V838 Mon: the movie
The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has just released another couple of images in a series of the object V838 Monocerotis. V838 Mon as it is known to its friends is a very strange variable star that underwent a sudden outburst back in 2002. It temporarily became 600,000 times more luminous than our Sun although with it being about 20,000 light years away it didn't outshine the Sun in the sky! What makes this particular outburst quite spectacular is that we can see a light echo; just like a sound echo in a cave, the light is being scattered from clouds of interstellar dust. That means that as time goes on we get to see different parts of the dust clouds illuminated. This makes for a very cool probe of the dust and makes a beautiful series of images as the shell of light expands outwards.
The ESA HST site has an animation fading between the two new images (November 2005 and September 2006) but I decided to make my own movie including all the HST images that now exist. It took a while to rotate and align each image and I then faded between the individual frames and made some MPEG movies. The smaller version should appear below but there is also a larger version. Enjoy!
By the way, the earlier images had much smaller fields of view than the later ones so some stars may suddenly appear but they were there all along.
Comments: V838 Mon: the movie
I know I keep using amazing amazingly often, but that is seriously amazing, astounding, stunning and other words ending in "ing"
Good find Stuart.
Posted by Ian Musgrave on Saturday 28th Oct 2006 (12:41 UTC)
AHHRRRGGG No! You made the movie yourself, sorry, sorry sorry (how did you do that?)
Posted by Ian Musgrave on Saturday 28th Oct 2006 (12:47 UTC)
I did it the very cludgy way! I used PaintShopPro together with a little trigonometry. V838 Mon has a nice, distinctive pattern of foreground stars so I chose two of them, found their pixel positions and used these to work out rotation angles and scaling factors for each image.
After scaling and rotating I included each image as a 'layer' in a new image with the layer transparencies set to 50% so that I could manually align them. Once they were aligned I copied each image into AnimationShop (which came with PaintShop) as a separate frame. This step was only to do the fading between the individual frames. I then exported each frame and saved them as separate images (about 130 of them!). It was then just a matter of using software to make an MPEG movie from all the individual frames.
I did spend quite a bit of late Friday afternoon and evening making it but I think it was worth it. It should be quicker to make something like that next time.
Posted by Stuart on Saturday 28th Oct 2006 (22:29 UTC)
Yikes! That's a bit of work. My appreciation of this animation just skyrocketed (and Yes, it was worth it).
I do much the same thing in the Gimp (except I've never done more that 15 frames in any animation), like I did for the Sunrise on the Moon animation (see tommorows post). Unfortunately I can only save as GIF or FLIC animations, looks like I'll have to find a freeware MPEG maker.
Posted by Ian Musgrave on Sunday 29th Oct 2006 (13:31 UTC)
Very very well done. Nice!
Posted by Rob on Wednesday 22nd Nov 2006 (19:27 UTC)
Thanks Rob.
Posted by Stuart on Wednesday 22nd Nov 2006 (19:34 UTC)
origin of live, see next link:
http://www.zippyvideos.com/7847231546647136/origin_of_live_240x320
Posted by pacal on Wednesday 14th Feb 2007 (20:22 UTC)