New Forest Observatory ®

If you look into past posts you will see that a number of years ago I came up with the Golden Solid Angle that nobody seems to have considered before.

Playing around on Wolfram Alpha (it comes back with a great answer for “Does God exist?” by the way) – I input Golden Angle as my question.  I got an answer I was not expecting, namely that the Golden Angle was equaly to 2Pi/Phi² where Phi is the Golden Ratio.  I hadn’t seen the Golden Angle expressed in this way before, but of course it is quite correct.  So I decided to have a look at what the Golden Solid Angle looks like expressed in a similar way.  In fact you can guess the answer from the Golden Angle result, but I found it stunning all the same.  The Golden Solid Angle turns out to be 4Pi/Phi² – what a nice result!!

I get asked this question A LOT when I give my “Magic of Photography” talk, so I thought I’d put the answer to this one up on my site.

Light travels at 186,000 miles per second, so all we need to do is multiply 186,000 by the number of seconds in a year and we’ll get the answer.

186,000 = 1.86 x 10⁵

Seconds in a year = 365 x 24 x 3,600 = 3.15 x 10⁷

Multiply the two together to get the number of miles in a light-year:

3.15 x 1.86 x 10¹² = 5.9 x 10¹² miles or nearly 6 x 10¹² miles.

So the answer to the question is – there are 6 x 10¹² miles in a light year.

Let’s go a little futher – how long would it take us to get the nearest star – Proxima Centauri which is 4.2 light-years away – if we travelled at a speed of a million miles a day (nearly 42,000 miles an hour)?

Answer – about 69,000 years!!

Space is BIG, REALLY BIG, you might think it’s a long walk down to the local supermarket but …………………..

Another image from last night – but this time only 1-second exposure which prevented any significant trailing of the planets at this focal length.  Image processed entirely by yours truly for a change 🙂  There’s still a touch of spikes as it looks very bland without (IMO).

Just took this image a couple of hours ago.  Mercury is getting very close to Jupiter (closest in 3-days I think).  Noel cleaned up the image for me, so it’s been all the way to Florida and back before appearing on the site 🙂

Dave Parker of Invisage Design has created a new web site for me called the Scientific Artist. This site will host all my images for deep-sky, macro, micro, high-speed, panoramic and conventional photography.  Each section will also discuss in-depth how the images are taken with standard DSLR cameras, or astronomical CCDs.