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Stunning images of space abound in this year's Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition – CBC News

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Taking photos of our universe is hard work, but the winners and contestants in the Royal Observatory Greenwich’s Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition make it look easy.

People who take images of the cosmos are called astrophotographers, and it can become an obsession. But they come from all walks of life, with varying degrees of equipment and know-how from all around the globe. But what they all have in common is a love of our night sky and the desire to share it with others.

Taking astronomical photos requires a lot of patience. For deep-sky images — like nebulas, galaxies and star clusters —most astrophotographers use special cameras that attach to their telescopes.

Much like space telescopes, the photographers often use different filters, such as red, green and blue, but sometimes others that only allow particular wavelengths to show up on the sensor. They take many images in each filter, leaving the camera’s shutter open for varying amounts of time, sometimes 10 minutes or more, depending on how dim the object is.

Then, using special astrophotography software, they stack those images together — imagine literally adding photos one on top of the other; this sharpens the image and reduces what photographers call noise. This produces the final colour image that can then be processed using different photographic software. 

Here are some of the winners of this year’s Astronomy Photographer of the Year, along with honourable mentions and special considerations.

Disconnection Event

Gerald Rhemann was the overall winner in the Royal Observatory Greenwich’s Astronomy Photographer of the Year Awards for this image of Comet Leonard taken at the Tivoli Southern Sky Guest Farm, Khomas, Namibia. (© Gerald Rhemann)

The overall winner of the award was Gerald Rhemann for the above image of Comet Leonard, which was discovered by G.J. Leonard on Jan. 3, 2021. The comet made its closest pass of Earth in December 2021. 

Comets are balls of dust and ice that orbit the sun. As comets — often called “dirty snowballs” — near the sun, their tails can elongate and become brighter. 

Rhemann’s image shows the comet on Dec. 25, 2021, where a noticeable part of its tail was pinched off and carried away by solar wind.

Unfortunately, Comet Leonard disintegrated in early 2022 and will not be seen again.

The Jovian Family

The massive Jupiter, taken by Damian Peach from the El Sauce Observatory, Río Hurtado, Coquimbo, Chile, 5 August 2021 (© Damian Peach )

Damian Peach is an accomplished astrophotographer, with most of his images focusing on Jupiter and Saturn. He won runner-up in the Planets, Comets and Asteroids category.

He took an image of our solar system’s biggest planet, Jupiter, together with three of its largest moons — Ganymede, Io and Europa — from Chile in August 2021.

Also visible is Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, a storm that has been brewing across the planet for at least 400 years. 

Cosmic Rose

A cosmic rose is seen here taken by Lionel Majzik in October 2021. (© Lionel Majzik)

Lionel Majzik took this image of Comet 4P/Faye in front of a nebula known as Lower’s Nebula or Sh2-261 in the constellation Orion. This image was highly commended in the Planets, Comets and Asteroids category.

He used a remote telescope located in Mayhill, N.M., and was able to capture this rose-like nebula with the comet creating what looks like a green stem.

Misty Green River

The only Canadian to place in the final winners was Fred Bailey, who photographed the dancing aurora over Cameron River, N.W.T. (© Fred Bailey )

Canadian Fred Bailey was the runner up in the aurora category. He captured the magnificence of the northern lights over Cameron River near Yellowknife on Sept. 1, 2021. 

He took this shot using only a camera with an 18-mm lens and a 15-second exposure.

Winged Aurora 

Another beautiful display of the northern lights is seen here like an angel in the sky. (© Alexander Stepanenko)

A highly commended image in the Aurora category is this one by Alexander Stepanenko. He photographed an almost angel-like aurora against a clear sky in Murmansk, Russia, on Jan. 15, 2022. This was just a 1.6-second exposure.

“Aurora pictures are always beautiful to look at, but never have such images stopped me in my tracks like this one,” said judge Melissa Brobby. 

“This wonderfully fortunate capture is simplistic in its beauty, but the sheer majesty of the winged aurora looming over the mountain is breathtaking. I haven’t stopped looking at this picture in awe.”

