Astronomy-Leelanau

Imaging a black hole...

2012-01-20T09:21:00.000-08:00

The concept of a black hole, where gravity is so strong itsucks in everything coming close to it…even photons of light…seemed the subjectof science fiction not many years ago. Blackholes were first suggested by Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.Decades of research and observations have provided evidence of their existence,but it has never been possible to directly observe and image one.

Enter thelatest proposed attempt to photograph a black hole.

Fifty radio telescopes scattered around the globe,including the Submillimeter Telescope on Mt. Graham in Arizona, telescopes onMauna Kea in Hawaii and the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-waveAstronomy in California. and several radio telescopes in Europe.

Sheperd Doeleman,assistant director of the Haystack Observatory at the Massachusetts Instituteof Technology and the lead researcher on the project, called the Event HorizonTelescope, said "In essence, we are making a virtual telescope with amirror that is as big as the Earth," http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/01/19/astronomers-aim-to-take-first-picture-black-hole/

The target of the effort may be a black hole in our galaxy,Sgr A*, which is estimated to contain a mass equivalent to 4million suns. Although it's invisible, the effect of its gravity onsurrounding stars has been seen, some of which orbit this monstrous black holeat speeds of more than 600 miles per second. Belowis an artist’s image of what it might look like.

The mind-boggling ESO video below takes us on a tour deep into the heart ofthe Milky Way, where Sgr A* resides, 26,000 light-years from our relativelypeaceful solar system:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=XhHUNvEKUY8

Although it is toofar away for such an undertaking, M81 is a galaxy that astronomers believe harborsa supermassive black hole as well. Obviously, my equipment could only image thegalaxy. Below is an image I took a couple of years ago with my old equipment(14” Meade and the SBIG 11K CCD camera.)

Stars & Planets a Billion

2012-01-14T07:41:00.000-08:00

The news that there are now estimated to be 1.6 planets, on average, for each star in the Milky Way did not really surprise me. http://www.sci-tech-today.com/news/Astronomers–More-Planets-than-Stars/story.xhtml?story_id=030000NUSR0C&full_skip=1 In the past few years, astronomers have confirmed over 700 exo-planets outside our solar system.

“We’re finding an exciting potpourri of things we didn’t even think could exist,” said Harvard University astronomer Lisa Kaltenegger. “We’re awash in planets where 17 years ago we weren’t even sure there were planets” outside our solar system, said Kaltenegger.

I have blogged that our galaxy, the Milky Way, has anywhere from 200 to 600 billion stars. It’s the numbers that boggle my mind. Obviously no one has done a hand count of them. Below is a composite image of this galaxy of ours, courtesy of Harvard University. Click on for a bigger picture.

Even if there were only a hundred billion stars in our galaxy, if one COULD count each one, a second at a time, a mere 31,536,000 stars would be logged in a year. To put this into biblical perspective, if the astrologers of King David’s time had begun the count, their descendants might be wrapping up the tally about now. If the number of stars in the Milky Way were 200 billion, mankind wouldn’t have even begun to write the history of such a colossal undertaking.

Just viewing a globular cluster of stars leaves one breathless.

I took an image of M15 earlier this month. M15 can be observed with binoculars or a small telescope, appearing as a fuzzy star. I imaged it for three minutes, and even then, the center appears too congested to identify single stars. This star cluster is one of the most densely packed globulars known in the Milky Way. Its core has undergone a contraction known as core collapse and it has a central density cusp with an enormous number of stars surrounding what may be a central black hole. Lying some 40,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Pegasus, M15 is one of nearly 150 known globular clusters that form a vast halo surrounding our Milky Way galaxy. Each of these spherically shaped clusters contains hundreds of thousands of ancient stars. The stars in M15 and other globular clusters are estimated to be about 12 billion years old. They were among the first generations of stars to form in the Milky Way.

Click on for a larger view.

The universe, as we know it today, contains about 350 billion galaxies, and the distances between each are virtually incomprehensible.

NGC 891 & DO Aquilae

2011-12-27T12:14:00.000-08:00

As an amateur astronomer, I have read extensively as to theories about the star of Bethlehem.

Suggestions range from the idea that it was an example of Midrash, wherein the writer of Matthew’s Gospel used the myths of a “star” to indicate the birth of a great personage. Examples include stories of a star appearing at the birth of Abraham, Moses and several of the Roman Caesars.

Other theories of the star of Bethlehem include the explanation that a comet appeared around the time of Jesus’ birth. Comets often have tails and these can be imagined to point towards or away from any point near the horizon.

Conjunctions of planets, particularly of Jupiter and Saturn, were used in that time to signal great events, such as the birth of rulers. Conjunctions, as astronomers refer to them, are common occurrences — they take place at periodic intervals as the planets orbit the sun at differing angular velocities.

Planets also had meanings because of their appearance in the sky. Jupiter, being visible as a large star-like object, was thought to be the “royal” star. Saturn and Venus also held various meanings in different cultures.
However, Mark Kidger, in his best-selling book “The Star of Bethlehem” (Princeton University Press, 1999) suggests that there really was a star of Bethlehem. He says that DO Aquilae, still visible as a faint star, erupted in 5 B.C., was visible during daylight and recorded by Chinese astrologers, and fit the criteria as the guiding star for the Magi.

I had the opportunity to image the exact area where DO Aquilae is located. The image below is circled simply because the star is so faint I cannot tell which it is. Click on for a larger view.

On the evening after Christmas, with the wind gusting near 20 mph, I had an hour of moderate viewing before a cloud front came in. I had never imaged NGC 891 with my new equipment. NGC 891 is an edge-on unbarred spiral galaxy about 30 million lys away in the constellation Andromeda. It has a faint dust lane along its equator.

I set my camera to take 20 X 1 min. images. Despite the wind, my dome did quite well in holding the scope rock-solid.

Also, this was the first time I had a chance to try out my newly-insulated ante-room, which I call the “warm room.” For $79 in insulation and particle board, my heater was able to bring temps up to a toasty 50 degrees. Believe me, in wintertime, anything over freezing is Florida in summer.

Click on NGC 891 for a cropped, but larger view.

December’s full Moon and NGC 2403

2011-12-17T07:32:00.000-08:00

Back in December there was a full eclipse on the Moon. The event occurred the morning of December10. The next full eclipse of the Moon won’t occur in the United States untilApril 15, 2014. The problem with theDecember 10 eclipse was that it began as the sun began to rise, and it was notvisible in the eastern half of the United States. Here in northwestern lower Michigan, we alsohad heavy cloud cover.

The next night however, the skies were clear and I was ableto take a picture of the Moon just past full. Below is my picture of the Moon the evening of December 11. Total time for exposure was one 1000^thof a second. Click on image below for alarger view.

One of my targets that night was NGC 2403. In my camera’s field of view, it appears as asmall image. NGC 2403 is a barred spiralgalaxy about eight million light years away. The galaxy is found in the constellation Camelopardalis, and is quitelarge...about 50,000 light years across.

Technically, taking images that night was supposed to bedifficult because of poor transparency and seeing. Not only that, but the light of the full Moonalways causes problems with astroimaging deep sky objects such as galaxies.

I don’t know why we astronomers are always making excusesfor conditions. However, as I’vementioned before, taking good images in northwestern lower Michigan is a hitand miss proposition during the late fall and early winter seasons.

Below is a 15 minute image of NGC 2403. Click on for a larger view.

I wrote this post using Windows Speech Recognition software. Love this technology.

The Star of Bethlehem

2011-12-16T06:48:00.000-08:00

As an amateur astronomer, I have read extensively as to theories about the star of Bethlehem. Suggestions range from the idea that it was an example of Midrash, wherein the writer of Matthew’s Gospel used the myths of a “star” to indicate the birth of a great personage. Examples include stories of a star appearing at the birth of Abraham, Moses, and several of the Roman Caesars.

Other theories of the Star of Bethlehem include the explanation that a comet appeared around the time of Jesus’ birth. Comets often have tails and these can be imagined to point towards or away from any point near the horizon. One advantage of the comet theory is that comets move across the starry sky. It has been argued that this fits the interpretation of the Gospel that the star was first seen in the east and thereafter moved to the south. The same argument could be applied to an object moving with the stars, however, if the journey of the Magi took some months. Below is my picture of Comet Garradd this fall. It has been visible for several months and it has moved from one constellation to another.

Conjunctions of planets, particularly of Jupiter and Saturn, were used in that time to signal great events, such as the birth of rulers.

However, Mark Kidger, in his best-selling book “The Star of Bethlehem,” suggests that there really was a Star of Bethlehem. It is his contention that DO Aquilae, still visible as a faint star, erupted in 5 BC, was visible during daylight and recorded by Chinese astrologers, and fit the criteria as the Magi’s guiding star. Biblical scholars place Christ’s birth at anywhere from 7 BC to 1 BC. At any rate, it is a guesstimate.

Stars obviously appear to circumnavigate the earth, so their position changes, relative to the North Star which remains fixed. However, the remnants of DO Aquilae, Kidger’s choice for the star of Bethlehem, is visible to large telescopes in the northwestern night sky in the northern hemisphere for most of the year. If it were visible during daylight hours it would appear to be pointing to Bethlehem most of the day from noon on, almost like an arrow, whose track would point to a western location for the Magi traveling from the East.

The region of Aquila that the star occupies is not populated with any easy pointers. In checking Burnham’s “Celestial Handbook,” I found that DO Aquilae’s position is 19 hrs, 28 min., 7 sec. in Right Ascension, and -06 hrs., 32 min. in Declination. Cross-referencing this info with my SkyAtlas 2000 detailed series of maps, DO Aquilae is not even mentioned, but it does lie about one-third the distance between 42 and 26 Aquilae, which are both marked in the Atlas.

Below is my picture of the area in question. I have placed a circle, in which DO Aquilae is located. Although I am unable to be certain which star in the circle it is, you may indeed be looking at the remnants of the Star of Bethlehem, if Kidger is correct. Click on for a larger view.

It is my opinion that none of the possible astronomical explanations appears to have overwhelming evidence in its favor. As a theologian and an astrophotographer, I am torn between the biblical account and astronomy’s best efforts to resolve the issue.

On the one hand, Matthew’s Gospel is the only one that records the appearance of a star, the visit of the Magi, the flight into Egypt, and Herod’s slaughter of children in Bethlehem. Without getting into a lengthy discussion as to the historicity of these events, suffice it to say that there is much in scripture, especially in the Old Testament, that is Midrash.

On the other hand, in the tradition of early Christianity, Origen (about 185-253 AD), who writes a couple of centuries after the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, favors a physical interpretation and he describes it as a “new” star, different from known ones, similar to celestial phenomena such as comets. John Chrysostom, a century later, viewed the star quite differently… as a supernatural event.

While the Star of Bethlehem remains a mystery, we can be certain that something extraordinary occurred…the birth of the Savior of the world.

(The Pleiades © Edward J. Hahnenberg 2010)

The Double Cluster and NGC 772

2011-12-03T08:25:00.001-08:00

Every half-way decent night in December for imaging is a gift. Last night, despite poor transparency and a quarter moon, I thought I'd give two objects I had never imaged before a try. The Double Cluster in the constellation Perseus was the first target. The Greek astronomer, Hipparchus, noted it as early as 130 B.C. What he saw was a patch of light. However, the true nature of the Double Cluster wasn’t discovered until the invention of the telescope many centuries later. The two clusters, NGC 884 and NGC 869, are normally not able to be captured in a single FOV; however, my camera has that capability.

NGC 884 and NGC 869 are at distances of 7600 and 6800 light-years away, respectively, so they are also close to one another in space. The clusters' ages, based on their individual stars, are relatively young. NGC 869 is 5.6 million years old and NGC 884 is 3.2 million years old, according to the 2000 Sky Catalog.

Below is my 10 minute image of the Double Cluster, with NGC 869 at the top and NGC 884 at the bottom. Click on for a screen-filling view.

The next target was NGC 772. Located in the constellation Aries, this galaxy rivals the size of our own Milky Way. It is notable for possessing a single elongated outer spiral arm, which has likely arisen due to tidal interactions with nearby galaxies. At around 100,000 light years in diameter, NGC 772 is surrounded by several satellite galaxies. It is 130 million light years away.

In trying to image MGC 772, I found that my camera, with its large FOV, was not the best instrument for the task. It appeared rather small, but with some cropping, it is visible. I did a 20 minute exposure, but there is a lot of noise in it. You can, however, see the outer spiral arm which distinguishes it.

You may be wondering how I select targets for imaging. I have a collection of books which give suggestions for different times of the year. Magazines like Astronomy and Sky and Telescope give monthly ideas as well.

5:30 am in the Observatory

2011-11-24T09:56:00.001-08:00

What person in his/her right mind would get up on a coldwinter morning and begin imaging DSOs before the dawn’s early light? Those of us that are intothis hobby really need to have our heads examined. We spend many thousands ofdollars to stay up, or get up, at night miles from the nearest man-made lighttaking exposures of objects often too faint to see through the telescope. Andit isn't like we can sell our prize pictures to recoup the huge costs involved.Better pictures are easily and freely available from the Hubble SpaceTelescope.

Whatcould possibly be the appeal of this crazy hobby? I think that in part it isbecause it is so challenging that it is so appealing. Under a canopy of stars, where the Milky Wayshines so brightly over your head, you really get a sense of watching thegreatest show on earth. It is often very quiet and nature tends to move veryslowly at night. It is a time to be still, look up and just notice. This isn'ton TV or the Internet… this is the real thing, the universe, and if you reallypay attention you can feel your place in it. You are tiny beyond imagination,and yet you are also here and aware of the awe. Like when you visit any greatcathedral, it is always nice to bring home a little reminder of your experiencethere. Astrophotography does it for me.

