Star Vistas

Managed to get today’s EPOD with the stunning NGC1333 and surrounding dust clouds image.  Thank you Jim for posting this one, we believe it is one of our best ever

Star Vistas is now below $7!  Even with postage from the States, you can now get Star Vistas for less than half the U.K. Amazon price – extraordinary!

We had a few clear nights in a row recently and I concentrated on just one object – IC2169 – a beautiful reflection nebula in Monoceros.  9 hours total exposure time using 4-minute subs from the New Forest Observatory.  Processing by Noel Carboni, Florida, U.S.A.  The little golden open cluster at bottom/left is OCL494 or Trumpler 5.

Another candidate for Star Vistas II

Looks like amazon.com in the U.S.A. wants to get rid of its stock of Star Vistas, just over $7 a pop – even with postage that will be a LOT cheaper than amazon.co.uk  So if you would like a copy of Star Vistas, but don’t like the price, order from the States before they run out

Managed to get today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day [APOD] with the wide field (sparkly colour) image of Kemble’s Cascade.  I like this image so much it is one of the permanent “wallpapers” on my home computer.  The little open cluster sitting on the left hand edge of the cascade makes this image perfect IMO

I acquired another 4 hours of data on this object and Noel put the whole thing together – now totalling some 9-hours of imaging time at f#2 on an 11″ reflector!  This is NGC1333 a beautiful reflection nebula in Perseus and it is surrounded by the most amazing dust clouds as you can see.  This is one of the “busiest” regions I have ever imaged.  Clearly another page in Star Vistas II

Noel recently processed the Caldwell 10 dataset and managed to pull out the faint red open cluster (IC116) towards the top left of the image.  Note also the dark nebulosity running diagonally across the field of view.  There are a total of 7 (yes-seven) catalogued open clusters in this image – Cassiopeia is a very rich star field region.  Another beautiful Star Vista – courtesy of Cassiopeia – for Star Vistas II.

Got today’s EPOD with a shadow self-portrait taken over the New Forest near the winter solstice at mid-day.  Thank you Jim for continuing to show my work

Mr. Ray Girvan has kindly replicated my Golden Solid angle work from 2007 for others to see (with diagrams!) on his site.  Ray states that he can see why the Mathematical Gazette might have been unimpressed by the Golden Solid angle paper I wrote back then, as basically it is no different from splitting up the surface area of a sphere into any other ratio, such as 3:1 for example.  Unfortunately this is quite incorrect!  Go down one dimension to the Golden (planar) angle of roughly 137.5 degrees and you will find this angle appearing time and time again in the subject area of Phyllotaxis – the ordering and spacing of leaves on plants and trees.  It is also the underlying rotation angle in the spiral patterns of the sunflower seed head, the pinecone and the pineapple (and possibly DNA if there are 10.5 base-pairs per turn!).

An unexpected by-product of applying the most irrational, irrational number (phi) to the packing of sunflower seeds is that it leads to a geometric structure with an infinite rotational symmetry which has important applications in modern optics and was Patented by me back in 2002   So the planar Golden Angle appears extensively in the Natural World and this is a direct result of applying the Golden Ratio to dividing up the circumference of a circle into the Golden section, not a ratio of 1:3 or any other ratio – the Golden Ratio.

It is for this reason that I am expecting to see the Golden Solid angle making an appearance in the 3-D packing of objects (seeds, cells, ?) in the natural world, but to-date I don’t have any unambiguous examples of Golden Solid angle packing in Nature.

So the initial question still remains unanswered - can anybody give me an example of 3-D packing of objects in the Natural World according to the Golden Solid Angle?  If anyone can answer this question it will bring something new to the discussion.

I see that Ray believes that my more detailed piece on the Golden Solid angle (below) was just for his benefit.  It was in fact written for people on astronomy forums (where I also posted my question) who didn’t know about solid angles.  I have written a correcting comment to Ray but he has not posted it on his site yet.

Back to some deep-sky imaging and two more brand new objects for Star Vistas II.  Recently captured from the New Forest Observatory we have a nice little open cluster (in fact there are three open clusters in the field of view) in Cassiopeia – Caldwell 10.  Next to this we have a globular cluster and Messier object – M15 – in the constellation Pegasus.  The C11/Hyperstar III/SXVF-M25C is a great combination for star clusters and star fields as you can grab a great dataset in just one evening’s (4-hour) imaging.