Majestic Sombrero Galaxy

This image of the Sombrero Galaxy was a collaboration between three astrophotographers. (© Utkarsh Mishra, Michael Petrasko, Muir Evenden)

The Sombrero Galaxy is a favourite of many astrophotographers. This image was a collaboration between Utkarsh Mishra, Michael Petrasko and Muir Evenden. The images were taken from Pie Town, N.M., on May 5, 2021.

The galaxy seems to be hanging in a jewel box of stars with faint dusty star streams that were created when a smaller galaxy collided with our Milky Way Galaxy. The image won in the Galaxies category.

A Giant in the Sun’s Limb

A solar prominence made up of gas and dust is seen hanging delicately above the limb of the sun. ( © Miguel Claro)

A massive solar prominence — a feature made of plasma, a hot gas that contains electrically charged helium and hydrogen — hangs above our sun. The image was highly commended in the category, Our Sun.

Miguel Claro captured this image from the Dark Sky Alqueva region in Portugal on Feb. 7, 2022. The prominence was visible for two days, and later threw a coronal mass ejection (CME) into space. If Earth is in the path of a CME, we can get great displays of auroras, or northern (and southern) lights.

Miguel used a telescope with a special solar filter and captured the prominence on video.

The International Space Station Transiting Tranquility Base

The International Space Station crosses over the moon’s Sea of Tranquility. (© Andrew McCarthy )

The International Space Station (ISS) is seen directly over the Apollo 11 landing site on the moon, in the Sea of Tranquility.

Andrew McCarthy, the winner in the People and Space category, was able to get the shot from Florence, Ariz. The entire transit of the ISS across the moon lasted only a few milliseconds and required a lot of planning to get the shot just right. 

The image itself was just a 0.3 millisecond exposure.

The Eye of God

The Helix Nebula, also known as the ‘Eye of God’ is a beautiful remnant of a dying star. (© Weitang Liang )

The winner in the Stars and Nebula category is Weitang Liang who photographed the Helix Nebula from the Río Hurtado, Coquimbo Region of Chile on Aug. 8, 2021.

This nebula — often called the Eye of God — is a planetary nebula, which, surprisingly has nothing to do with planets. It is a cloud of gas and dust that has been shed by a parent star as it nears the end of its life. It is believed that one day, our sun will also create a beautiful nebula such as this.

Liang collected 22.5 hours of data to produce this final image.

Badwater Milky Way

The Milky Way hangs over Death Valley National Park. (© Abhijit Patil)

Abhijit Patil is the runner up in the Skyscapes category. He photographed the Milky Way stretched over the salt flats at Badwater Basin in Death Valley National Park in California. 

Each winter new rainwater is brought to the flats, where a continuous freeze-thaw-evaporation process creates the hexagonal patterns seen in this photograph. 

The image is a composite of a five-second exposure of the ground and a five-minute exposure of the sky.

Andromeda Galaxy, The Neighbour

This image of the Andromeda Galaxy, which can be seen with the naked eye in dark-sky locations, was taken by two 14 year-old boys in China. (© Yang Hanwen, Zhou Zezhen )

Finally, the Young Astronomy Photographer of the Year award was won by Yang Hanwen and Zhou Zezhen, two 14-year-old boys from China. The pair collaborated to take an image of our nearest neighbour, the Andromeda Galaxy on Feb. 21, 2021.

The galaxy is one of our closest and largest neighbours and is on a collision course with the Milky Way. But there’s no need to panic: it’s not expected to happen for another five billion years. It took a total exposure of 17 hours to capture this image.

For a full list of winners, visit the Royal Museum Greenwich website. The photographs will also be on display at the National Maritime Museum in London beginning Sept. 17. 

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Here’s how Helene and other storms dumped a whopping 40 trillion gallons of rain on the South

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More than 40 trillion gallons of rain drenched the Southeast United States in the last week from Hurricane Helene and a run-of-the-mill rainstorm that sloshed in ahead of it — an unheard of amount of water that has stunned experts.

That’s enough to fill the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium 51,000 times, or Lake Tahoe just once. If it was concentrated just on the state of North Carolina that much water would be 3.5 feet deep (more than 1 meter). It’s enough to fill more than 60 million Olympic-size swimming pools.