So itwas the other morning. I couldn’t sleep and as I passed by our deck’s glassdoors, I couldn’t resist seeing if the sky was clear. It was. I knew I had toforego a few moments of snoozing…so what? Seven hours of sleep is enough forany adult.

Itwas cold.,.and frost was on everything. That didn’t matter somehow. The lock onthe observatory door wouldn’t open so I gave it mouth to mouth to warm it up.

Inside…heateron…computer, scope, and camera powered up. Ready to image. The sky wasdifferent so early in the morning. The constellation Hydra…the largest of all88 in the sky…was in view, so I decided to give M 48 a shot. M 48 is a conspicuous open cluster in the head ofthe water snake. Even Ptolemy in the 2^nd century AD noted Hydra'slength.

The smallest binocular, or telescopes, show a large group ofabout 50 stars in M 48. The cluster’s age is estimated at 300 million years.

A one minute image of the cluster was all I took.

My real goal was IC 342, a beautiful nearby spiral galaxy, butvery difficult to image because it is almost hidden from view behind the veilof stars, gas and dust clouds in the plane of the Milky Way. I programmed thecamera to take 30 images X 30 sec. and found myself doing some studying in my “warmroom”.

Near the end of the programming cycle, I decided to take a look at aboutthe 27^th image and found no stars visible. A quick glance outside revealeda dense cloud cover. A further check revealed several images clouded partially.

What I was able to resurrect was the following image, but Ihad to eliminate several clouded-over ones. Not an APOD, but something.

The time was 7:00 am, still dark. I needed to go into the big city. I closed up everything and was off to get a circular saw, meeting work-goers and deer hunters as dawn began to break. That day I would be helping build a garage.

(CLICK ON FOR LARGER IMAGES.)

ET and the Pacman Nebula

2011-11-16T05:49:00.001-08:00

As a group of deer were grunting in the recesses of my Christmas tree plot on the evening of Nov. 15, I was outside my observatory taking in the receding beauty of the Milky Way. Inside my stereo was playing my usual mixture of piano favorites and my scope and camera were about their business of imaging. Quite a combination.

Two targets were on my agenda. I was able to begin imaging around 7:00 pm...a great bonus for those of us who like an early bedtime. My first DSO was NGC 457. Also known as the Owl Cluster because of its two big eyes and surrounding stars making up the body of the owl, it has lately come to be known also as the E.T. cluster, reminiscent of the movie E.T.

NGC 457 is an open star cluster in the constellation Cassiopeia. It was discovered in 1787 and lies over 7,900 lys away from our sun. It has an estimated age of 21 million years.

Below is my 20 minute image of it (1 min. exposure X 20):

My next target was one which I didn't expect to be so large (it almost filled my camera's FOV) was the Pacman Nebula. I think all of us have played the video game Pacman, and the resemblance of NGC 281 to the game character is neat. The nebula was discovered in 1883 and was described as "a large faint nebula, very diffuse."

NCG 281 in Cassiopeia, lies at a distance of about 10,000 lys. A bright group of stars in the center illuminate the region of hydrogen gas, glowing red. Dark clouds of dusk obscure some of the glowing gas, creating the "mouth" and "eye". Star formation occurs in these dense clouds of dust. Because the cluster is in the direction of the Milky Way, innumerable stars litter the background and foreground of the image.

I knew if I was going to be successful, I would have to image it for at least 20 minutes. I did and was not disappointed. Lots of levels and curves, etc., in Photoshop yielded this result:

Click on both images for a larger view.

Neptune and Uranus

2011-11-11T13:51:00.001-08:00

Ever since Pluto was relegated to the status of a dwarfplanet, science books have had to upgrade the fact that we no longer have nine majorsolar planets, but eight.

This is a banner year for Neptune, because on July 12, 2011,it completed a full orbit around the Sun since its discovery on the night ofSeptember 23-24, 1846. It was the first planet found by mathematical predictionrather than by observation. Unexpected changes in the orbit of Saturn ledAlexis Bouvard to deduce that an unknown planet existed. At 2.7 billion milesfrom the sun, it is the farthest of the four outer planets…Jupiter, Saturn,Uranus, and Neptune. Neptune, like Jupiter, has a visible cyclonic Dark Spotcomparable to the latter’s Red Spot. The weather patterns on Neptune are drivenby the strongest sustained winds of any planet in our solar system, withrecorded wind speeds as high as 2,100 km/h. Below is my image of Neptune,taken with a 995 Coolpix.

Compare this image with an image of the planet which has been visited by only one spacecraft, Voyager 2, which flew by the planet on August 25, 1989.

Uranus and Neptune spent almost all of 2011 in Pisces andAquarius, respectively. Uranus is near the celestial equator, and Neptune isconsiderably farther south — so neither gets very high in the sky for us atmid-northern latitudes.

Uranus is considerably closer to the Sun at 1.7 billionmiles, and is a virtual twin of Neptune. Both are gas planets. Both haveseveral moons…Neptune 13; Uranus 27.

Below is my image of Uranus…taken with the Starlight XPress M25C.

Compare this image with one taken by Voyager 2 in 1986. The planet is virtually featureless.

For the path of the two planets this year, below is a chart showingeach’s progression. CLICK ON PICTURE BELOW FOR A READABLE VIEW.

Ring and Fetus Nebulae

2011-11-05T07:21:00.000-07:00

November is infamous for astrophotography here in NW lower Michigan. Last year I had two good nights from Nov. 17th through mid-March. Hopefully the winter season this year will be better. At the beginning of November this year, I had a good imaging night at first quarter. One of my targets was the often imaged M 57, or Ring Nebula. It is located in the constellation Lyra and, for a while at least, is almost directly overhead. Its discovery goes back to the last half of the 1700s and its apparent size was then described as "almost as large as Jupiter."

If you look up on a clear night this month, toward the NW, you can see the famous Summer Triangle composed of the stars Vega, Altair, and Deneb. M 57 is close to Vega which is second in brightness only to Arcturus at this time of year. However, Arcturus has receded to the NW's horizon, so Vega is master of the sky. M 57 is a challenge in binoculars, but easily visible in a small scope.

I had not imaged the Ring nebula with my new equipment, so I gave it a try. It is one of the most prominent examples of a planetary nebula, and if you look closely you can see the faint central star in the heart of the nebula. Below is my 1 minute image of it.

Another, but more difficult nebula, is the Fetus nebula. Also known as NGC 7008, the nebula is quite small for my large CCD FOV, but after some cropping and using Carboni's Astro Tools to downsize nearby stars, the fetus shape is visible. It's about 2800 ly away in the constellation Cygnus. I took an experimental shot of 30 sec. and was pleasantly surprised I could bring the image out.

To see both nebulae larger, click on either.

The Western Veil & Bubble Nebulae

2011-10-23T09:02:00.000-07:00

In a previous post, I imaged the Eastern Veil Nebula, NGC 6992. Last evening, in a moonless sky, I took a shot at the Western Veil Nebula, NGC 6960. Both are clouds of heated and ionized gas and dust in the constellation Cygnus. The Western Veil is also known as "the Witch's Broom." How appropriate is that for a Halloween treat! Even though the entire nebula has a relatively bright integrated magnitude of 7, it is spread over so large an area that the surface brightness is quite low, so both portions, the Eastern and Western, are notorious among astronomers as being difficult to see. Below is my 10 minute stacked image.

With my 14" Meade, I had imaged the Bubble Nebula before. NGC 7635, also called the Bubble Nebula, is an emission nebula in the constellation Cassiopeia. The nebula is near a giant molecular cloud which contains the expansion of the bubble nebula while itself being excited by the hot central star, causing it to glow. However, I had been unsuccessful in drawing out detail with the Hyperstar and the C1400. I decided to image a lot longer...60 images of 30 sec. I set up the camera with Maxim DL to do just that, and left for 45 minutes, going home to watch Notre Dame miss an opportunity to tie the game with USC. When I returned, I realized that the scope had tracked to within the edge of my ExploraDome's opening, thus causing a reddish hue to the right side of over half of my images. I decided I wanted the exposure time, so I used Gradient Exterminator to get rid of the coloration. After several manipulations in Photoshop and some cropping, here's the Bubble Nebula.

The Iris & Flaming Star Nebulae

2011-10-17T11:48:00.000-07:00

Two of the more interesting nebulae are the Iris Nebula (NGC 7023) and the Flaming Star Nebula (IC 405). Maybe the "NGC" and "IC" designations should be explained before I get into describing these two nebulae.

"NGC" is the abbreviation for the New General Catalogue of Nebulae and Star Clusters. There are 7840 telescopic objects in this collection of deep sky objects (DSOs). The catalogue was compiled during the 1880s by J. L. E. Dreyer using observations from William Herschel and his son John, among others. Dreyer had already published an update to the Herschel's Catalogue of Nebulae, but a new update was refused by the Royal Astronomical Society, who asked Dreyer to compile a New General Catalogue. This catalogue was published in 1888.

"IC" designations, or Index Collections, are an expansion of the NGC collection. IC I in 1896 & IC II in 1905 added an additional 5,386 objects.

In taking astrophotographs, I began with the Messier Objects, designated as "M" with a number following up to over 100 DSOs. This early catalog was assembled by French astronomer Charles Messier in 1771. Although I have not imaged all of the Messier DSOs, I have become interested in some of the several thousand objects in the "NGC" and "IC" groupings. A Messier object will usually be listed with an NGC number.

Back to the NGC 7023, the Iris Nebula. It is a reflection nebula in the constellation Cepheus, about 1300 light years away. It looks eerie, appearing as an eye...or at least a part of one.

Below is my 10 minute image. Click on it for a larger view.

The Flaming Star Nebula (IC 405)is a diffuse nebula in the constellation Auriga that mainly surrounds the star AE Aurigae and gives the impression that the star is burning, hence its name. It is about 1500 light years away.

I had to do some manipulation with this 15 minute stacked exposure to bring out the flaming portion. Click on for a larger view.

The California & Snowball Nebulae

2011-10-10T11:12:00.001-07:00

The CGE Pro electronic pier had a nervous breakdown this past few weeks, which involved a shipment to the west coast for repair. Everything works fine now...and it was under warranty... but I missed a lot of good viewing nights through the end of summer and beginning of fall.

However, yesterday, Oct. 9th, despite a full moon, two objects were on my "to do" list: The California Nebula, NGC 1499, and the Blue Snowball Nebula, NGC 7662.

Ironically my electronic pier had to go to California for a look-see at the state...I could have saved it the trouble, if it had not suffered its breakdown. The state of rehab did do its job, though...

The California Nebula, found in the constellation Perseus, is so named because it appears in the shape of the state. It is about 1000 light years from earth and can be viewed in different colors using different filters. However, the most common appearance is that with a reddish hue. It is one of the later nebulae discoveries, with credit being given to E.E.Barnard in 1884.

Below is my ten minute stacked image:

Click on for a larger view.

The next DSO I took a shot at was the Blue Snowball Nebula, found in the constellation Andromeda. Also known as NGC 7662, it was difficult to resolve because of my camera's wide FOV. This blue DSO is about 5,600 ly away. is a popular planetary nebula for casual observers. A small telescope will reveal a star-like object with slight nebulosity.

Below is my 7 1/2 minute image. Click on for a slightly larger view.

Comet Garradd & NGC 6802

2011-09-02T16:02:00.000-07:00

I had never imaged a comet before. Last evening I imaged my first, comet Garradd. The fainter ones are a bit difficult to find since they move daily. I did not realize how many comets have been identified this year...Lulin, Elenin, and Garradd. An earlier comet, Elenin, to attract buzz spurred questions about whether it would collide with the earth. Nasa has clarified in a statement that the fading comet Elenin, expected to come closest to earth on October 16, 2011, will not collide with Earth. As typical with most comets, Elenin will also not come closer to earth than 22 million miles.

“Comet Elenin will not encounter any dark bodies that could perturb its orbit, nor will it influence us in any way here on Earth," said Don Yeomans, a scientist at NASA.

“It will be headed back out again, and we will not see or hear from Elenin for thousands of years,” he added.

I had to do some research to find out where to look for the newest comet Garradd. My best guess was that it would be in the constellation Vulpecula near an obscure globular cluster of stars, NGC 6802. You can see the cluster in the bottom right. I took a minute exposure and saw that it was indeed in the same FOV as the cluster. So, stacking ten one minute exposures, here's the result after some manipulation in Photoshop:

Click on for a larger view.

The Lagoon Nebula & The Flying Horse Nebula

2011-08-28T14:18:00.000-07:00

When one uses a HyperStar lens, you have to realize that your FOV (field of view) is quite large. This is a blessing for large nebulae and galaxies, but a bane for smaller objects. The Lagoon Nebula, or M8, is is a giant interstellar cloud in the constellation Sagittarius. It is classified as an emission nebula. I've been taking a few of these lately.

I had never been able to get a good image of the Lagoon Nebula with my former equipment. However, just one 30 sec. image was all it took to get a pretty decent picture of it. The Lagoon Nebula is estimated to be between 4,000-6,000 light years from the Earth. In the sky of Earth, it spans 90' by 40', translates to an actual dimension of 110 by 50 light years. Like many nebulas, it appears toned toward the red in time-exposure color photos.

Click on to see a full screen image. If you are able, you might see a meteor-trail toward the top.

The Flying Horse Nebula is a tough one to image and I couldn't get the green stars out. (Of course there are none.)

The image had to be cropped, so there is more noise (odd pixels) in it. My wife commented that the image reminded her of one of those past Mobil gas station logos we both used to see.

The nebula, or NGC 7380, is a young star cluster, between 2 and 4 million years old and contains about 125 bright type O and B stars near the center of this image. Interspersed dust lanes shape the contours of the nebula into a flying horse facing down and to the right, trailing a long flowing cape extending to the upper left. I had to rotate the image so it appears to be "flying" to the right.

