Pulsar Rs 200 Photo Download
Gabrielle Brownlee
^^^ Nor did I expect that anyone could have imagined that I could have taken that "picture" of a close up pulsar with my refractor and two minute subs. But just to clear the air (and my tainted reputation ) I got it from a free downloadable wallpaper site here:
Like the radio emissions, the pulses of visible light from the Crab (and a few other) pulsars come directly from the neutron star, not from the surrounding medium. We know that they must be coming from a very compact body because the pulses are so short and frequent. If they were from an extended source the pulses would become scrambled because of the different light travel time. This was they key fact that led to the realisation that pulsars were neutron stars.
These shock waves are from the original supernova explosion 600 years ago, still travelling outwards in the nebula. The pulsar light pulsations seen are from a region a few tens of km above the neutron star in its magnetosphere
The shockwaves shown in the images are produced by radiation travelling out from flares produced in the region of the pulsar at various occasions in the past and illuminating the nebula, rather than the regular sweep of the jets which produces the fast pulsations we see
"By folding a fast sequence of Lucky Images we can construct a movie of the pulsar in the core of the Crab Nebula. It varies on a 30 millisecond cycle, with a bright flash as well as a fainter interpulse."
I don't know the size scope used but an O'scope synced to the right rate and connected to a photomultiplier tube allowed the peak to be scanned by slowly adjusting the start of the window and scanning it across the time of the peak intensity. I believe this is how Don Taylor once explained how his grad students made its optical discovery to me. First night they had the wrong sync rate so failed but succeeded once they had the rate right. I can't recall if they picked up the secondary peak.
With a mechanical chopper and long exposures it is certainly possible and has been done I think several times with sct's. An example is here:
-...staden_2013.pdf
The main technical issue is setting up the chopper and controlling it - etc. There is little requirement on the camera side since it is doing long exposures at each phase. But that is all old school - and it's how the pulsar was first imaged decades ago.
But I don't know of anyone using strictly video techniques with an SCT and non-fancy camera to do the same thing - based on raw captured video and no chopper. But I think it is within reach nowadays with high QE cameras and low read noise at high frame rates.
The attempt I mentioned earlier was limited mainly by read noise. I think it should be possible with the ASI-1600 at high gain and cropped field capture. It would require good seeing and focus so the fwhm is as small as possible for maximum snr. I don't think there is a need for more than one continuous video capture.
Frank
Hi John-
I just got that reference from a google search - so I don't know much about it. But over the years I think several people have used sct's in combination with an optical chopper to capture the blinking of the crab pulsar.
The link provided by the OP is different because no chopper is involved. It's just raw video and very short exposures - with a very expensive camera. As opposed to using a chopper in combination with a non-special camera.
But what's new nowadays is that fairly inexpensive cameras could capture the pulsar blinking - and with no chopper at all. You just record a stream of video and then stack it in various ways to capture the bright vs. the dark periods. That's what the OP's reference did.
With a modern video camera the duty cycle is basically 100%. So if the pulsar is about 30 Hz, you could try 60fps video and see what you get. You just expose a stream of video at around 60 fps and 15ms exposure - and then you post-process and stack different phases of the video stream.
I was involved in an effort to do this a few years ago - but with an earlier video camera that had a fair amount of read noise. With the ASI - all these things become possible - because all that really matters here is QE and read noise. So I think it should be possible with EdgeHD14 and ASI-1600 - and just a video capture of some length of time - many minutes - but not hours.
The only requirement is that the individual frames should reveal a star - any star - that can be used for alignment and stacking. But I think 14" aperture and 15ms should be ok.
Frank
Unless you have a very big scope though there are just not enough photons relative to the read noise to do it directly with video using conventional sensors but it has been done with EMCCD based cameras. There is an example here on cloudy nights
The pulsar, originally discovered by ESA's INTEGRAL satellite, is called IGR J11014-6103 and is moving away from the center of the supernova remnant where it was born at a speed between 2.5 million and 5 million miles per hour. This supersonic pace makes IGR J11014-6103 one of the fastest moving pulsars ever observed.
