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What’s Up November 2017

What’s Up For November?

Dawn pairing of Jupiter and Venus, Moon shines near star clusters, meteor activity all month long!

This month binoculars will come in handy–to view the moon, star clusters, and a close pairing of Venus and Jupiter.

You can’t miss bright Venus in the predawn sky. This month Venus pairs up with Jupiter on the morning of November 13th.

The Leonids peak on a moonless November 17th. Expect no more than 10 meteors an hour around 3:00 a.m., the height of the shower.

The Northern and Southern sub-branches of the Taurid meteor shower offer sparse counts of about 5 meteors per hour, but slow, bright meteors are common.

The nearby November Orionids peak on the 28th. In contrast to the Taurids, the Orionids are swift. But don’t expect more than 3 meteors per hour.

The moon glides by three beautiful star clusters in the morning sky this month, and a pair of binoculars will allow you to see the individual stars in the clusters. Aim your binoculars at the Pleiades and the moon on the 5th.

Then aim at the Messier or M-35 cluster and the moon on the 7th and the Beehive cluster and the moon on the 10th.

Meanwhile, at dusk, catch Saturn as it dips closer to the western horizon and pairs up with Mercury on the 24th through the 28th.

Also, Comet C/2017 O1 should still be a binocular-friendly magnitude 7 or 8 greenish object in November. Use Polaris, the North Star as a guide. Look in the East to Northeast sky in the late evening.  

Watch the full What’s Up for November Video: 

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.  

Polaris

“Fareed Lafta”

Fareed Lafta is an ‪#‎Iraqi‬ ‪#‎pilot‬, athlete and the first iraqi qualified cosmonaut in future. He has set ‪#‎Guinness‬ World Records for 3 times. His feats are many, including the first-ever skydive above Mount Everest, first Iraqi to fly to the edge of space in a ‪#‎MiG‬ 29 and flying with largest flag in the World while skydiving. He has been hailed as Iraq’s “‪#‎Superman‬”. He is interesting in skydiving, gliding, diving, flying, surfing…etc

Polaris

Concept work done for Syn Studios’ Gathering of the Masters ‘18  ‘Tron in the Daylight’ workshop.  Had fun returning to my comfort zone! Started out as a building that became a ‘Yacht’ of some variety … super fun. 

Original caption:

There is something inexplicably magical about the Fall. Is it the mesmerizing colors, the intriguing smells, or simply the start of the aurora season? As the bright summer nights come to an end within the arctic circle, the nights get longer by the day. The change is quite spectacular! Within a couple weeks at the end of August/start of September, you go from being able to walk around without a headlamp to almost complete darkness! And with it comes the aurorae! Of course they happen year round but the brightness of arctic summer nights prevents us from seeing them. The very first green bands of the season are always a relief among the locals, as if we were welcoming an old friend!

Høst På Senja translates to ‘Fall on Senja’ in Norwegian. This season has been very strange this year as it’s rained a lot more than usual. We have seen an alternation of both cold periods with snow and frost, and very mild ones with up to 14 degrees Celsius at night at the start of November. We have had a lot of wind as well, which made all the leaves fall quickly. I barely had a week’s window to really get the beautiful golden and orange colors of Birch trees in the mountains here on Senja. However the freshly fallen snow arrived at the right time too, enabling me to get some outstanding scenes in the fjords. 

Senja is one of the most strikingly beautiful islands I have ever visited. No matter what the weather, the time of year and day/night you visit, there is always a peculiar set of colors, lighting and mood that you can’t get elsewhere. The small fishing villages in the fjords, the jagged-edged mountains rising from the sea, the turquoise-water beached and inlets, the completely still bodies of water giving off a perfect mirror, the wildlife, the sunrises and sunsets on the southern part of the island… Everything is absolutely out of this world! Autumn is in my opinion one of the best seasons to visit Senja, as this video attempts to suggest. There really is a microclimate which helps clear up the sky most nights, so that you can enjoy the aurora.

Coming to settle down on the island, I was a bit worried that I wouldn’t be able to really shoot deep-sky astro timelapse and milky way… Ohhh how wrong I was! There are nights where the aurora is faint and that’s precisely when you should dust off your tracker! A very cool close-up shot of the Cygnus and its nebulae in the dim aurora is the proof! But while you’re at it, you can also shoot both our home galaxy and the northern lights in the same frame on such nights. As a side note it is my favorite scene in the movie (hence the cover): that night was perfect with crystal clear skies, a faint and colorful aurora, the milky way shining bright, and the mirror of the water… A rare night I won’t soon forget. The aurora is very common on Senja because the island lies right in the middle of the auroral oval, where the aurora spawns. We get aurora every night if it’s clear. However on October 11th, a G2-strong geomagnetic storm hit the Earth and I witnessed some of my most long-lasting aurorae ever! I went to Storvatnet lake to get the reflection of the water as well! Most of the scenes were shot on or in between my tours of the island with our guests at the observatory and the time is getting scarce now, but I succeeded in compiling the best scenes I have shot since my arrival in August. Since I moved from France, I was unable to bring all my stuff at once including my my slider, so some of the sequences are simple panned in post-process, and some others with the Vixen Polarie. 

All was shot with the Sony a7rII, Sony a7s and the Canon 6D Baader modified and a variety of bright lenses ranging from 14mm to 300mm. I used the Lonely Speck Pure Night and Matt Aust Light pollution filters to reduce light pollution and increase details on the deep-sky scenes and also the Vixen Polarie to track the stars and get cleaner shots. All post production was made in Lr with the special timelapse plus plugin, Sequence for mac, TLDF, and final production was made in FCPX. I hope you like the movie as much as I liked shooting and processing it and I thank everyone of you for your support. All content is of course copyrighted AMP&F (except sountrack licensed through The Musicbed: Steven Gutheinz with ‘In the Balance’), and no footage can be used in any way without the author’s permission. Please contact me for media and purchase inquiry. Please share and comment if you liked the video and follow me for more videos like this one! More at adphotography-online.com.

The Peak Leisure Club Hong Kong.  1982-1983 Architects: Zaha Hadid

Zaha Hadid

Hadid's Approach to Architecture

As quoted from an interview between Zaha Hadid herself and Ossian Ward, Hadid speaks about her work and how herself and her team go about completing an assignment. It is quite impressive to see how her work begins as paintings before it transforms into architecture. Read her account of her design process below:

Derogatory tags such as ‘fantasist’ and ‘paper architect’ were often applied to Hadid in the early days due to her conspicuous lack of built work, but ironically they might be appropriate terms for an architect who paints, scribbles or draws her ideas before they are rendered by computer. ‘The paintings were always part of the building,’ she says of some of the works to be included in her Design Museum exhibition.  ‘They were never done as pure art.’ Hadid differs in this hands-on approach from many of the current crop of techno-architects who are only a few steps away from relinquishing all human control and ushering in an age of computer-generated architecture. But stories about her passing images across a photocopier to come up with her extraordinary sweeping, stretching designs are false; it is technology that has had to catch up with Hadid and not the other way round.  The sinuous lines and layers may look spectacular but her architecture is always built with its end users – us – in mind. ‘We learn from our own repertoire, but every site brings something unique to the project. Our approach is to invest in making a space, and research how, for example, to integrate civic space within the domain of office space.’

To read the entire interview visit: http://www.timeout.com/london/art/zaha-hadid-interview

ZAHA HADID, WU Campus, Library and Learning Center, Vienna Austria, 2013