Below is my 10 minute image:

The Pillars of Creation

2011-08-26T12:35:00.000-07:00

The Hubbel Space Telescope has taken breath-taking pictures of DSOs. One of the most famous taken in 1995 was M16, the Eagle Nebula, dubbed the "Pillars of Creation". The longest of the 'Pillars' is seven light years long, and because of their massive density interior gasses contract gravitationally to form stars. At each 'pillars' end, the intense radiation of bright young stars causes low density material to boil away, leaving stellar nurseries of dense EGGs exposed. Due to the huge distance between us, the Pillars of Creation may already be gone, and instead a stellar star nursery could have taken its place. In early 2007, scientists using the Spitzer telescope discovered evidence that potentially indicates that the Pillars were destroyed by a nearby supernova explosion about 6,000 years ago, but the light showing the new shape of the nebula will not reach Earth for another millennium.

Here is my 5 minute image of it (You have to click on it to see the Pillars clearly):

I used some new techniques to make the cluster of stars smaller and the pillars more defined. Carboni's Astro Tools has a feature, used in Photoshop, that can downsize stars.

The Elephant and Cocoon Nebulae

2011-08-19T07:07:00.000-07:00

Astrophotographers, in their chat rooms, are wont to offer excuses when displaying their images. I do it from time to time. However, factors such as "transparency" and "seeing" can affect one's final result. Being the impatient imager that I am, I could go into other excuses such as poor collimation, bloated stars, etc.

However, last night, with poor transparency, I tried to photograph an interesting nebula...the Elephant... in the star cluster IC 1396 – an ionized gas region located in the constellation Cepheus about 2,400 light years away from us. It is on the western side of the cluster, and if you Google up images of it, you'll get all kinds of them. Mine had to be cropped, and I experimented with different colorations to bring out the image. The Elephant's Trunk nebula is now thought to be a site of star formation, containing several very young (less than 100,000 yr) stars. Below is a 15 minute stacked (30 sec. X 30 images) portrait of the Elephant with its long trunk and visible eye. Click on for a larger view.

During the imaging, I stepped outside the observatory for a few minutes and, through the haze, was able to enjoy the Milky Way. So few people see this summer wonder and it reminded me again that the best things in life are free.

The second nebula to receive my efforts was the Cocoon. Less patient, I only spent 5 minutes on this one. I cropped it a bit to show the dark nebula Barnard 168 (B168) which forms a dark lane that surrounds the cluster forming the appearance of a trail behind the Cocoon. Like the Elephant it is an emission nebula, aka IC 5146, and the central star that lights it formed about 100,000 years ago. Click on for a larger image.

The Crescent Nebula & North American Nebula

2011-08-15T08:21:00.000-07:00

Last evening, despite a full moon, I moved to an area of the sky I have been wanting to explore...Cygnus.

The constellation Cygnus is virtually overhead and it is one that is rich in nebulae. One of the more colorful is NGC 6888, the Crescent Nebula, an emission nebula, about 5000 light years away. It was formed by the fast stellar wind from the Wolf-Rayet star WR 136, which you can see near the center of the nebula, colliding with and energizing the slower moving wind ejected by the star when it became a red giant around 400,000 years ago. The result of the collision is a shell and two shock waves, one moving outward and one moving inward. Kind of looks like a jellyfish!

Below is my 15 minute image of it....Click on for a screen-filling view.

I next turned my attention to another stunner...NGC 7000, the North American Nebula. It is adjacent to the Pelican Nebula, which I had imaged before. For some reason, my 14 min. image, was more difficult to process. Perhaps more exposure time would have made it easier. However, the NA Nebula is a fascinating view. Like the Crescent, it too is an emission nebula in the constellation Cygnus, close to the bright star Deneb. The remarkable shape resembles that of the continent of North America, complete with a prominent Gulf of Mexico. It is large, covering an area of more than four times the size of the full moon. The distance of the nebula complex is not precisely known, nor is the star responsible for ionizing the hydrogen so that it emits light. If the star inducing the ionization is Deneb, as some sources say, the nebula complex would be about 1800 light years distant. Click on for a larger view.

Hands-on Astrophotography

2011-08-11T11:22:00.000-07:00

Last summer I got a phone call from a lady who was vacationing near my observatory. She wanted some information on viewing times, etc. I told her that I don’t use my equipment for viewing the moon, planets, etc., but that my interest was in taking astrophotographs of deep sky objects. Since she was up for just a few days, she thanked me and I forgot about her call. This summer she called again, and I explained the purpose of my observatory. This time she expressed a determined interest.

“Could my daughter and I observe you at work,” she asked. I reminded her that my telescope was not used for viewing, just for taking pictures of DSOs. I offered to show both how astrophotography is done, and even suggested that they take a picture themselves.

That was agreeable. So, in the second week of August, despite a full moon, the cloud cover, transparency, and seeing were adequate, and the two of them showed up promptly at 10:00 pm.

After a short tutorial concerning the mechanics of the operation, I decided to image M27, the Dumbbell nebula. A 30 sec. image was all that was needed for the monitor to show what the picture looked like in Maxim DL. Interspersed throughout the process, we carried on a conversation that any cosmologist would have found interesting.

So I invited the daughter, Kelly, to try her hand at repeating the imaging. Come to find out she was a health care lawyer and, although she had not used Photoshop, she remembered the step-by-step process very well.

Here is her 30 sec. image of M27...click on for a larger view.

If there ever was a “wow” factor expressed, it came from both of them, particularly from her mother, Nancy, who sat transfixed at what was on the monitor.

After an explanation of what a nebula was, and a delving into other topics such as galaxies, their distances and age, it was apparent to me that both had never experienced what I take for granted each night I roam the skies with my scope and camera.

I guess when a hobby such as mine can yield results that help those interested in looking at what the universe contains, there is that conviction that there is no better avocation than teaching. Like ants on a tennis ball, we all need to look up at the heavens from time to time.

If any of my readers would like to take an astrophotograph, get in touch. Two to four persons would be a suitable group. Your plans will have to be flexible, though, because predicting the weather here in NW Michigan is often “as difficult as a frog with his eyes closed, trying to see in a hailstorm.” That last bit was courtesy of Sen. Alan Simpson…

The Pelican Nebula

2011-07-08T16:05:00.000-07:00

The Pelican Nebula lies about 2,000 light-years away in the high flying constellation Cygnus, the Swan. From our vantage point, dark dust clouds (upper left) help define the Pelican's eye and long bill, while a bright front of ionized gas suggests the curved shape of the head and neck. My image does not equal the APOD (Astronomy Picture of the Day) of November 2006 imaged by Charles Shahar. Below is his image:

You will have to do some careful examination of my image below in order to see the details found in Shahar's APOD. You can see the neck of the Pelican clearly because it is the brightest part of the image. The bill is very, very faint. However, the shoulder can be made out. My image was a lengthy one for me (30 sec. X 39 exposures). CLICK ON FOR A LARGER VIEW.

As I image large DSO's, my experience grows. The Pelican could have used a considerably longer exposure to bring out more of the details.

Cygnus is a constellation that is visible for astrophotography all year long, and with the many objects to image in it, I will be exploring this area of the sky for quite a while. It turns out that it is almost directly overhead and my finderscope needs an upgrade to a right angle illuminated one. As it is now, I have to get on my knees, bend my neck back, and try to find the guide star. Thankfully my birthday is coming up.

The Veil Nebula

2011-07-04T08:20:00.000-07:00

The fireworks in Leland were booming from 10 to 11 pm last evening, but I was taking advantage of one of the finest nights for taking astrophotographs. There were several objects on my list to image, but I had to wait until 11:30 until it was dark enough on a moonless night to capture a nebula I had never had any success imaging.

The target was the Veil Nebula. The Veil Nebula is a cloud of heated and ionized gas and dust in the constellation Cygnus. The source supernova exploded some 5,000 to 8,000 years ago, and the remnants have since expanded to cover an area roughly 36 times the area of the full moon.

Although my camera has a large FOV, it cannot capture the entire nebula, but only a portion of it. Here is my image of the eastern section of the entire nebula. I took 26 images, each 30 sec. in length. CLICK ON FOR A LARGER VIEW.

To see how this portion fits into the larger nebula, below is an image of the entire Veil Nebula taken with the Hubble Telescope:

Double Star…SAO 8890

2011-06-30T13:17:00.000-07:00

On the last day of June, at a minute before I turned into a pumpkin, I made a dash to get an image of the Cat’s Eye Nebula in the constellation Draco. Prior to wrapping up imaging for the night, I had tried to use my Imaging Source AVI camera to get an image of Saturn, but the atmospheric conditions were not in my favor so, after an hour of frustration, I gave up. I had used my small 80 mm scope and used my 8X finder scope to center Saturn, thus screwing it up (so I thought) when I returned to my C1400.

The “mistake” led me to what was supposed to be Dziban as my “precise go-to” guide star. I imaged it anyway and you will notice that there appears two stars, instead of one. I realized I had captured a “double star”… a set of two or more stars that appear next to each other. CLICK ON FOR A LARGER VIEW.

Satisfied that this was of more interest to me at that late hour, I left the Cat for another day and closed up the observatory.

The next day the mystery began. After I processed the 30 sec. image in Photoshop, it dawned on me that I no clue what double star combination this was. I read through the info in Burnham’s Celestial Handbook and Googled up double stars in Draco. There are 90, so searching for one that matched mine was not in my patience range.

There are two types of double or multiple stars. There are "true" binaries or multiples and "optical" binaries or multiples. True binaries or multiples are stars that are actually physically close and are bound together by gravity. Optical binaries or multiples are stars that are lined up just right so that the appear to be physically close.

Finally, after some luck, the mystery was solved. I had imaged SAO 8890, AKA DZIBAN! Apparently my finder scope was not that screwed up after all.

If you go to http://www.nckas.org/doublestars/#Dra, there are 4 double stars worthy of note. The 4th one down is Dziban or SAO 8890. It consists of two stars, each with the luminosity of eleven suns, and is about 76 light years away.

Appearances can be deceiving…Polaris, the north star, is actually a triple star…one binary and a Cepheid variable. But I digress…satisfied with a discovery that I had not planned on.

Galactic Tug of War

2011-06-06T14:24:00.001-07:00

What happens when a huge galaxy is in the neighborhood of a smaller one? Generally speaking, because of intergalactic gravitational forces, the larger one will pull the smaller one. Some amateur astronomers see this happening in M 51, the Whirlpool Galaxy, and its neighbor, NGC 5195, the small, yellowish galaxy at the outermost tip of one of the Whirlpool's arms. At first glance, the compact galaxy appears to be tugging on the arm. However, NGC 5195 is passing behind the Whirlpool. The small galaxy has been gliding past the Whirlpool for hundreds of millions of years. Below is my 12 minute image of the two galaxies. CLICK ON FOR A LARGER VIEW.

Another example of what appears to be a galactic tug of war is M 101 and its neighbor NGC 5474. NGC 5474 is an asymmetric spiral galaxy and it is being dramatically disturbed by its much larger neighbor. At first glance, it might appear that M101 is somehow gravitationally dragging the nucleus right out of NGC 5474. However, astronomers that model these kinds of galactic interactions on a computer find a slightly different story. When using tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of point masses for stars, astronomers found that the asymmetry displayed in NGC 5474 is probably relatively short lived. We just happen to be looking at this galaxy in a state of "sloshed" agitation as it orbits M101.

Below is my 7 minute image of M 101, a huge galaxy seen face-on, called the Pinwheel Galaxy.

Actually, this is a cropped portion of the original image which includes NGC 5474. Below is a larger FOV, showing both galaxies.

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M 97 and M 108

2011-04-30T10:13:00.000-07:00

Last evening, after an abysmal month of imaging, the skies cleared for a few hours of excellent viewing, and I was able to capture a couple of hard-to-get DSOs. With previous equipment, M 97, also known as the "Owl Nebula," was an elusive target since it is a faint object. However, with the HyperStar lens, I took a combined image of 20 X 30 sec. for a satisfying result. Also, in the FOV is Galaxy M 108.

A little info on each... My 97 is one of the fainter objects in Messier's catalog. It is one of the four planetary nebulae in that catalog, and is situated in the constellation Ursa Major. If you look carefully, you can see the dying white dwarf star at its center. Its distance is uncertain; the Sky Catalog 2000 has it at 1,300 light years distant, but guesstimates go all the way up to 12,000 ly away. CLICK ON FOR A BIGGER VIEW.

Galaxy M 108 (bottom right) is a barred spiral galaxy and it has an estimated mass of 125 billion times the mass of the Sun. There is a supermassive black hole in its center. Barred spiral galaxies are relatively common and are thought to be a temporary phenomenon in the life of spiral galaxies, the bar structure decaying over time, transforming the galaxy from a barred spiral to a "regular" spiral pattern.

Inside the Dome & a Mystery DSO?

2011-04-20T06:06:00.000-07:00

This morning, April 20th, as I look out my window, I must be on some strange planet. The surroundings are white but beautiful. I cannot remember such a heavy snowfall this late in April. There was one May 6th, way back when, when a few inches of snow fell, melting that day, but never this much so late into spring. Here’s what greeted me outside the deck…an A-frame bird house, a sailboat ready to go, and Lake Leelanau.

The fronts that have come in over the past month have made imaging come to a halt again. So, for those of you who follow this blog, I thought I’d give you a glimpse of my equipment INSIDE the observatory. For starters, here’s an image of the Celestron C1400 atop a CGE Pro mount. The view is from inside an Explora-dome.

Next, a picture of the Starlight Xpress camera that is attached to the HyperStar lens. Unlike most astrophotographers’ setups, the camera and lens replaces the secondary mirror IN FRONT of the telescope. This reduces the focal length of the 14” Celestron from an f 10 to an f 2, which allows imaging 30 times faster. Not only that, but since the camera is a one-shot color version, no darks or separate images with Red, Green, and Blue (RGB) filters are necessary. Short, multiple images are all that need to be combined.