A massive star ran out of fuel and collapsed to form the pulsar along with the supernova remnant, the debris field seen as the large purple structure in the upper left of the image. The supernova remnant (known as SNR MSH 11-61A) is elongated along the top-right to bottom left direction, roughly in line with the tail's direction. These features and the high speed of the pulsar suggest that jets could have played an important role in the supernova explosion that formed IGR J11014-6103.
In addition to its exceptional length, the tail behind IGR J11014-6103 has other interesting characteristics. For example, there is a distinct corkscrew pattern in the jet. This pattern suggests that the pulsar is wobbling like a top as it spins, while shooting off the jet of particles.
Another interesting feature of this image is a structure called a pulsar wind nebula (PWN), a cocoon of high-energy particles that enshrouds the pulsar and produces a comet-like tail behind it. Astronomers had seen the PWN in previous observations, but the new Chandra and ATCA data show that the PWN is almost perpendicular to the direction of the jet. This is intriguing because usually the pulsar's direction of motion, its jet, and its PWN are aligned with one another.
Wow Spectacular images of the universe - that something so deadly could look so intriguing and exquisite. But to see the why, the how, measure its nature, examine forces from the mind's eye and know without this violent torrent, we would not come to be. We are virtual tourists blind to the present peering deep in time to a cosmos developed so time can even exist.
None of this work product could be without the confluence of resources, interests, and human acceptance. I appreciate your conveyance, whoever you are, of these fine images.
Where are the anti-matter telescopes or the electromagnetic field imaging - a fine addition to the spectacular and informative photographs presented here. Perhaps they will be next presented here.
If the jet's behavior is related to the wobbling of the pulsar, why would the stream maintain the corkscrew shape for 37 light years in length rather than dissipate in the vacuum of space? It seems plausible that the spiral motion of a charged particle in a magnetic field could be applied to this jet. The magnetic field would be a result of interstellar Birkeland currents, which also exhibits a kink instability in this example.
Thank you for the hard work you personal are doing. I am from Houston, I am an amateur astronomer and I have a question. I know you are super busy but please try to answer me. About this new release of the pulsar firing a jet, it happen to be another image of the same body but without the jet. Here I let the link so you can see it. How is possible that this new image was release few days ago And how is that the image release on 2012 looks the same with out the jet. Thank you for reading this. -fast-spinning-stars-runaway-pulsar.html
The Chandra data shown in the movie, containing eight images obtained between June and September 2010, suggest that the pulsar may be slowly wobbling, or precessing, as it spins. The shape and the motion of the Vela jet look strikingly like a rotating helix, a shape that is naturally explained by precession. If the evidence for precession of the Vela pulsar is confirmed, it would be the first time that a jet from a neutron star has been found to be wobbling, or precessing, in this way.
This is the second Chandra movie of the Vela pulsar, with the original having been released in 2003. The first Vela movie contained shorter, unevenly spaced observations so that the changes in the jet were less pronounced and the authors did not argue that precession was occurring. However, based on the same data, Avinash Deshpande of Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico and the Raman Research Institute in Bangalore, India, and the late Venkatraman Radhakrishnan, argued in a 2007 paper that the Vela pulsar might be precessing.
For your comprehension: my project goal is to take astrophotography of a pulsar when it's light is minimum (freq: 29.9Hz). Imagine I want to picture someone close to to a stroboscopic light in a bar!! So, a rotating disk (dia: 6 inch) with hole (3/4 inch) will play the shutter function. Exposure time expected of 2 minutes.
A pulsar is as precise as an atomic clock.
I only discovered one experiment of what we want to do, and there is no details of setup and parameters. My telescope operator expect at first an exposure time of 1 - 2 minutes.
For the budget, around
For the moment, I still don't know. But I'll tend to minimise the variation as much as technology and my budget may offer. The quality of the picture will be limited by the amount of light I catch from the pulsar; smaller the better.
Located some 16,000 light-years away, this is pulsar PSR B1509-58 and its associated wind nebula, cataloged separately as MSH 15-52. When a massive star dies in a supernova explosion, it can leave behind a neutron star: a city-sized, rapidly rotating ball of neutrons with a powerful magnetic field. As the star, called a pulsar, rotates, it shoots out beams of both matter and antimatter from its poles, like a cosmic particle accelerator. These beams sweep through the gas left behind from the explosion, lighting it up as a pulsar wind nebula.
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