Altered Solar Eclipse image to Highlight the Corona

Solar eclipses are almost uniformly spectacular, and there have been several partial and full solar eclipses over the past year, the most recent one being the eclipse from late April that took place over Northern Europe.

I managed to stumble across an image hosted on Imgur of a solar eclipse, that had been digitally optimized to highlight the corona of the sun.

Does anyone out there know the way to edit an image to show the corona and not the various other aspects of the shot?

Whatever the creator did, it's stunning

Astronews: A great site for developments in astronomy and stargazing, especially if you are ein Deutschsprächer

There are a lot of different sites on the web for picking up news and information about astronomy, and there are similarly a lot of new sites in German, but I really like the site Astronews for the unique combination of these two things with a genuinely fun site.

Screen capture of Astronews.com from 5/19/15

Astronews features a lot of entertaining sections, including a dynamic home page rich with images, a news feed populated with a lot of interesting content about current events and upcoming spectacles in astronomy, an "Ask Astronews" section that allows users to query the site administrators and get personalized feedback, a picture of the day section that showcases notable or praiseworthy shots daily, and a Glossary to review common or not so common astronomical terms in German.

Since I am no longer in language classes, I find it necessary to conduct a good bit of self study, so it is both pleasant and useful for me to exercise my German language skills by consuming media in German. I also genuinely like the content, since it allows me to enjoy two hobbies at once.

I would recommend Astronews to anyone looking to get quality content, whether photographical or journalistic, as well as any German language learners. If you aren't so into German, you can easily have the content translated by using Bing or Google translate.

Summer Nights Are Great for Stargazing

I spend the winter and spring looking forward to the summer. Not only am I laden with golden sunshine during the warm days, but I have a great opportunity to go outside without excessive rain or cool temperatures and get a good look at the sky.

Nearly full moon tonight!

I'm looking forward to clear skies and a nearly full moon tonight. The astronomical full moon is coming up on May 3rd, just 2 nights away, and the lack of cloud cover makes this a great opportunity.

We are probably all familiar with the different terms used to describe the phases of the moon, waxing meaning that the illuminated portion of the moon is becoming more visible, waning means that the illuminated portion becomes less visible, crescent moon meaning that there is just a sliver of the illuminated portion visible and gibbous moon meaning that nearly all of the illuminated portion of the moon is visible.

Despite these basic definitions, and the knowledge that I have that the moon isn't full tonight, I still think of a gibbous moon as nearly full, and I'm pretty excited for a chance at getting a clear shot of the moon.

Has anyone seen a good image of the moon lately?

How are the skies in your area?

I'm unlucky enough to be unable to see the stars too frequently in my climate, due to a combination of extreme weather and excessive cloud cover making it hard to go out to a dark field and see the moon, respectively.


I'll also include a quick illustration (from stardate.org) of how the moon's appearance changes based on the position of the moon relative to the earth and the sun.