I do have an image which I took this winter, but which I cannot identify. I was imaging in the vicinity of the bright star Sirius, and this is what came up…what looks like a blue nebula with a strange circular object to its left. I suspect the circular object is a camera aberration, but I had no idea what the other object was. Click on for a closer inspection.

The best explanation I have received from fellow astronomers is that both objects are artifacts unique to the HyperStar system when trying to image a very bright object such as Sirius. This is how Sirius looks...taken with my previous setup.

Open Globular Clusters M35, M36, M37, and M38

2011-04-03T07:32:00.000-07:00

Nearly all stars are formed in groups or clusters of some kind. Open clusters of stars can be near or far, young or old, and diffuse or compact. Open clusters may contain from 100 to 10,000 stars, all of which formed at nearly the same time. M35, in the constellation Gemini, is relatively nearby at 2800 light years distant, relatively young at 150 million years old, and relatively diffuse, with about 2500 stars, although even high-powered scopes reveal only about 200. You can view its fainter neighbor, NGC 2158 (bottom center) which contains more stars, is much more compact, over 10 times older and over five times more remote than M35. Below is my 30 sec. exposure, as are all the following.

The constellation Auriga is home to three open globular star clusters, which show as glows in binoculars and small splashes of stardust in a small telescope.

M36 is the first of these three.The cluster contains some 60 member stars of magnitudes between 9 and 14 and is 4,100 light years distant.

M37 is an easy and rewarding object for small telescopes or binoculars, and appears as a rich, somewhat triangular grouping of closely packed together stars.

M38 is an open cluster of stars that formed about 200 million years ago. Its distance is approximately 4,200 light years away. The cluster has a diameter of about 25 light years and, as viewed from Earth, is about two-thirds the size of the full Moon. The brightest star in the cluster is a 7.9 magnitude type GO yellow supergiant. Type G stars have a surface temperature of 5,000 to 6,000 degrees. In comparison to our own Sun, which is also a type G star, this supergiant star shines 900 times brighter. Notice NGC 1907 toward the right, bottom. NGC 1907 is a open star cluster around 4,500 light years from Earth. It contains around 30 stars and is over 500 million years old.

The Horsehead and Flame Nebulae

2011-03-29T13:29:00.000-07:00

March 28th was one of the best nights for imaging so far this year. It was also an evening I had not planned on to get so many great images. I began by taking images of several globular clusters which will be the topic of the next post. What really interested me was the Horsehead Nebula, IC 434. It is a dark emission nebula in the constellation Orion. It is approximately 1500 light years from Earth and is one of the most identifiable nebulae because of the shape of its swirling cloud of dark dust and gases, which is similar to that of a horse's head when viewed from earth.

The red glow originates from hydrogen gas predominantly behind the nebula, ionized by the nearby bright star Sigma Orionis. The darkness of the Horsehead is caused mostly by thick dust, although the lower part of the Horsehead's neck casts a shadow to the left. Streams of gas leaving the nebula are funneled by a strong magnetic field. Bright spots in the Horsehead Nebula's base are young stars just in the process of forming.

Below is a 10 minute exposure (20 X 30 sec.) of it: (CLICK ON FOR A SCREEN-FILLING VIEW.)

The benefit of my setup that I like the best (beside its incredible speed with the HyperStar lens) is the large Field of View (FOV) that my CCD camera provides. I have separated the two nebulae so you can see each one individually. Below is the Flame Nebula exposed for the same length of time. The Flame Nebula, NGC 2404 is an emission nebula about 900 to 1,500 light-years away.

The bright star Alnitak (ζ Ori), the easternmost star in the Belt of Orion, shines energetic ultraviolet light into the Flame and this knocks electrons away from the great clouds of hydrogen gas that reside there. Much of the glow results when the electrons and ionized hydrogen recombine. Additional dark gas and dust lies in front of the bright part of the nebula and this is what causes the dark network that appears in the center of the glowing gas. You cannot see Alnitak in this cropped image, but you can below.

Now take a look at the original image which has both nebulae in one FOV. The large washed-out circle is the star Alnitak. (CLICK ON FOR A SCREEN-FILLING VIEW.)

M1, M81, and M82

2011-03-15T09:45:00.000-07:00

With the arrival of daylight savings time, the clock pushes my observatory visits an hour later into the evening. This winter was a flop of the first magnitude as regards good viewing and thus the output of astrophotographs suffered accordingly. However, things are looking better for what's left of this month. Yet, I know that April showers bring May flowers, so it might be another couple of months before I can find consecutive nights for imaging. Ah, the joy of living in northwest lower Michigan...

With my Celestron and HyperStar setup I am revisiting some of the DSOs that I had imaged before. The Ides of March found me capturing two interesting galaxies and one very famous nebula. M81 and M83 are not normally photographed together, but my FOV is wide enough to do just that.

M81, also known as NGC 3031 or Bode's Galaxy, is a spiral galaxy about 12 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major. Because of its proximity to Earth, its large size, and its active galactic nucleus, M81 is a popular galaxy to study in professional astronomy research. It is the largest galaxy in the M81 Group, a group of 34 galaxies in the Great Bear.

However, in my FOV, another prominent galaxy, M82, is visible. Astronomers opine that M81 and M82 are interacting gravitationally, and creating conditions for star formation.

Below is a twenty minute exposure (30 sec. X 40) of both. CLICK ON FOR A LARGER VIEW.

M1, the Crab Nebula, has a recent history. The creation of the Crab Nebula corresponds to the bright SN 1054 supernova that was recorded by Chinese astronomers and Arab astronomers in 1054 AD. Recent analysis of historical records have found that the supernova that created the Crab Nebula probably appeared in April or early May, rising to its maximum brightness of between apparent magnitude −7 and −4.5 (brighter than everything in the night sky except the Moon) by July. The supernova was visible to the naked eye for about two years after its first observation. Thanks to the recorded observations of Far Eastern and Middle Eastern astronomers of 1054, Crab Nebula became the first astronomical object recognized as being connected to a supernova explosion.

Below is my 10 minute exposure of it. CLICK ON FOR A SCREEN-FILLING VIEW.

The Rosette Nebula

2011-03-03T08:13:00.000-08:00

Another great night for imaging...temps around 10 degrees, so I came home frozen. My target was such a huge nebula, that I was amazed. The Rosette Nebula actually contains several NGC objects. It is a large, circular H II region located near one end of a giant molecular cloud in the Monoceros region of the Milky Way Galaxy. The open cluster NGC 2244 is closely associated with the nebulosity, the stars of the cluster having been formed from the nebula's matter.

The cluster and nebula lie at a distance of some 5,200 light years from Earth (although estimates of the distance vary considerably, down to 4,900 light years) and measure roughly 130 light years in diameter. The radiation from the young stars excite the atoms in the nebula, causing them to emit radiation themselves producing the emission nebula we see. The mass of the nebula is estimated to be around 10,000 solar masses.

I binned it at 1 X 1, took 30 X 30 sec. images, for a 15 minute combined exposure. Without a HyperStar lens this would take conventional astronomers 31 times the 15 minutes, or 7 & 3/4 hours of imaging in RGB. (CLICK ON FOR A SCREEN-FILLING VIEW.)

Two for One &The Leo Triplet

2011-03-01T07:58:00.000-08:00

It took until the last day of February until the night skies were clear enough for imaging. This hibernation of my observatory and new equipment lasted two full months…an unheard of sequence of cloudy nights, poor seeing, and clipper fronts which is unusual even for northwest lower Michigan.

Anyhow, I made the best of it, despite the cold temps. It really was an excellent imaging evening. I focused first on the familiar Orion nebula…and its neighbor, the Running Man Nebula. I tried a sequence of 20 X 30 sec. 1 X 1 binned images. Here’s the result. CLICK ON FOR A SCREEN-FILLING VIEW.

The Running Man Nebula, NGC 1977, (at the extreme right bottom of the above image) is a region of predominately blue reflection clouds of hydrogen in the Orion complex. The dark lanes of dust in front of the cloud give this region its name. Note the dark dust cloud to the lower left in the image. In the above picture, the “running man” with his little left leg appears to be running straight downhill. In the PICTURE BELOW, I have him running on level ground, which is normally how he is pictured!

Not satisfied with the “two for one,” I tried imaging the Leo Triplet. The Triplet (also known as the M66 Group) is a small group of galaxies about 35 million light-years away] in the constellation Leo. This galaxy group consists of the spiral galaxiesM65, M66, and NGC 3628.

Since I was going into frost hibernation myself, I knew it would be a battle royale between my endurance and my hopes to image a target I have never done before.

My scope and camera equipment worked flawlessly, despite two months of inactivity. However, it took three tries to get the desktop PC to load properly.

Here’s the result, with NGC 3628 top left, M66 middle right, and M65 bottom center. Normally, an image of this clarity would take conventional equipment 5 hours of combined images in RGB. My image, with Hyperstar…10 minutes. CLICK ON FOR A LARGER VIEW.

Adjusting Astrophotographs with Photoshop CS5

2011-01-31T12:44:00.000-08:00

In an earlier post I displayed a 5 minute image of the Orion Nebula, M 42, with minimal adjustment in the newest version of Photoshop. After taking an image in Maxim DL, I send the image as a TIFF file to Photoshop for adjustment. I open the TIFF file in Photoshop and it looks like this:

The image doesn't look like much...black with bit of light from the center of the nebula. Now I take Photoship and go to Image Adjustment. The mistake I made in the next image was that I used Levels first, then Curves. I got the image to show the perimeter of the nebula, but the central brighter portion was washed out with light. Here was the result:

I sent a copy of this to an expert astrophotographer in Arizona who said I had done the process all wrong. So we Skyped for an hour or so, with me sending my raw TIFF file. He shared his desktop screen with me and I watched as he did his magic to bring out the central portion...the Trapezium. He began with Curves, the to Levels. Back to Curves, then again to Levels. An Inverse lasso of the Trapezium and application of Gradient XTerminator, and a bit more adjustment and the result was markedly different.

Later in the day I experimented with the TIFF image and came up with the result below. I used Carboni's program to make the stars smaller and not so bright.

In this image, the Trapezium is less washed out are visible, stars are smaller, and the nebula's cloud is more detailed. It's not a perfect image, but it's progress. CLICK ON FOR LARGER VIEW.

The Phases of Venus

2011-01-07T10:59:00.000-08:00

If you are driving to work these mornings on a clear day, the brightest object you can see is the planet Venus. It is now the fabled “morning star” of ancient history. At various times of the year it becomes the “evening star.” What is fascinating about Venus is that it played an important role in astronomy, giving Galileo proof that the earth was not that which everything revolved around as Aristotle had taught, but that the sun was the center of a solar system. Galileo observed through his primitive telescope that Venus had phases, like the moon, and that changed astronomy forever, embarrassing then-current scientists, popes, and sky-watchers alike, and calling into question conclusions in the natural science of the genius of the ages, Aristotle.

On December 29th, at about 6:00 am, with the first cloudless night in six weeks, I wanted to check out the phase Venus was in. So, out on the snowmobile to the observatory in some rather chilly temps, I ventured forth to image “the morning star.” The U.S. Naval Observatory has a nifty website which will give you the apparent image of any planet on any given day of any recent or future year. http://www.usno.navy.mil/USNO/astronomical-applications/data-services/diskmap

If you go to this link you can choose what planet you want to view by entering the month, day, and year of that planet (or the moon) and you can get a projected image specific to your choice. I did so for Venus for 12-29-2010. Here’s the phase Venus was projected to be in:

With that knowledge, I took a .001second image of Venus. See how it compares:

While I was in my observatory, as dawn was growing in brightness, I imaged the waning moon, two days first quarter. Here’s my .001 second image...CLICK ON FOR A SCREEN-FILLING VIEW.

Trust me, it agrees with the Naval Observatory projected image. However, if you’d like to see for yourself, go to the Naval Observatory site yourself. Interesting how similar the phase of Venus and the Moon were.

Winter Splendors

2010-12-30T05:48:00.000-08:00

When winter comes, two friends always make their way back into the sky. I am speaking of the brightest nebula in the sky...the Orion Nebula, and the most famous cluster of stars in the sky, which, incidentally, is mentioned more than once in the Old Testament...the Pleiades. It has been a long six weeks since the skies in northwest lower Michigan have cleared out enough at night to do any kind of imaging. Just as we were about to welcome in the new year, the night-sky drought ended. The moon was waning, so it caused no problem. However, because of seeing and transparency forecast to be marginal, I didn't know what to expect two evenings before year's end.

I had invested in a UHC/LPR (Ultra High Contrast/Light Pollution Reduction) Filter which I had installed back in November, but never had a chance to use it. I was to find out what a terrific difference it made in capturing nebulae and DSOs in general. These filters are normally recommended for light-polluted sites, but, even though my observatory is not situated that close to much light pollution, when seeing and transparency are poor, such filters can make a significant difference for the better.

My first target was M 45, the Pleiades. It is an easily visible patch of stars in the constellation Taurus. Also known as the "Seven Sisters," the cluster is dominated by hot blue and extremely luminous stars that have formed within the last 100 million years.

The earliest known depiction of the Pleiades is likely a bronze age artifact known as the Nebra sky disk, dated to approximately 1600 BC. Some Greek astronomers considered them to be a distinct constellation, and they are mentioned by Hesiod, and in Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. They are also mentioned three times in the Bible (Job 9:9 and 38:31, as well as Amos 5:8).

Here is my 9 minute image of it:

My next target was the old familiar friend, the Orion Nebula, M42. I have taken countless images of it with various scopes and cameras, but this image has to rank up there with the best...10 X 30 sec., or a 5 min. image, yielded this result:

CLICK ON BOTH FOR A SCREEN-FILLING VIEW!