“That’s an astronomical amount of precipitation,” said Ed Clark, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. “I have not seen something in my 25 years of working at the weather service that is this geographically large of an extent and the sheer volume of water that fell from the sky.”

The flood damage from the rain is apocalyptic, meteorologists said. More than 100 people are dead, according to officials.

Private meteorologist Ryan Maue, a former NOAA chief scientist, calculated the amount of rain, using precipitation measurements made in 2.5-mile-by-2.5 mile grids as measured by satellites and ground observations. He came up with 40 trillion gallons through Sunday for the eastern United States, with 20 trillion gallons of that hitting just Georgia, Tennessee, the Carolinas and Florida from Hurricane Helene.

Clark did the calculations independently and said the 40 trillion gallon figure (151 trillion liters) is about right and, if anything, conservative. Maue said maybe 1 to 2 trillion more gallons of rain had fallen, much if it in Virginia, since his calculations.

Clark, who spends much of his work on issues of shrinking western water supplies, said to put the amount of rain in perspective, it’s more than twice the combined amount of water stored by two key Colorado River basin reservoirs: Lake Powell and Lake Mead.

Several meteorologists said this was a combination of two, maybe three storm systems. Before Helene struck, rain had fallen heavily for days because a low pressure system had “cut off” from the jet stream — which moves weather systems along west to east — and stalled over the Southeast. That funneled plenty of warm water from the Gulf of Mexico. And a storm that fell just short of named status parked along North Carolina’s Atlantic coast, dumping as much as 20 inches of rain, said North Carolina state climatologist Kathie Dello.

Then add Helene, one of the largest storms in the last couple decades and one that held plenty of rain because it was young and moved fast before it hit the Appalachians, said University of Albany hurricane expert Kristen Corbosiero.

“It was not just a perfect storm, but it was a combination of multiple storms that that led to the enormous amount of rain,” Maue said. “That collected at high elevation, we’re talking 3,000 to 6000 feet. And when you drop trillions of gallons on a mountain, that has to go down.”

The fact that these storms hit the mountains made everything worse, and not just because of runoff. The interaction between the mountains and the storm systems wrings more moisture out of the air, Clark, Maue and Corbosiero said.

North Carolina weather officials said their top measurement total was 31.33 inches in the tiny town of Busick. Mount Mitchell also got more than 2 feet of rainfall.

Before 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, “I said to our colleagues, you know, I never thought in my career that we would measure rainfall in feet,” Clark said. “And after Harvey, Florence, the more isolated events in eastern Kentucky, portions of South Dakota. We’re seeing events year in and year out where we are measuring rainfall in feet.”

Storms are getting wetter as the climate change s, said Corbosiero and Dello. A basic law of physics says the air holds nearly 4% more moisture for every degree Fahrenheit warmer (7% for every degree Celsius) and the world has warmed more than 2 degrees (1.2 degrees Celsius) since pre-industrial times.

Corbosiero said meteorologists are vigorously debating how much of Helene is due to worsening climate change and how much is random.

For Dello, the “fingerprints of climate change” were clear.

“We’ve seen tropical storm impacts in western North Carolina. But these storms are wetter and these storms are warmer. And there would have been a time when a tropical storm would have been heading toward North Carolina and would have caused some rain and some damage, but not apocalyptic destruction. ”

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Follow AP’s climate coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/climate

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Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at @borenbears

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Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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‘Big Sam’: Paleontologists unearth giant skull of Pachyrhinosaurus in Alberta

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It’s a dinosaur that roamed Alberta’s badlands more than 70 million years ago, sporting a big, bumpy, bony head the size of a baby elephant.

On Wednesday, paleontologists near Grande Prairie pulled its 272-kilogram skull from the ground.

They call it “Big Sam.”

The adult Pachyrhinosaurus is the second plant-eating dinosaur to be unearthed from a dense bonebed belonging to a herd that died together on the edge of a valley that now sits 450 kilometres northwest of Edmonton.

It didn’t die alone.

