Morning photo: Starlight

Posted on March 24, 2012 by Bob Berwyn

Summit County’s night skies

Gore Range Panoramic: Middle Park, Colorado.

All photos by Daniel McVey

SUMMIT COUNTY — I’m super-psyched to be hosting a guest photography post by self-taught widefield landscape astrophotographer Daniel McVey, a resident of Summit County, Colorado for more than 10 years. McVey has been honing his night photography skills for about six years.

“I first started the trial and error process when I lived up on Boreas Pass,” McVey said. “At night I would hike out to Rocky Point and give it a go. I found that there is a lot of practice, patience, pre-planning, and painfully-frozen fingertips to try to get the image you envision. I seldom record my composition exactly as planned but I’m not unhappy with my end results.”

Check out his website, www.danielmcvey.com and his facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/PhotographybyDanielMcVey  for a daily blog and additional images.

Milky Way over Mayflower Gulch: Summit County, Colorado.

Orion, the Great Hunter, with the Dog star, Sirius, over the
Gore Range: Summit County, Colorado.

Moonshine on the Blue River: Silverthorne, Colorado.

(more…)

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New surveys find plenty of planets in Milky Way

Posted on January 16, 2012 by Bob Berwyn

Every starry night 100 million stars are observed using telescopes in Chile and New Zealand. If the search identifies a stellar location with a possible microlensing effect, it is automatically registered. Then the best "lenses" are observed more closely at high resolution and their light curves are analyzed. One of the places this is done is at the Danish 1.5 meter telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile. Credit: ESO/Z. Bardon

Earth-like planets may be common through the galaxy

By Summit Voice

SUMMIT COUNTY — The Milky Way likely has a huge number of planets that may be similar to Earth in some ways, according to one of the latest surveys of the galaxy.

“We used to think that the Earth might be unique in our galaxy. But now it seems that there are literally billions of planets with masses similar to Earth orbiting stars in the Milky Way,” said Daniel Kubas, one of the author of  the research paper published last week in Nature. (more…)

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Collision with dwarf galaxy may have shaped Milky Way

Posted on September 25, 2011 by Bob Berwyn

An artist's conception of the Milky Way, courtesy NASA.

New research helps explain formation of our galaxy’s characteristic arms

By Summit Voice

SUMMIT COUNTY — A collision with the Sagittarius Dwarf galaxy some 2 billion years ago may have given the Milky Way galaxy its characteristic spiral shape, according to a University of Pittsburgh researcher and his collaborators.

Their paper, published last week in the British journal Nature, is the first to identify Sagittarius as the architect of spiral structure in our Milky Way. The researchers ran simulations on supercomputers to model the collision — and to create a picture of what the Milky Way might have looked like without those collisions.

“It presents a new and somewhat unexpected way of thinking about why the galaxy we live in looks the way it does,” said Christopher W. Purcell, a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Physics and Astronomy in Pitt’s School of Arts and Sciences. (more…)

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