Lunar Eclipse

2010-12-21T05:38:00.000-08:00

At 1:30 am today (Dec. 21) I got out to the observatory and took this shot of 1/3 totality. The cloud cover was awful during and after this shot. However, my wife, daughter, and I were out at 3:00 am and the clouds parted for a few minutes and we were able to see 95% totality. Quite an experience. The moon was orange except for the edge which hadn't be covered yet. I went back to take more pics, but by this time clouds had obscured stars...everything. The last time a lunar eclipse occurred on the winter solstice was 372 years ago. Click on for a larger, but fuzzier view.

Stars by the Billions…More

2010-12-15T01:18:00.000-08:00

Throughout my study and imaging of galaxies, I was under the impression that galaxies had in the hundreds of billions of stars. The biggest galaxies in the universe are elliptical galaxies.

I thought I had taken images of several elipticals. It turns out, after examining my astro library, I have only a few that are worth sharing. One is M89. Current observations indicate that M89 may be nearly perfectly spherical in shape. It is a difficult one to image because of its distance from earth. Sit down when I tell you it is estimated to be 360,000,000,000,000,000 miles away. Abbreviating that to 360 quadrillion miles might relax you a bit more, but in any case, it’s one heck of a way from us.

Anyway, here is my close up and personal shot of it:

New research shows that elliptical galaxies actually hold 5 to 10 times as many stars as previously believed. This means that the total number of stars in the universe is likely 3 times bigger than realized.

We’re talking REAL numbers here! Imagine a galaxy with a trillion stars, instead of the Milky Way’s 400 billion. Why, we’re getting into terminology associated with our national debt.

How can scientists count the number of stars in a galaxy anyway? It has been said that counting the stars in the Universe is like trying to count the number of sand grains on a beach on Earth. We might do that by measuring a small surface area of the beach, and determining the average depth of the sand layer. If we count the number of grains in a small representative volume of sand, by multiplication we can estimate the number of grains on the whole beach.

So, why the new estimates of numbers of stars in elipticals? Because of stars that weren’t as detectable as our sun. In fact, they were virtually hidden.

The hidden stars are known as red dwarfs for their color and small size. Because red dwarfs are small and dim compared to stars like the Sun, astronomers hadn’t been able to detect them in galaxies beyond the Milky Way before now. As such, they didn’t know how many stars in the universe were red dwarfs.

Scientists used powerful instruments at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii to detect the faint signature of red dwarfs in the cores of eight elliptical galaxies, which are located between about 50 million and 300 million light-years away. They discovered that the red dwarfs that are only between 10 and 30 percent as massive as the Sun were more bountiful than expected.

“As it turns out, the universe thinks small, at least when it comes to star size,” said Charlie Conroy from Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Our stellar inventory has changed dramatically.”

“No one knew how many of these stars there were,” said Pieter van Dokkum from Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. “Different theoretical models predicted a wide range of possibilities, so this answers a long-standing question about just how abundant these stars are.”

Their results imply that stellar population counts depend on what type of galaxy astronomers examine, just as a census of the city of New York and the town of Derby, Kansas, will find different population numbers.

“We usually assume other galaxies look like our own. But this suggests other conditions are possible in other galaxies,” Conroy stated. “This discovery could have a major impact on our understanding of galaxy formation and evolution.”

In particular, galaxies might contain less dark matter — a mysterious substance only detectable due to its gravitational effects — than previous measurements of their masses indicated. Instead, the abundant red dwarfs might contribute more mass than previously calculated.

Well, it all goes to show that when science pontificates on this or that subject…as it has so many times in the past…new information almost always shows that what scientists thought they knew, they really did not.

By the way, has any scientist proven that God does not exist? I’d take any such attempt with a grain of salt…or rather, sand.

The Geminids – December 13-15

2010-12-10T09:01:00.001-08:00

I don’t know if it’s just me, but I weary of announcements made in astronomy magazines and on the news of upcoming meteor showers. They are supposed to be spectacular displays of “shooting stars” which should prompt anyone with an ounce of interest in astronomy to catch these falling stars and put them in your pocket, as Mr. C used to croon.

The interesting thing about these events is that they occur at least eight times during the year. Every so often someone asks me if I know about these showers and I nod an affirmative, if not enthusiastic, “yes.”

There was only one meteor shower that our whole family was privileged to observe and that was the August Perseid shower many years back. The whole family of us went out to one of our higher points on the farm, taking folding chairs, etc. It was a show that I’ll always remember. The night really was spectacular with the appearance of several meteors per minute, some seeming like miniature fireballs crashing into the horizon.

Since then, I have gotten up at midnight for this or that display, only to be disappointed. The rate of appearances was always slower than predicted, so lately I have just given up on the mandatory astronomical routine.

This year one of the most prolific annual meteor showers makes its appearance in mid-December. The Geminid shower peaks the nights of December 13-15th. Although many people consider it to be a poor cousin to August’s Perseid shower, the Geminids may put on a better show (if you live under a cloudless night.) This year, observers can expect to see upward of 100 “shooting stars” per hour — an average of nearly two per minute — under a dark sky.

So goes the hype…never mind that the Grand Traverse region will have total cloud cover during those evenings or that I haven’t seen a clear sky in almost a month now.

“Conditions should be wonderful for the Geminids this year,” says Astronomymagazine senior editor Michael Bakich. “The First Quarter Moon sets around midnight local time, leaving the prime viewing hours after midnight free from any unwanted natural lighting.”

I suppose if you live in the southwest, where cloudless nights run over 300 per year, the Geminids might be worth seeing. For me, in northwest lower Michigan, it’s a cipher. I’ll get some sleep and read about it on Google news…how disappointing, once again, this natural wonder was.

If you read this post after the 15th, you probably didn’t miss a thing.

Imaging in Winter

2010-11-26T08:53:00.000-08:00

November has got to be the worst month in the Grand Traverse region for astrophotography. Not only are cloudy nights the norm, but if one is able to eek out an hour or two of cloud-free skies, those qualities of the atmosphere such as “transparency” and “seeing” can prevent one from capturing quality pictures of nebulae and planets. December isn’t much better either. There is also the problem of getting to my observatory. Once snow pack is over a few inches, getting there by ATV or auto becomes a problem. I suppose if I had a 4-wheel drive vehicle…naw, not my thing.

So, what’s a guy to do? Snowmobile to it! Why sure the dark nights are spooky and it’s cold. One night last winter when the moon was full, I thought I heard some children laughing and talking. I suspected they were out for a sledding party. It turns out the noise came from a pack of coyotes feasting on a downed deer. (We do have coyotes near the observatory. I accidentally caught one in a box trap.)

Anyway, my observatory has electrical power, but when the dome is open, a 1500 watt floor heater doesn’t help much. I do have a small ceramic heater near my computer keyboard to keep my hands from going into hibernation. Here’s a picture of me imaging the moon last winter with my heavy-duty bomber coat.

In my last post, I mentioned my lunar and planetary imager, the DFK 21AU04.AS. During those winter nights when imaging DSOs give less than satisfactory results, if there is spotty cloud clover, I can usually go to the moon pictorially.
Here are some winter shots from last year:

Crater Erotasthenes (to the left) and the Apennine mountain range. The total length of the range is about 370 miles, with some of the peaks rising as high as 3.1 miles. Crater Erotasthenes has a well-defined circular rim, terraced inner wall, central mountain peaks, and an irregular floor, and is believed to have been formed about 3.2 billion years ago.

Crater Plato and the Alpine valley. Look for the valley in the top right. The apparent smoothness of the crater‘s interior contrasts with the jagged one-mile high peaks that surrounds it. The Alpine Valley is about six miles at its widest, ninety-three miles in length and was probably formed due to a fault triggered by the Mare Imbrium-forming impact. The valley subsequently filled with volcanic material following it creation.

Crater Copernicus. This crater is relatively young, having been formed about 800 million years ago. Its inner diameter is a little over 18 miles across. The terrain along the bottom is hilly in the southern half while the north is relatively smooth. The central peaks consist of three isolated mountainous rises climbing as high as 4000 feet above the floor. These peaks are separated from each other by valleys.

Maybe I’m getting lonesome for those ventures into the night to spy on the moon with the coyotes as my only companions.

The Many Faces of Jupiter

2010-11-13T05:50:00.000-08:00

This winter Jupiter will dominate the night sky. Already a third up in the east at 7:00 pm, it no doubt will be the source of a few UFO calls, so bright is it. If you have a telescope, get it out and enjoy this magnificent planet and nightly rearrangement of its four easily visible moons. The other fifty-nine are subjects for high-powered observatories and spacecraft fly-bys.

Although Jupiter appears bright in the fall and winter skies, for the astrophotographer, it is one of the most difficult objects to image well. A lot has to do with its position in the sky and the conditions of the atmosphere as well.

I have an Imaging Source DFK 21AU04.AS USB CCD color camera which I use with a Meade 5X TeleXtender, effectively increasing the image size by a factor of five. I had earlier invested in a small 80 mm fl400 guidescope which now is piggy-backed on to my 14” Celestron FS. The DFK 21AU04.AS is a small cube-type camera a bit over 2” on each side which takes up to 30 images per second and can shoot a live AVI sequence of almost 2000 pictures in less than a minute. Composing a good picture (a combined one of many shots) theoretically is not difficult using a stacking program such as the free Registax program. (AVI, or Audio Video Interleave, is a multimedia container format introduced by Microsoft in November 1992 as part of its Video for Windows technology. AVI files can contain both audio and video data in a file container that allows synchronous audio-with-video playback.)

Early this month I took an image of Jupiter at 1/30 of a second. The software that comes with the DFK allows still images or an AVI sequence. Notice one of the bands of the planet is visible, but the image is fuzzy and far from ideal.

The next evening, I tried a series of 1000 images, aligned and stacked in Registax. Although the results were smoother, not much is definable. NOTE: The differing orientations of the pictures has to do with the position of the camera. The coloration is manipulative in software.

So what caused these images to be toss-aways?

Astrophotographers have to deal with several conditions that vary nightly. First is CLOUD COVER. It so happens that image No. 1 had varying bands of light cloud cover that came and went. As I went “live” in imaging the planet, if the thin cloud cover interfered, my monitor would show the planet grow dimmer.

A second condition affecting imaging of such an easy target as the bright planet is TRANSPARANCY. This term applies to the total amount of water vapor in the air. It is somewhat independent of the cloud cover forecast in that there can be isolated clouds in a transparent air mass, and poor transparency can occur when there is very little cloud cover.

A third atmospheric condition which affects an image is SEEING. Excellent seeing means at high magnification you will see fine detail on planets. In bad seeing, planets might look like they are under a layer of rippling water and show little detail at any magnification, but the view of galaxies is probably undiminished. Bad seeing is caused by turbulence combined with temperature differences in the atmosphere. Seeing for BOTH nights was horrible…and you can see the results that were achieved. It’s as if one was swimming under water looking up to the surface. Jupiter looks like it is under a layer of water and you can see hardly any detail, even though image No. 2 is technically a better image since I had 1000 for the software to choose from at a threshold of 80% quality.

DARKNESS, WIND, FOCUS, and TEMPERATURE within the observatory relative to ambient outdoor temperature can also affect an image, but where the planet is located in the sky can make a huge difference in quality. If the planet is near the horizon, you are imaging through a greater thickness of Earth’s atmosphere than when the planet is overhead.

We just passed the Harvest Moon last September. The Harvest Moon has the reputation of being especially big and bright and orange. But it isn’t really. It’s no bigger, brighter or more orange than any full moon.

Still, you might think it is. It’s the location of the moon near the horizon that causes the Harvest Moon – or any full moon – to look particularly big and particularly orange in color.

The orange color of a moon near the horizon is a true physical effect. It stems from the fact that – when you look toward the horizon – you are looking through a greater thickness of Earth’s atmosphere than when you gaze up and overhead. The atmosphere scatters blue light – that’s why the sky looks blue. The greater thickness of atmosphere in the direction of a horizon scatters blue light most effectively, but it lets red light pass through to your eyes. So a moon near the horizon takes on a yellow or orange or reddish hue.

Anyway, back to Jupiter…

The same conditions that affect the view of a full moon at its rising…namely, seeing it through a greater thickness of the atmospher…will plague winter attempts to truly bring out detail.

The image below, taken last year when the planet was higher in the sky, is, as in image No. 2 above, the combined product of hundreds of images aligned and stacked with Registax. Some tweaking in Photoshop brings out more detail. Bands are visible, and the bulge in the bottom band is the famous “red spot,” though hardly well-defined.

Finally, there are those rare nights, generally during the summer months, where all the conditions come together. If one is lucky enough to be there to photograph Jupiter, you might have a keeper.

Here is a one-shot picture taken a couple of years ago. You can even see the red spot.

M81 Adjusted

2010-11-05T07:23:00.000-07:00

I have time to do some interesting things with Photoshop. I took an old image of M81 and tried adjusting its appearance for a smoother appearance. It's a smaller image and the stars are dimmed, but click on it anyway for a larger view.

NGC 891

2010-10-24T14:15:00.001-07:00

The constellation Andromeda is most famous for the nearest galaxy to ours, the famous M31, or Andromeda Galaxy. However the constellation is home to several very faint galaxies as well. NGC 891 is a member of a small group of galaxies, sometimes called the NGC 1023 group, which also contains NGCs 925, 949, 959, 1003, 1023, and 1058.

NGC 891 is an edge-on spiral with a faint dust lane along its equator, about 30 million light years away. Below is my 10 minute image of it, looking east on the full moon night of October 22nd. (CLICK ON IT FOR A LARGER VIEW.)

