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Yellowstone and stuff

Oct 4, 2007 by Jared Smith

We had a fun trip through Yellowstone last week. It was well below freezing at night, but we still camped out – though I’m not quite sure why. We drove from Cache Valley to Montpelier to Star Valley, through Jackson, and then to Old Faithful. Old Faithful sure gets less and less impressive each time I see it. I don’t know if it’s getting smaller or I’m getting bigger (no fat Jared jokes), but I’ve seen broken sprinklers that are more impressive. I guess we need a good earthquake to churn up the old Yellowstone caldera a bit. After O.F., we camped at Madison, then did the Upper Loop (Mammoth Hot Springs, Tower, Grand Canyon), then headed for Rigby for the rest of the weekend.

Here’s A BUNCH of photos.

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Southeastern Sky

Aug 21, 2007 by Jared Smith

I photographed two very cool, yet very different things in my southeastern sky this week. The first is a double rainbow from a very mean, fast approaching storm. The brightest rainbow is caused by the sunlight from the setting sun reflecting off rain drops. The second, double arc is caused by a double reflection of sunlight inside those rain drops. Notice that the colors of the outer rainbow are inverted (purple on top and red on bottom)? The storm knocked out our power and it remained out for 6 or 7 hours.

The second image is of the International Space Station and the Space Shuttle Endeavour racing across the sky and setting over my neighbor’s roof. The brightest streak on the left is the space station with two Russian cosmonauts and one U.S. astronaut on board and the dimmer streak on the right is the space shuttle with 7 people on board. The space shuttle had undocked from the space station a day or so earlier and landed the next morning. Both are moving about 17,500 miles per hour or 5 miles per second and are 211 miles up.

The shorter streaks of light in the image are stars. They appear streaked because the Earth rotated a small amount during the 30 second or so exposure.

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Milky Way

Aug 10, 2007 by Jared Smith

It’s been a crazy summer and I have had few chances to get the telescope out. The night before last was a nice night and the Perseid meteor shower was just picking up, so I took the time to go out and observe for a while and take the picture below. This photo of the Milky Way covers about 80% of the distance from horizon to horizon. This image is looking outward across the disk of the galaxy we live in. The bright portions at the bottom are looking toward the center of our galaxy, where the majority of the stars are at. The other ‘glowing’ regions throughout are the residual glow of billions of stars throughout our galaxy. The dark areas are where dust is blocking the light from the stars behind. The small, red, glowing areas are mostly nebulae.

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