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| Todd Doucette, a Media Artist at the
University of Lethbridge,
provided us with an amazing
time-lapse video of the February 20,
2008, total
lunar eclipse. He put in a lot of
time making and editing this video
and we very much appreciate his
efforts. We also very much
appreciate his willingness to share
his work with us, so that we can
make it available to kids from all
across Canada. The video is in
QuickTime format and it is just over
one-minute in length. |
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Click on the image above to view the
total lunar eclipse video. |
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composite image of the total lunar
eclipse was captured by
Clive Schaupmeyer. Clive
is not actually a member of the Big
Sky Astronomical Society, but we
certainly consider him to be a friend.
He appreciated the information that we
provided on our website, on the day of
the eclipse, as to the exact starting
time of each phase of the total lunar
eclipse and as a thank you, he sent us
this image! |
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| Clicking on the image above
will
open a new web browser and allow you to
view the full-size (1200 pixels by
479 pixels) image. |
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We captured this image of the Moon during a total lunar eclipse on
February 20, 2008. The image was captured
by holding a 6.1 megapixel (Kodak Z650)
digital camera in front of the eyepiece
of our new Outreach
Telescope (Celestron CPC 800 GPS). Clicking on the image below will open a new web browser and allow you to view the full-size image of the Moon.
This image measures 1416 pixels by 1064 pixels. The resolution of the full-size image is approximately 4 kilometres per pixel.
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We captured this image of Jupiter on July 20, 2006. On that
night, Jupiter was approximately 765 million kilometres away from Earth. The image was captured using our
Outreach Telescope (Meade LX50) and a Celestron NexImage Solar System Imager. The resolution of this image
is approximately 2200 kilometres per pixel.
The image below is the same as the one above, however, it has been enlarged
to twice its original size.
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This image of the Moon was captured on February 11, 2006. On that night, George "Bagheera" Latta was supervising the 14th McKillop Cubs,
who were participating in the Camp-In Program
at the Royal Tyrrell Museum, when he held his 3.2 megapixel camera (Canon A-300)
in front of the eyepiece of our Outreach Telescope (Meade LX50) and snapped this amazing picture. Clicking on the image below will open a new web browser and allow you to view the full-size image of the Moon.
This image measures 1920 pixels by 1440 pixels. The resolution of the full-size image is approximately 4 kilometres per pixel.
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We captured this image of Mars on October 29, 2005. On that night, Mars was approximately 69 million kilometres away from Earth. Mars will
not be this close to Earth again until 2018. The image was captured using our Outreach Telescope (Meade LX50) and a Celestron NexImage Solar
System Imager. The resolution of this image is approximately 165 kilometres per pixel.
The image below is the same as the one above, however, it has been enlarged to twice its original size.
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| Image
removed for re-processing. It will
return soon! |
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This image of the Moon was captured on October 14, 2005. On that night, two grade 10 students from Highwood High School
were given the opportunity to take control of our Observatory Telescope (Meade LX200GPS) so that they could capture the
very first image ever taken with our Celestron NexImage Solar System Imager. As you can see, they did a wonderful job!
The crater at the centre of the image is Crater Mersenius, which is 84 kilometres in
diameter. The largest crater in the image, located in the upper-right corner, is Crater Gassendi and it has a diameter
of 110 kilometres. The third largest crater in the image, located in the lower-left, is Crater Cavendish. It is 56 kilometres
in diameter and as you can see was mostly covered by shadow when this image was taken. The large, relatively flat, area that
dominates the lower-right of the image is Mare Humorum (Sea of Moisture).
The red rectangle in the image below shows the region that was imaged.
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This image of the Pleiades (M45) was captured on December 2, 2004. The image was captured by Pierre Martin (Ph.D.) using the
Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) and the MegaCam - a 340 megapixel digital camera. This prize image was taken on our behalf as a
result of the Big Sky Astronomical Society being named the winner
of the contest for one-hour of CFHT imaging time for amateur astronomersin Canada.
Clicking on the image below will open a new web browser and allow you to view the full-size image of
the Pleiades. Please note that the image is very large (6974 pixels by 4615 pixels) and the size of the file is 1.75 megabytes.
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We captured this image of the Moon during a total lunar eclipse on November
8, 2003. The image was captured using our Outreach
Telescope (Meade LX50) and an ordinary one-megapixel Hewlett Packard (C200) digital camera. |
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Adopt-A-Star
The colour of the traffic light
above indicates the status of our Adopt-A-Star program. A green light indicates that we are ready to process
Adopt-A-Star requests. A yellow light indicates that we expect to begin processing
Adopt-A-Star requests within a few days. Finally, a red light indicates that we are not able to process any
Adopt-A-Star requests at this time.
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Book of the Day
Businesses that are subject to an increased risk of fraud require a special type of merchant account called a high risk merchant account. 
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Space History
January 1
On this day, back in 1801, Italian
astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi discovered the first asteroid. It was named Ceres, in
honour of the Roman goddess of agriculture. Ceres has a diameter of about 950
km, which makes it the largest asteroid in the Asteroid Belt. In 2006, the
International Astronomical Union adopted the term "dwarf planet" and since then
Ceres has been classified as a dwarf planet.
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Big Sky News
The Nanton Legion recently
contributed $1000 to our 2010 Facility Enhancement Project.
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Did You Know?
A light-year is a unit of distance, not time. It is simply the distance that light travels in one year. The speed of light is 299,792,458 metres per second and therefore in one year (365¼ days) light can traverse 9,460,730,472,580,800 metres. In other words, a light-year is equal to about 9.46 trillion kilometres.
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