Fireworks Galaxy NGC 6946 & Open Cluster NGC 6939

2010-10-18T12:52:00.000-07:00

Recently I tested my new equipment with a series of exposures 30 sec. each X 35 subexposures. My target was the Fireworks Galaxy NGC 6946. I suspected my wide FOV would also capture the Open Star Cluster NGC 6939. I was right.

The Fireworks Galaxy is a rather nearby spiral galaxy, but is highly obscured by interstellar matter of the Milky Way galaxy, as it is quite close to the galactic plane. The galaxy is 22 million light years away and lies on the border between the constellations Cepheus and Cygnus, both of which lie almost overhead in the October sky before midnight. NGC 6946 is sometimes called the Fireworks Galaxy because of the number of supernovae that have been discovered there and the galaxy's prodigious rate of star formation.

The star cluster NGC 6939, in my same FOV, By contrast, open cluster NGC 6939, seen close to NGC 6946, is located inside of our own galaxy at a distance of approximately 5,800 light years. It is just by coincidence that these two objects lie close to each other in the same line of sight.

NGC 6939's total brightness is about 8th magnitude and it contains about 80 stars.

The Fireworks is lower left and the star cluster is upper right. (CLICK ON FOR A LARGER VIEW.)

The Trifid

2010-10-05T05:56:00.000-07:00

Last night was the beginning of a series of upcoming excellent viewing nights. The Milky Way was spectacular as will tonight's view of it. I had eight visitors from Fountain Point at the observatory and helped one of the ladies to image the Trifid Nebula. I've posted enough already about this beautiful DSO, but here is a 60 second image of it. (CLICK ON FOR A GREAT PANORAMIC VIEW OF IT.)

Stephan's Quintet and NGC 7331

2010-10-01T07:51:00.002-07:00

The evening of September 30th was not supposed to be very user-friendly for astrophotographs. However, the Milky Way was brilliant, and it proved to be very worthwhile in imaging two unique galaxy clusters, Stephan’s Quintet and the Deer Lick Group. Normally, we think of star clusters, such as M13 or M15, but galaxy clusters in close proximity are rare. To image two in the same FOV was quite unplanned.

I had tried imaging a neighboring galaxy, NGC 7331 and the Deer Lick group of galaxies early in the evening. Results were disappointing. However, to my surprise, when I imaged Stephan’s Quintet (NGC7317, 7318A, 7318B, 7319 and 7320), I captured NGC 7331 and the Deer Lick group as well. (How appropriate this time of year when deer hunting for archers begins!)

In the image below, the large galaxy and most prominent member of the Deer Lick group is in the upper right corner of my cropped image. You can see a faint galaxy above it. Stephan’s Quintet is visible left of center. They form a kind of “y”. Stephan’s Quintet in the constellation Pegasus is a visual grouping of five galaxies of which four form the first compact galaxy group ever discovered. Why it is so named is because the group was discovered by Édouard Stephan in 1877 at the Marseilles Observatory in France. All of Stephan’s Quintet, except 7320, are about 300 million light years away, and are seen pulling gravitationally at each other. (CLICK ON THE IMAGE FOR A MUCH LARGER VIEW.)

About 300 million light-years away, only four galaxies of the Stephan's Group are actually locked in a cosmic dance of repeated close encounters. They form a kind of "y". The odd man out is easy to spot, though. The four interacting galaxies (NGC 7319, 7318A, 7318B, and 7317) have an overall yellowish cast and tend to have distorted loops and tails, grown under the influence of disruptive gravitational tides. But the galaxy at the lower left (NGC 7320) is much closer than the others...a mere 40 million light years away.

The Andromeda Galaxy

2010-09-09T07:07:00.001-07:00

M31, the Andromeda Galaxy, is our nearest galactic neighbor. M32 is another galaxy...the fuzzy patch lower right. This is a very short exposure with a bit of gradient removal. Weather conditions are not favorable at this time for a better and lengthier exposure. Click on for larger view.

M27 - The Dumbbell Nebula

2010-09-03T12:57:00.000-07:00

The learning continues as I processed M27. This is a 2 minute exposure, processed with Maxim DL, the newest version of Photoshop CS5 Extended, and two neat programs which can do a lot of things....Noel Astro Tools and Gradientxterminator. The latter took an image which had a lot of gradient (surrounding) light and eliminated it with a couple of mouseclicks. Be sure to click on the image for a larger view.

M17 - The Swan Nebula

2010-09-01T09:19:00.000-07:00

On a recent night of excellent seeing and transparency, I imaged an old friend with my new equipment...M17. It was the first night I was able to see the Milky Way this summer in all its glory. M17, also known as the Swan Nebula, reveals a long streak with a hook at one end, bringing to mind a sort of "check mark." The figure of a Swan can be readily seen with the hook as the head and the long portion its body. Ironically, objects such as M17 sometimes become victims of their own magnificence when it comes to their popularity. Many of us cut our teeth on objects like M17, often with small instruments which didn't reveal all the exquisite detail. As the years go by and we turn our telescopes toward more challenging objects, they simply become forgotten. Or worse yet, we forget to take the time to really see them when we do look.

Here is a three minute view of M17: BE SURE TO CLICK ON THE IMAGE FOR A DETAILED VIEW.

M16

2010-08-29T08:40:00.000-07:00

After a couple of evenings working on polar aligning the new CGE Pro mount, last night, Saturday, Aug. 28, was an excellent night for transparancy and seeing. Had it not been for the waning moon, I think the Milky Way would have been visible in more detail. However, it was one of the best nights all summer. With the scope polar-aligned very well (Celestron has an excellent method built into its firmware), I was easily able to expose unguided for four minutes. I am assuming I can push that limit further.

Collimation of the Hyperstar was a hit-and-miss proposition, however. Since the scope's secondary mirror is removed, collimation must be done on the HS lens. I still have some work to get perfect collimation across the entire FOV.

My target was M16, known by various names. M16 is also called the Eagle Nebula and is a young open cluster of stars in the constellation Serpens. Its name derives from its shape which is resemblant of an eagle. It is the subject of the famous "Pillars of Creation" photograph by the Hubble Space Telescope, which shows pillars of star-forming gas and dust within the nebula.

Here is a combined image of five four minute exposures of M16. Be sure to click on it for a larger view.

M13

2010-08-27T08:02:00.000-07:00

M13 is a globular cluster in the constellation of Hercules. M13 is about 145 light-years in diameter, and it is composed of several hundred thousand stars.

It is nicely visible in the south at this time of year.

Here is a 25 sec. image: (Click on for larger view.)

M20

2010-08-17T11:28:00.000-07:00

On a windy moonlight evening yesterday, I was able to image the Trifid Nebula, M20, with my new equipment. It isn't perfect and I have color issues yet to deal with, but it's a start. CLICK ON TO SEE A MIND-BOGGLING IMAGE!

First light with new equipment

2010-08-15T08:20:00.000-07:00

Finally, after waiting most of the summer, the new C1400, CGE Pro mount, Starlight Xpress 25C camera, and HyperStar with correct adapter all are up and running. Last evening everything was put to the test with a waxing crescent moon.

There will be some tweaking and alignment issues before I display some DSOs.

Below is a .001 second image of the August 14th moon in color. (Click on to see a larger image.)

New equipment has arrived

2010-08-11T15:20:00.001-07:00

After waiting until August 3rd, I finally received the C1400 HyperStar-compatible telescope which was mounted the same day atop a CGE Pro mount. The following two evenings were learning experiences which led to the conclusion that a different adapter for the HyperStar was needed. By the beginning of next week (Aug. 15th), pending good viewing, the new equipment should be operational. (Click on to see an enlarged view of the C1400.)

The staff at Starizona has been very helpful in helping walk me through the setup. However, since the problem was reaching focus with the Starlight Xpress camera, photos had to be taken to see distances of the camera from the HS lens and the angle of the camera's chip. The photos had to be sent to technicians in England. The designer of the HS lens here in the U.S. has sent two adapters which should solve my problem of reaching pin-point focusing.

Since the 14" Celestron telescope sits atop a German equatorial mount, any additional weight has to be factored in by achieving balance in right ascension and declination. This should improve tracking. The problem with the Meade fork-mount allowed for a mere 40 sec. accurate tracking without a self-guiding camera chip.

The HyperStar lens reduces the f10 focal length to f1.9, allowing a 6 minute stacked image to be the equivalent of a three hour plus exposure. I am expecting amazing results from the new setup.

Slow boat from China

2010-07-22T08:51:00.000-07:00

Nothing can screw up an astronomer's plans like having no equipment to work with. My switch from Meade to Celestron has cost me some summer viewing and photographing time. I ordered all my new equipment in May, having sold the former, and am still awaiting the C1400 on a CGE Pro Mount from China. See pic below. Latest news is that it will be in the US by the end of the month. We'll see. If that turns out to be true, it will take a week to get here and a few days to get up and running. So, hopefully by mid-August the new equipment with HyperStar will be up and running.

Also, we have a new sign off of S. Lake Leelanau Dr.

New Equipment at Hahnenberg Observatory

2010-06-15T10:52:00.000-07:00

Hahnenberg Observatory is in a period of transition. In order to achieve faster download times of DSOs, the Meade telescope and SBIG STL 11K color camera have been sold. They are being replaced with HyperStar compatible equipment.

As of mid-July, the new setup should be operational. Equipment will include a Celestron 14" telescope, a CGE Pro mount, a HyperStar Lens, a Starlight Xpress SXVR-M25C one-shot color CCD camera, an Imaging Source DFK 21AU04.AS USB CCD color camera, a Coronado PST h-alpha telescope for solar astrophotography, a Teldrad finder, a permanent pier mount, a Meade 5X TeleXtender, numerous eyepieces and color filters, Maxim DL, CCDOps, CCDSoft v5, and Photoshop software, and a Nikon Coolpix 995 digital camera.

Basically, the new equipment cost slightly less than what previously was being used. Hope to see you soon!

A Solution for the Impatient Astronomer

2010-05-30T16:37:00.001-07:00

Singer Perry Como made famous the song “Catch a Falling Star” in my younger days. The lyrics don’t quite fit the astrophotographer, since the starlight caught was to be used on a rainy day…but then again maybe they do. That’s precisely when astronomers tweak the images taken on a cloudless night. “Good morning…but I digress…”

I have been studying techniques for capturing deep sky objects in as short a time as I can. I think I found the solution. It’s called HyperStar.

Begun by the Celestron telescope company with their SCT line of Fastar scopes, a company in Arizona, called Starizona, has picked up the mantle of the idea to bring fast imaging to both amateurs and professionals alike.

From their website http://starizona.com/acb/hyperstar/index.aspx HyperStar speaks in language even I can understand:

"Who wants to spend all night taking a picture of one object? HyperStar allows a Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope to be converted into an amazingly fast f/2 imaging system. Pictures now take mere minutes instead of hours, and there is no need to guide or even to have an equatorial mount! HyperStar is easy to install and use, making it perfect for the novice, but still powerful enough for advanced astrophotographers."

The primary advantage of HyperStar is speed. Exposures that take the better part of an hour at f/10 take mere seconds with the HyperStar lens!

Aside from the obvious savings in time and effort, short exposure times have a secondary advantage: capturing images is much easier. With typical exposure times of 20-60 seconds, HyperStar imaging allows unguided imaging. Long exposures require a telescope to be guided due to inherent tracking errors in the drive. This requires a second CCD camera or self-guiding CCD and often other hardware such as a guidescope. HyperStar images can be shot unguided thanks to the extremely short exposure. For example, an F10 scope is 31 times slower than the same scope equipped with HyperStar. That means an image that takes an hour of exposure can be achieved in less than two minutes! Now, that’s my kind of imaging.

Interestingly, Hyperstar and an attached low-profile CCD camera attaches to the front of the telescope. Here is an image of the setup on a Celestron 8” SCT.

I have seen some of the images taken with HyperStar’s reduced focal length and I’m sold. So, there will be changes made to the equipment in the Hahnenberg Observatory in June.

I will catch a falling star…rather many galaxies of stars in future posts I hope you will enjoy.

Galaxy Heaven – The Constellation Virgo

2010-05-19T16:47:00.000-07:00

This time of the year in the northern hemisphere gives the steady drumbeat of longer days and shorter nights…as the summer solstice approaches…a bane to astrophotographers, but a welcome relief from the seemingly perpetual darkness of winter for the rest of the population.

Nevertheless, here in northwestern lower Michigan, late spring and summer often yield cloudless nights, despite their brevity. So, the first stars begin to appear closer to 10:00 pm, and around 11:00 pm, serious attempts can begin to image a DSO.

I have had zero good nights for astrophotography for the better part of a month now, but last evening (May 18th) was tolerable despite average “seeing.” Excellent seeing means at high magnification you will see fine detail on planets. In bad seeing, planets might look like they are under a layer of rippling water and show little detail at any magnification, but the view of galaxies is pretty much undiminished. Bad seeing is caused by turbulence combined with temperature differences in the atmosphere.

The Constellation Virgo lies directly south as the sky darkens, quite near the sun’s path called the ecliptic. Virgo it is the second largest constellation in the sky. It can be easily found through its brightest star, Spica.

With my Meade LX200 14” ACF scope and Telrad finder, it is quite easy to find Spica. I power up the scope, and go to “Telescope” in my handbox menu. Setting the “high precision” control to “on,” then selecting “Spica” under the Named Star option, the scope slews reasonably close to the star. If the star is not visible in the viewfinder, I wait a few minutes to see if I can find it without the viewfinder. Once I see the star emerge in the darkening dusk, I use the Telrad finder to center the star. Doing a bit more fine tuning with the illuminated crosshairs in my viewfinder, I center the star and “sync” on it. Having done that, I am good to go for finding virtually any object in the night sky.

