploring the vistas from that high altitude (much higher than the 4,600-foot desert floor below), we retreated to visit the desert itself.

Kevin and I were astonished to see a tarantula (two, actually) for the first time in the wild. We hiked for an hour and a half to reach a rocky shelf on one of the small mountains close to Hidalgo to find the area inhabited by various Native Americans, including Mimbres, from before 1,000 years ago to about the year 1,300 a.d. Tools and numerous stone chips from fashioning arrowheads and other implements lay abundantly on the sand in great areas of concentration. Inside one complex of caves, we found red and black petroglyphs seemingly telling of rivers, mountains, and long-forgotten messages of the ancient past.

This September we had an extremely late monsoonal flow (pictured at right) that threatened our observing on Friday night. But we stuck with the plan, feasted on a bountiful steak dinner, and then prepared Gene’s 30-inch Dobsonian (pictured above) to go after a laundry list of deep-sky objects. For Kevin, it would be a special treat, his first night under a premier sky with a really large telescope. Memories of M13 as seen with a small reflector at his summer camp way back when aroused comparisons with what we might see, until darkness fell, we had generally clear sky, and M13 was the first object dialed up. “My God!” Kevin exclaimed. It was a stunning view of the cluster, resolved cleanly across the face and with numerous lines of bright stars arcing from the central glow. A nice way to start the night, indeed.

We then gave Kevin a taste of the Sagittarius mainline, the arch of bright deep-sky objects from the galactic center northward. The Eagle Nebula (M16) looked fine, although the dark “pillars of creation” were a little subtle, as the sky was still darkening. The Lagoon Nebula (M8) did not fail to impress, as its star cluster, bright central glow, and rivers of dark nebulosity filled the field of view abundantly. We popped in an oxygen-III filter just to give the image a little more kick, to knock up the contrast. We then skittered over to the Trifid Nebula (M20), whose twin glows of emission and reflection nebulosity were superb. The Omega Nebula (M17) had such stunning surface brightness that it practically blew our heads off.

Not to be lost in Sagittarius and Serpens forever, we scooted up to the Wild Duck Cluster (M11), which was so richly stunning that its triangular shape looked wedge-like, set with the single, right orange jewel in its center. From there we shot over to the Dumbbell Nebula (M27), and by now the sky was getting dark enough to be superb. M27 was so brilliant — the brightest part a complete dumbbell but the fainter “ears” of nebulosity completely filling the object into an eerily glowing oval. It was like a superb photo without the color.

A long list of smaller planetary nebulae followed, many in Aquila and Cygnus, with NGC 6781, NGC 6905, NGC 6804, NGC 7008, and the Ring Nebula (M57) leading the way.

We observed many more objects, although some hopping back and forth around the sky was necessary due to very dark clouds that slowly washed over parts of the sky. The view of the Andromeda Galaxy and its satellites was incredible, the nucleus glowing brilliantly and the dust lanes sharply defined, with rich starfields on all sides of the major action. We took the galaxy question to the other extreme, too, by looking at the distant galaxy NGC 4319 and the nearby quasar Markarian 205. In the end, I think Kevin was satisfied with his first night of dark-sky, big-scope viewing. After lots of looking, it was a cool ending to a hot day in the desert, and we returned to Milwaukee on Saturday in time to get back into rhythm for another week at Astronomy magazine starting Monday morning.

We’ll continue to keep you posted on activities at Astronomy’s observatory and on images made from the facility in the coming days.

Photo credits: Gene Turner (30-inch); David J. Eicher (tarantula and monsoon)

August 28-September 4, 2009: Thuban, the Hercules Cluster, and the Veil Nebula

Michael Bakich — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 20:30:00 GMT

Each week, Astronomy magazine Senior Editor Michael Bakich, a master at explaining how to observe, posts a podcast about three objects or events you can see in the sky.

In each episode, Michael highlights:

One object you can see without any optical aid
One object you can see with a small (4-inch) telescope
One object you can see with at least an 8-inch telescope

Targets for August 28-September 4, 2009

Binoculars:

Small telescope:

8-inch or larger telescope:

The weekly observing podcast is available to registered members of Astronomy.com. The podcast remains FREE, so please register with the site to make sure you don't miss an episode!

Listen to this week's podcast.

This week's podcast is brought to you by Celestron — one of the world's leading designer and manufacturer of high-quality optical equipment. Learn more about Celestron and their products at www.Celestron.com.

August 21-28, 2009: Algedi and Dabih, M73, and Gyulbudaghian’s Nebula

Michael Bakich — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 21:39:00 GMT

Each week, Astronomy magazine Senior Editor Michael Bakich, a master at explaining how to observe, posts a podcast about three objects or events you can see in the sky.

In each episode, Michael highlights:

One object you can see without any optical aid
One object you can see with a small (4-inch) telescope
One object you can see with at least an 8-inch telescope

Targets for August 21-28, 2009

Binoculars:

Small telescope:

8-inch or larger telescope:

The weekly observing podcast is available to registered members of Astronomy.com. The podcast remains FREE, so please register with the site to make sure you don't miss an episode!

Listen to this week's podcast.

July 31-August 7, 2009: Small Sagittarius Star Cloud, NGC 6738, and Bernes 157

Michael Bakich — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 18:44:00 GMT

Each week, Astronomy magazine Senior Editor Michael Bakich, a master at explaining how to observe, posts a podcast about three objects or events you can see in the sky.