“We have hundreds of juvenile bones in the bonebed, so we know that there are many babies and some adults among all of the big adults,” Emily Bamforth, a paleontologist with the nearby Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum, said in an interview on the way to the dig site.

She described the horned Pachyrhinosaurus as “the smaller, older cousin of the triceratops.”

“This species of dinosaur is endemic to the Grand Prairie area, so it’s found here and nowhere else in the world. They are … kind of about the size of an Indian elephant and a rhino,” she added.

The head alone, she said, is about the size of a baby elephant.

The discovery was a long time coming.

The bonebed was first discovered by a high school teacher out for a walk about 50 years ago. It took the teacher a decade to get anyone from southern Alberta to come to take a look.

“At the time, sort of in the ’70s and ’80s, paleontology in northern Alberta was virtually unknown,” said Bamforth.

When paleontogists eventually got to the site, Bamforth said, they learned “it’s actually one of the densest dinosaur bonebeds in North America.”

“It contains about 100 to 300 bones per square metre,” she said.

Paleontologists have been at the site sporadically ever since, combing through bones belonging to turtles, dinosaurs and lizards. Sixteen years ago, they discovered a large skull of an approximately 30-year-old Pachyrhinosaurus, which is now at the museum.

About a year ago, they found the second adult: Big Sam.

Bamforth said both dinosaurs are believed to have been the elders in the herd.

“Their distinguishing feature is that, instead of having a horn on their nose like a triceratops, they had this big, bony bump called a boss. And they have big, bony bumps over their eyes as well,” she said.

“It makes them look a little strange. It’s the one dinosaur that if you find it, it’s the only possible thing it can be.”

The genders of the two adults are unknown.

Bamforth said the extraction was difficult because Big Sam was intertwined in a cluster of about 300 other bones.

The skull was found upside down, “as if the animal was lying on its back,” but was well preserved, she said.

She said the excavation process involved putting plaster on the skull and wooden planks around if for stability. From there, it was lifted out — very carefully — with a crane, and was to be shipped on a trolley to the museum for study.

“I have extracted skulls in the past. This is probably the biggest one I’ve ever done though,” said Bamforth.

“It’s pretty exciting.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 25, 2024.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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The ancient jar smashed by a 4-year-old is back on display at an Israeli museum after repair

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TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — A rare Bronze-Era jar accidentally smashed by a 4-year-old visiting a museum was back on display Wednesday after restoration experts were able to carefully piece the artifact back together.

Last month, a family from northern Israel was visiting the museum when their youngest son tipped over the jar, which smashed into pieces.

Alex Geller, the boy’s father, said his son — the youngest of three — is exceptionally curious, and that the moment he heard the crash, “please let that not be my child” was the first thought that raced through his head.

The jar has been on display at the Hecht Museum in Haifa for 35 years. It was one of the only containers of its size and from that period still complete when it was discovered.

The Bronze Age jar is one of many artifacts exhibited out in the open, part of the Hecht Museum’s vision of letting visitors explore history without glass barriers, said Inbal Rivlin, the director of the museum, which is associated with Haifa University in northern Israel.

It was likely used to hold wine or oil, and dates back to between 2200 and 1500 B.C.

Rivlin and the museum decided to turn the moment, which captured international attention, into a teaching moment, inviting the Geller family back for a special visit and hands-on activity to illustrate the restoration process.

Rivlin added that the incident provided a welcome distraction from the ongoing war in Gaza. “Well, he’s just a kid. So I think that somehow it touches the heart of the people in Israel and around the world,“ said Rivlin.

Roee Shafir, a restoration expert at the museum, said the repairs would be fairly simple, as the pieces were from a single, complete jar. Archaeologists often face the more daunting task of sifting through piles of shards from multiple objects and trying to piece them together.

Experts used 3D technology, hi-resolution videos, and special glue to painstakingly reconstruct the large jar.

Less than two weeks after it broke, the jar went back on display at the museum. The gluing process left small hairline cracks, and a few pieces are missing, but the jar’s impressive size remains.

The only noticeable difference in the exhibit was a new sign reading “please don’t touch.”

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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