Virgo contains a galaxy cluster, the Virgo Cluster, which is a gold mine of Messier galaxies. Some examples are Messier 49 (elliptical), Messier 58 (spiral), Messier 59 (elliptical), Messier 60 (elliptical), Messier 61 (spiral), Messier 84 (lenticular),Messier 86 (lenticular), Messier 87 (elliptical and a famous radio source), Messier 89 (elliptical) and Messier 90 (spiral). A noted galaxy that is not part of the cluster is the Sombrero Galaxy (M104), an unusual spiral galaxy. Below is my 35 minute color image of it. CLICK ON FOR LARGER VIEW.

However, my target was M61. Using a trial version of Maxim DL, but focusing in CCDOps., I was able to find a good star near M61 to calibrate on. Calibration involves moving the scope four times, twice on the X axis and twice on the Y axis. If successful, the calibrated star can be used as the guide star for autoguiding. My camera the SBIG STL 11000CM camera has a built-in guide chip, and using The Sky software, I can usually find a good guide star for the guider by rotating the camera.

Since I am still a beginner in lengthy DSO tracking, I have made lots of errors out of ignorance. However, I was able to track M61 for about an hour. The neat thing is that Maxim DL has a visual tracking log which updates every few seconds, so you can see the adjustments the software makes to the telescope to keep the guide star centered. However, I went back to my old habits…taking a quick image of m61 at under 5 minutes with my color camera.

This is one of the larger galaxies in the Virgo Cluster, measuring in at about 100,000 light-years in diameter. It is estimated to be located some 60 million light-years from Earth. This galaxy's low luminosity, about magnitude 10, makes it appear as nothing more than a fuzzy spot in small scopes. A large telescope and good sky conditions are needed to see any amount of detail.

The Nearest Stars

2010-05-11T05:18:00.000-07:00

The other day I started thinking about the dimensions of our Milky Way galaxy. That led me to investigate the stars nearest to our sun. I was always under the impression that the nearest star to our own sun was Alpha Centauri at a distance of 4.5 light years. It turns out that Alpha Centauri is a star system with three stars in it. The closest star in the system is Proxima Centauri (Latin for the “nearest” star in the Centauri system) at a distance of 4.2421 lys.

Proxima is what is known as a red dwarf star of the K spectral class. If you took an astronomy class, you probably remember the spectral classes of stars from the mnemonic sentence “Oh Be A Fine Girl Kiss Me Kate.” O, B, A, G, K, M, K are classifications of stars ranked in order of size and brightness, with O stars being the largest and brightest. Our sun falls in the middle as a G star. Accepted wisdom holds that the Sun is an ordinary, run-of-the-mill star. But astronomers are having a hard time finding true solar twins. Is our sun an odd ball? That’s another story for another day. Back to Proxima.

Proxima is a small and relatively cool red dwarf star with a surface temperature of less than 4,000 degrees Kelvin. Red dwarfs constitute the vast majority of stars and have a mass of less than one-half of that of our sun.

Interestingly, the two other stars of the Alpha Centauri system are farther away from earth at about 4.365 lys. One of them is a G star and the other is a K star. So much for our three nearest neighboring stars.

Just how far is a light year? Imagine that you could travel at the speed of light…approximately 186,000 miles / second. You’d have to go at that speed for 60 seconds X 60 minutes X 24 hours X 365 days X 4.2421 years to get there! We are talking about the three nearest stars to our own. Yet the Milky Way has…and I love these estimates…anywhere from a hundred billion to four hundred billion stars… give or take two hundred billion!

For this post, I am content to look at the 30 or so star systems nearest…within 14 lys…to our own solar system. These systems contain the familiar Barnard’s star and Sirius, the brightest object in the sky except for our sun, the moon, and Venus. Here’s a three dimensional view...CLICK ON FOR A LARGER VIEW.

When I post an image of a galaxy, my target is a system of stars and planets so far away that no one can really comprehend what millions of light years are…so trying to understand those distances is simply beyond the capability of the human mind. Remember also that the farther away they are the less likely it is that what we see has any resemblance to its present shape or appearance. Stars in galaxies we view now have life cycles that have changed. They may not even exist at all, be remnants called brown dwarfs, black holes, or even newly born stars. It’s all very humbling, but at the same time…truly wonderful.

The Extremely Large Telescope

2010-05-03T15:20:00.001-07:00

Ever since I was a kid I was fascinated with mountains and things geologic. I remember reading a book about Fr. Bernard R. Hubbard, S.J., who described his flight into the caldera of Mount Katmai in Alaska about eighty years ago. Known today as Aniakchak, is a 6-mile-wide, 2,000-foot-deep caldera formed by the collapse of the 7,000-foot Mt. Katmai. Lying inland in a region of frequent clouds and stormy weather, Aniakchak remained unknown to all but native inhabitants until the 1920s and explorations by geologists, among whom was the indomitable geologist and Jesuit priest, Fr. Hubbard and his dog Sparky.

I also became fascinated with Switzerland’s Matterhorn, which I vowed I would see someday. Well, I made it there. It was one of those once-in-a-lifetime experiences.

My interest in mountains was only topped by my passion for astronomy, and some of you are following my journey as an amateur astrophotographer.

However, with my own camera and telescope that can image as well or better than the 200 inch telescope at Mt. Palomar did during my high school years, it is of great interest to me to learn about plans for building the largest land-based telescope yet.

Recently, officials from the European Southern Observatory announced where they plan to build the E-ELT, short for European Extremely Large Telescope.

The chosen location is the summit of Cerro Armazones, a remote hilltop on the high plateau of central Chile. Topping out at 10,020 feet (3,060 m), it's not nearly the highest perch for a professional observatory. Mauna Kea's summit, for example, is 13,796 feet (4,207 m) above sea level.

But these days telescope location is more about "attitude" than altitude. Key factors include maximizing cloud-free nights, atmospheric stability ("seeing"), very low water-vapor content (for infrared observations), as well as costs of construction and operation. The ESO's site-selection team spent years assessing a short list of five peaks in Chile and on La Palma in the Canary Islands.

With a billion-euro price tag and a construction timetable projecting "first light" by 2018, the world's largest optical telescope will be a monster. Its primary's mosaic of 1,000 hexagonal mirrors will create an aperture 138 feet (42 meters) across. That's a huge engineering leap: four times the diameter of the largest single-aperture optical telescopes today.

The current design of the European Extremely Large Telescope in its enclosure, which will be nearly 300 feet tall.

If I ever hope to visit it someday, I'd better get in shape.

M99 and M100…and my soapbox comments

2010-04-16T07:58:00.000-07:00

Two of the most spectacular edge-on spiral galaxies are coming into summer viewing…M99 and M100. I have decided to stop trying to be an amateur professional astrophotographer…if there is even an oxymoron like that. No offense to all the dedicated fellow astrophotographers who spend hours, days, and big bucks trying to beat each other at the most perfect image. Hubble has already been there and done that. I am through with that. I like results I can see in one night of no more than one hour imaging.

Anyway, off my soapbox I go and present two galaxies I was never able to get before. I redid my polar alignment using the iterative method and gained almost a minute of unguided accuracy.

M99 is an unbarred spiral galaxy approximately 60 million light-years away in the constellation Coma Berenices. The galaxy has a normal looking arm and an extended arm that is less tightly wound. It was one of the first galaxies in which a spiral pattern was seen, back in 1846. Below is my 12 minute image (90 sec.X 8...(CLICK ON ALL IMAGES FOR A DETAILED VIEW.)

Let’s see how this compares to a near-infrared image taken by NASA:

Next on my list of new galaxies to image was M100. It is an example of a grand design spiral galaxy located within the southern part of constellation Coma Berenices. It is one of the brightest galaxies in the Virgo cluster, approximately 55 million light-years[ distant from Earth and has a diameter of 160,000 light years.

How does my image compare with a professional image taken by an imager of the ESO (the European Southern Observatory) which builds and operates a suite of the world's most advanced ground-based astronomical telescopes?

M53 - Globular Cluster

2010-04-10T06:04:00.000-07:00

The other evening I experimented with two exposures of the globular cluster M53. A globular cluster is a spherical collection of stars that orbits a galactic core as a satellite. Globular clusters are very tightly bound by gravity, which gives them their spherical shapes and relatively high stellar densities toward their centers. Globular clusters are fairly common; there are about 150 currently known globular clusters in the Milky Way.

M53 lies in the constellation Coma Berenices, which is nicely coming into view in the east as we progress toward summer. Although it is one of the outlying clusters in our home galaxy, it is only 58,000 light years away.

I had never imaged M53, so I thought I would try a couple of approaches. The first was a quick 50 second shot, and the second a 5 minute exposure.

Since I took the first picture before the sky was dark, you will notice the light blue color of the sky when the only star visible to the naked eye was the Dog Star Sirius. (CLICK ON BOTH IMAGES FOR LARGER VIEW.)

The second, longer image, was taken around 9:30 pm when darkness was gaining a foothold. Notice the washed out core.

The conclusion to my brief experiments is that in order to obtain greater detail, I will have to wait until conditions are optimal and do more experimenting with exposure times. I didn’t revisit my experiment because I began targeting M99 and M100, two wonderful galaxies I hope to give you a view of in my next post. They are also in Coma Berenices.

2010-03-25T07:55:00.000-07:00

Yesterday evening, when the moon was at slightly past first quarter stage, I took some photos of our neighbor before dark. I used my lunar and planetary camera, the Imaging Source DFK 21AU04.AS USB CCD color camera, inserted into a Meade 5X TeleXtender. My telescope was my smaller piggy-back 80 mm fl400 guidescope. Since the camera takes up to 30 images per second and can shoot a live avi sequence of almost 2000 pictures in less than a minute, picking a good picture is not difficult if one uses a stacking program to come up with one good image.

In any case, here is an image of one of the largest of all lunar formations, the crater Clavius, 145 miles in diameter. The crater is one of the older formations on the lunar surface and was likely formed about 4 billion years ago. Despite its age, however, the crater is relatively well-preserved. It has a relatively low outer wall in comparison to their size, and it is heavily worn and pock-marked by about half a dozen craterlets. (CLICK ON ALL PICTURES FOR A LARGER VIEW.)

Another prominent crater is Copernicus. It is one of the most prominent craters on the Moon. It constitutes a classic example of a relatively young, well-preserved lunar impact crater. Copernicus measures 58 miles in diameter and is a source of radial bright rays, light-colored streaks on the lunar surface formed of material ejected by the impact. Notice the mountain peaks in its center.

Another crater, Plato, has an interesting neighbor…the Alpine Valley. You can see it as a depression cutting through the lunar Alps. The Alpine Valley is classified as a rille…a long, narrow depression in the lunar surface…running about 90 miles long and 5 miles wide. You can see it near the center of the picture below Plato.

The picture below of Crater Gassendi was taken past quarter. It is a large lunar crater feature located at the northern edge of Mare Humorum. The formation has been inundated by lava during the formation of the mare, so only the rim and the multiple central peaks remain above the surface. The outer rim is worn and eroded, although it retains a generally circular form. A smaller crater Gassendi A intrudes into the northern rim, and joins a rough uplift at the northwest part of the floor. The crater pair bears a curious resemblance to a diamond ring.

Finally, there is the famous Apennine mountain range…running about 400 miles long. It begins just to the west of the prominent crater Eratosthenes, which is seen to the left in my picture. Near one of its mountains…Mount Hadley…is a valley that served as the landing site for the Apollo 15 expedition.

M105, NGC 3384, and NGC 3389

2010-03-23T13:52:00.000-07:00

One of the nice things about my new SBIG STL 11000CM camera is that it has the capability to take color astrophotographs without spending many hours for one image, and all the tracking precision and separate imaging in Red, Green, Blue, and Luminance filters that this very complex process requires. Admittedly, when one exposes this camera for nine or ten hours on a distant galaxy or nebula, and combines dark frames, etc., the results are truly spectacular. However, knowing I can engage this process in one thing. The reality is I simply am not patient enough to do so. Not only that, but suitable imaging nights here in northwestern lower Michigan are often quite limited.

I have communication with a fellow astrophotographer in Arizona, where humidity averages about 10 to 12% and cloudless nights are over 300 per year. His images are spectacular, but the investment he has made in equipment boggles the mind. I would guess he has invested well over $75,000 in his equipment…from the best mount (Paramount) to having everything hooked up to his 30″ monitor inside his home. He has the same camera as I do, but he can set his camera and mount to track for four or five hours during the night, making sure that his focus remains precise with an automatic focuser, and other goodies too numerous to mention…go to sleep, and have all of the data saved and ready to process the next morning. He might do this four nights in a row, for ONE image!

Forget that here in Michigan. Clouds roll in, seemingly at will, and leave me with maybe 50 good nights of imaging a year. No wonder there are not too many astrophotographers in this neck of the woods. I am not making excuses…just dealing with reality.

The other evening I imaged three neighboring galaxies…M105, NGC 3384, and NGC 3389. Total length of time? 45 minutes. Yet with a little manipulation in Photoshop, my image, though desaturated and not in color, compares favorably with the one you will find on Wikipedia, for example. (CLICK ON BOTH TO SEE A MORE DETAILED IMAGE.)

Here’s mine:

Now let’s see the image of the same three galaxies in Wikipedia:

M105, aka NGC 3379, is the brightest elliptical galaxy in the Leo I or M96 group of galaxies, and as such approximately 38 million light years distant. It is of type E1, and often studied as a typical representative of elliptical galaxies. M105 is the bright elliptical galaxy at left in our images. Below and right of center is NGC 3384, while the galaxy in the upper right is NGC 3389. This is also the order of increasing difficulty to image. NGC 3384 is probably a member of the Leo I group as is M105. NGC 3389 is probably a background object, as it is receding from us at over 700 miles per second.

In any case, each of the three galaxies probably contain a hundred million or more stars.