In each episode, Michael highlights:

One object you can see without any optical aid
One object you can see with a small (4-inch) telescope
One object you can see with at least an 8-inch telescope

Targets for July 31-August 7, 2009

Binoculars:

Small telescope:

8-inch or larger telescope:

The weekly observing podcast is available to registered members of Astronomy.com. The podcast remains FREE, so please register with the site to make sure you don't miss an episode!

Listen to this week's podcast.

Volunteers help pick out Green Pea galaxies

Bill Andrews — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 20:26:00 GMT

In a twist on the amateur-astronomer-helps-professionals storyline, Yale astronomers discovered a group of galaxies by enlisting citizen scientists’ help not with stargazing, but computer gazing.

The galaxies, dubbed the “Green Peas” because of their small, green appearance, were discovered as part of an online project called Galaxy Zoo, where volunteers have helped classify galaxies in a huge online picture gallery since 2007. Apparently the volunteers’ help was essential, with only 250 Green Peas found out of one million galaxies in the bank. It’s the kind of job that one dedicated astronomer couldn’t do in decades, but multitudes of part-time astronomers could make short work of.

The astronomers discovered that Green Peas, between 1.5 and 5 billion light-years away, form stars faster than usual, about 10 times faster than our own Milky Way. That’s all the more unusual given their relative tininess, about 10 times smaller than the Milky Way and 100 times less massive. Because these kinds of galaxies would have been more normal in the early universe, further research could help guide theories as to how early galaxies formed stars and evolved.

Despite all this great science, I still can’t help thinking that “Green Pea Galaxy” sounds more like a stage in the recent Wii video game Super Mario Galaxy, home to such areas as the Good Egg Galaxy, Rolling Green Galaxy, and Beach Bowl Galaxy.

The Green Pea moniker also seems to have brought out the playful side of the Galaxy Zoo volunteers, who call themselves the “Peas Corps” and originally titled their forum thread “Give peas a chance.”

Were you a part of this finding, or do you know someone who was? And if so, what fun — PG-rated — peas-related name would you have come up with?

Related:

Blog: Here comes Galaxy Zoo 2
Blog: Interactive astronomy education
Blog: Galaxy Zoo project and you
News: Galaxy Zoo finds universe is left-handed

Photo credit: Courtesy Galaxy Zoo blog

Mysterious gamma-ray bursts continue to surprise

Bill Andrews — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 19:21:00 GMT

It looks like gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) just became even more inscrutable. And that’s saying something for the brightest — and potentially most destructive — known objects in the universe.

Even though it’s still a mystery just how these things work, scientists believed GRBs originated from a giant “fireball” made up of traditional matter, spewed out during black hole formation. But a recent paper in the Astrophysical Journal Letters (August 1, 2009) concludes that, for at least one GRB, this can’t be the case.

In the paper, Bing Zhang of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and Asaf Pe’er of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore analyzed recent data from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and discovered none of the expected thermal emissions from GRB 080916C. Instead, they suggest it was a Poynting flux (energy spikes in electromagnetic fields) that got the GRB going.

GRBs seem to be quite rare, just a few per million years per galaxy, but that doesn’t stop them from capturing the imagination. They release as much energy in a few seconds as the Sun does in its entire lifetime. If our planet ever got caught in the line of fire, we’d probably go extinct. Fortunately, we’ve only seen GRBs in galaxies billions of light-years away.

I try not to focus on how dangerous GRBs could be, but how crazy they are. These things are so bright that last year GRB 080319B (illustrated above) was visible to the naked eye (with apparent magnitude 5.8) despite being more than 7.5 billion light-years away. 7.5 billion light-years! That means light we could have seen with our own eyes originated 7.5 billion years ago, considerably before Earth formed and roughly half the estimated age of the universe!

So let’s hope this Poynting flux idea pans out. If we can understand something so ludicrously powerful and mind-blowing, there’s no limit to what we could figure out.

Do you worry about an impending GRB? Can you think of anything crazier in the cosmos, stranger in space, or more unique in the universe? Let me know!

GRB 080319B illustration: NASA/Swift/Mary Pat Hrybyk-Keith and John Jones

July 24-31, 2009: Barnard’s E, the Double Double, and globular cluster NGC 6717

Michael Bakich — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 20:31:00 GMT

Each week, Astronomy magazine Senior Editor Michael Bakich, a master at explaining how to observe, posts a podcast about three objects or events you can see in the sky.

In each episode, Michael highlights:

One object you can see without any optical aid
One object you can see with a small (4-inch) telescope
One object you can see with at least an 8-inch telescope

Targets for July 17-24, 2009

Binoculars:

Small telescope:

8-inch or larger telescope:

The weekly observing podcast is available to registered members of Astronomy.com. The podcast remains FREE, so please register with the site to make sure you don't miss an episode!

Listen to this week's podcast.

July 17-24, 2009: The Coathanger, globular cluster M22, the Phantom Streak

Michael Bakich — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 20:14:00 GMT

Each week, Astronomy magazine Senior Editor Michael Bakich, a master at explaining how to observe, posts a podcast about three objects or events you can see in the sky.

In each episode, Michael highlights:

One object you can see without any optical aid
One object you can see with a small (4-inch) telescope
One object you can see with at least an 8-inch telescope

Targets for July 17-24, 2009

Naked eye:

Small telescope:

8-inch or larger telescope:

The weekly observing podcast is available to registered members of Astronomy.com. The podcast remains FREE, so please register with the site to make sure you don't miss an episode!

Listen to this week's podcast.