Image of 104 Manipulated

2010-03-19T16:30:00.000-07:00

I took the color image taken with the SBIG 11K CM for 30 minutes and changed the TIFF file to FITS and did some levels corrections. I lost the color, but the image is a bit cleaner, and it became my temporary desktop background. CLICK ON FOR A LARGER IMAGE.

M104 at 4:30 AM

2010-03-16T09:43:00.000-07:00

With the recent time change, astrophotography becomes a bit more challenging to my winter evening schedule. As we near summer, the time for the sky to darken goes deeper into the evening. For farmers, working later into the evening is a blessing. For myself, who is both a farm market owner and an astrophotographer, the lengthening of daylight hours is a mixed blessing.

I had spent a couple of hours in the evening from 8:30 onward and closed up the observatory. However, at 3:00 AM I woke up and realized that I had an opportunity to image M104, the Sombrero galaxy. So, without waking the whole household up, I drove to the observatory and powered the scope and 11K camera up. I set the software to take 50 images, each 40 sec. in length, left the observatory and drove home for a cat nap. My picture was waiting for me when I returned at 4:30. CLICK ON FOR LARGER IMAGE.

The Sombrero Galaxy (also known as M 104 or NGC 4594 ) is an unbarred spiral galaxy in the constellation Virgo. It has a bright nucleus, an unusually large central bulge, and a prominent dust lane in its inclined disk. The dark dust lane and the bulge give this galaxy the appearance of a sombrero. The galaxy has an apparent magnitude of +9.0, making it easily visible with amateur telescopes. The large bulge, the central supermassive black hole, and the dust lane all attract the attention of professional astronomers.

M81 - A Galaxy Worth the View

2010-03-09T15:15:00.000-08:00

My new SBIG STL 11000 color CCD camera has surprised me with its tremendous capability. Its power became apparent in an image I took recently. For the first time I was able to leave the observatory for an hour of TV viewing in the comfort of a warm house and let my equipment work for me. With the target of my imaging centered and appropriate information supplied to the computer’s software, I departed for home on my snowmobile.

The camera was told to take 40 images at 45 sec. each, or a total of 30 min. of exposure. I returned to find the image waiting for FITS file manipulation in Photoshop, and voila, here is the result: (CLICK ON FOR DETAILED VIEW.)

M81 is a spiral galaxy about 12 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major. It is one of the most striking examples of a grand design spiral galaxy, with near perfect arms spiraling into the very center. It is relatively close to earth to Earth, and with its large size and its active galactic nucleus (which harbors a 70 million solar mass supermassive black hole), it is one of the most photographed of DSOs. M 81 is the largest galaxy in the M81 Group, a group of 34 galaxies located in the Local Group, which contains the Milky Way.

First light with new camera

2010-03-06T10:14:00.000-08:00

I finally was able to get a cloudless night to try out my new, and much larger (11 megapixels vs. 4) CCD camera. Transparency was poor Friday (Mar. 5) evening which seems to be a problem as snow melts and fills the atmosphere with moisture.

Since receiving the new SBIG STL11000m2 monochrome camera early in February, I decided to upgrade to the one-shot color version of the STL11000 instead. The people at OPTCorp in California were very patient with me, giving me a full refund on the monochrome unit, and expediting the color version which I received last Thursday. Good thing, too, because this coming week looks like a non-stop forecast of cloudless nights and sunny days.

The learning curve on the color camera will not be as high as the monochrome version. I will be able, though, to go deeper with it than the ST4000. I will be learning how to use this Cadillac of CCD cameras.

As I’ve been told by the giants in this business of astrophotography, I have been on training wheels and now it’s time to step into the Cadillac and learn how to drive it. So, be patient, since I know I will learn only by doing, despite the library of books and chat room advice I have.

Anyhow, here is a 50 second image of M42 with the new color camera. Click on for larger view.

Next I tried imaging galaxies M66 and M65 in one field of view. This is a six minute stack. Click on for larger view. Keep in mind that the pros will spend hours imaging this in LGRB (Luminance, Green, Red, and Blue) with a ton of Darks, Flats, and Bias frames added and tweaked.

I am too impatient to do that amount of work, considering the relatively few really good nights we get here in northern Michigan, so that is why the monochrome version was returned and the color version ordered to replace it. Pricier but worth every penny.

As a matter of fact, I have begun a new book, “The Impatient Astrophotographer” which will document my journey from my teens to today, complete with all the failures and successes that entailed. Hopefully it will be out this year.

Lunar Shots with Imaging Source DFK 21AU04.AS USB CCD color camera

2010-02-25T13:05:00.000-08:00

While I am awaiting the arrival of the newest color camera to the observatory...the STL 11000 one-shot color CCD camera...I thought it would be interesting at this time in the lunar cycle to pull up some pictures I took recently with my planet imager, the Imaging Source DFK 21AU04.AS USB CCD color camera. Capable of taking 30 images a minute, I used the camera attached to my guidescope, a 80 mm (fl 400), to wander around the lunar landscape. I won't even attempt to locate what I was imaging, because I'd have to flip the images vertically and then flip them horizontally to match them up with a lunar map. Click on for a larger, but less focused, image. Anyhow, here we go:

First light with new camera

2010-02-20T06:36:00.000-08:00

I finally was able to get a cloudless night to try out my new SBIG STL11000m2 camera. Transparency was very poor which seems to be a problem as snow melts and fills the atmosphere with moisture. However, I chose two objects I imaged before with my ST4000XCM. I have decided to upgrade to the one-shot color version of the STL11000 instead of the monochrome camera the following pictures were taken with. The learning curve on the color camera will not be as high as the monochrome version. I will be able, though, to go deeper with it than the ST4000. I will be learning how to use this Cadillac of CCD cameras. As I've been told by the giants in this business of astrophotography, I have been on training wheels and now it's time to step into the Cadillac and learn how to drive it. So, be patient, since I know I will learn only by doing, despite the library of books and chat room advice I have.

Anyhow, here is a 1 minute image of M42 in CCDSoft v5:

Next I tried imaging a galaxy NGC 891, which I have done in color before. Here it is in B&W for a 1 minute exposure.What should blow your mind is how large the image becomes IF YOU CLICK ON IT. Keep in mind that the pros will spend hours imaging this in LGRB (Luminance, Green, Red, and Blue) with a ton of Darks, Flats, and Bias frames added and tweaked. I am too impatient to do that amount of work, considering the relatively few really good nights we get here in northern Michigan, so the monochrome version will be returned and the color version ordered to replace it.

NGC 2683 and a New CCD Camera

2010-02-11T10:09:00.000-08:00

I have been plagued by poor “transparency” on three nights when there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. If you ever want to experience poor “transparency” on a cloudless night, away from any source of street lights or other forms of light pollution, see if you can see the Milky Way. If you can only see stars and identify constellations, you are going to have serious problems as an astronomer taking any good picture, except those of the moon and planets. Galaxies and nebulae are almost impossible to get good images of because of the moisture in the air, which causes poor “transparency.”

I did image one galaxy for 15 minutes, though, on a cloudless but hopeless night because of poor transparency…NGC 2683. This spiral galaxy is viewed nearly edge-on from our perspective. Because of its appearance, it was nicknamed the "UFO Galaxy" by the Astronaut Memorial Planetarium and Observatory site. Note the yellow core in the center of the galaxy, consisting of older stars.

Despite the winter doldrums, I made an exciting decision to upgrade my SBIG ST4000XCM CCD camera to a SBIG STL11000M2 camera.

Since its introduction, the SBIG STL11000M, 35mm format, 11 megapixel CCD camera has been used in the hands of some of the best astrophotographers in the world to produce some of the most stunning astrophotos ever produced by amateur astronomers. I listed my 4000 camera on Astromart, along with my AO-8 adaptive optics unit and sold both in a day.

As of Friday, Feb. 12th, I will have the choice camera of the elite in the amateur astrophotographer world. I must admit I am intimidated by what I have seen astronomers produce with this camera and filter set. Instead of a single-shot color camera which I have been using, images have to be taken three or four times through red, green, and blue filters and combined. An Ha filter can give greater nebula detail, and a luminance filter can give control over brightness of the image.

Suffice it to say I will be anxious to see what I can image over the next few months. This is the peak of the mountain as far as cameras go. I am about to attempt to scale its possibilities.

The Tax Man Cometh...Run!

2010-01-24T06:37:00.000-08:00

Two things, they say, you cannot escape…Death and Taxes. I have taken note and it seems that even the night sky dots the exclamation point. I got a rare view of the Running Man in my search for interesting objects to photograph. Below is the eerie image I took of the famous Running Man nebula. I exposed my camera for ten minutes to get the picture. (CLICK ON FOR A LARGER VIEW.)

Located just above Orion’s sword, the blue reflection nebula is present in NGC 1977, also called the "Running Man Nebula", is part of the stellar nursery that is M42. New stars are in the process of forming in this part of the galaxy. The Orion Nebula has rich red areas of the hydrogen alpha emissions. This is a florescence, where radiation is causing clouds of hydrogen gas to glow.

Yet another winner for me was NGC 891 an edge-on unbarred spiral galaxy about 30 million light-years away in the constellation Andromeda. You may remember that Andromeda is also home to M31, "The Andromeda Galaxy", which is the finest spiral galaxy in the heavens, and probably the most well known.

NGC 891 is described as “a rather faint, but quite a nice edge-on spiral with clearly distinguished dust-lane in large telescopes,” my ten minute image of it makes it one of my favorites.

Some Neat Nebulae in the Orion Beltway

2010-01-21T07:20:00.000-08:00

In this part of the country, you take what you can get as far as astrophotography goes. As I’ve said before, until February, winter is not a good season for this endeavor. The great advantage is that nights are long; however, the clouds and cold temps make for sporadic and unpredictable visits to my observatory. I’ve grown accustomed to outfitting myself in snowmobile dress attire, with a heater two inches from my mouse on the computer, but ever mindful of that big open space above me in my dome where all the heat I can muster floats up and out. That’s why I am not so inclined to take those four or five hour images that others do. I can live with the “noise” in my photos, at least until temps warm up this spring and summer.

Anyway, despite the problems, last evening was one for the books. I imaged three noteworthy nebulae, one of which (The Horsehead) I had been hoping to get.

Located in the constellation Orion beltway, IC 434 is a dark nebula in the constellation Orion. The nebula is located just below Alnitak, the star farthest left on Orion’s Belt, and is part of the much larger Orion Molecular Cloud Complex. It is approximately 1500 light years from Earth. It is one of the most identifiable nebulae because of the shape of its swirling cloud of dark dust and gases, which is similar to that of a horse’s head. (CLICK ON IT FOR A LARGER VIEW.)

Here is my 6 minute stacked image:

Another nebula in the Orion beltway is the Flame Nebula. (Like my terminology?….because I’ve driven the entire Washington Beltway, but I digress…)

Also known as NGC 2024, the Flame Nebula is an emission nebula about 900 to 1,500 light-years away. That bright star Alnitak shines energetic ultraviolet light into the Flame and this knocks electrons away from the great clouds of hydrogen gas that reside there. Much of the glow results when the electrons and ionized hydrogen recombine. Additional dark gas and dust lies in front of the bright part of the nebula and this is what causes the dark network that appears in the center of the glowing gas. The Flame Nebula is part of the star-forming region that includes the Horsehead.

Below is the Flame Nebula…stacked images totaling a bit over six minutes of exposure.

Finally, while not in Orion, is the Jellyfish Nebula, or IC 443, in the constellation Gemini. Normally faint and elusive, the Jellyfish Nebula is the brighter arcing ridge of emission with dangling tentacles right of center. Light from the explosion first reached planet Earth over 30,000 years ago. Like its cousin in astrophysical waters the Crab Nebula supernova remnant, IC 443 is known to harbor a neutron star, the remnant of the collapsed stellar core. The Jellyfish Nebula is about 5,000 light-years away. At that distance, this image would be almost 200 light-years across.

Below is my 6 minute-plus stacked image.

M77 and IC2233

2010-01-17T05:56:00.000-08:00

The rarity of cloudless nights during the winter months should start to ease off in February, but last evening (Jan. 16th) was a passable night, although “seeing” was abysmal.

I did manage to experiment with two DSOs I hadn’t imaged before. The first, spiral galaxy M77, is one of the most unusual objects in Messier's catalog. However, its visual appearance in a 14-inch telescope is far from spectacular. It appears as a small, round, nebulous patch, with a small, bright, almost star-like nucleus. There is an 8th magnitude star just to the west. This star and the tiny nucleus may be what convinced Messier that this was "A cluster of small stars which contains some nebulosity...." P.Mechain, Messier's friend and rival, first observed M-77 in October 1780. However, it wasn't until 1848 that Lord Rosse recognized it as a 'spiral nebula.'

M-77 is the brightest and closest of the Seyfert galaxies. In 1943 Seyfert described this class as spiral galaxies with nuclei that showed emission lines in addition to the normal continuous spectrum. This implies that there is a cloud of rapidly expanding gas in the nucleus. Observations with X-ray and radio telescopes support this. M77, as well as other Seyfert galaxies, is very bright in the infrared, and its brightness is variable. It has a small energy source in its nucleus that is pumping out more energy than several millions of supernovae. Most astronomers now consider Seyfert galaxies to be older versions of the much more energetic, distant, and young, quasars. The central energy source is most likely a billion solar mass black hole which is consuming gas and whole clusters of stars.

Below is a five minute image of it. CLICK ON IT FOR A LARGER VIEW.

The next object was galaxy IC2233, an extremely difficult object to image because it is of its low surface brightness.

Since I first observed the sky through a telescope, galaxies are fascinating me in their various forms, shapes, and orientations. Many deep-sky fans are enthusiastic about edge-on galaxies, e.g. spirals with a disc seen nearly from the edge. In this case dust bands and the central bulge are dominant features.

However, IC2233 in the constellation Lynx is one of a group of "superthin galaxies" (in short SGs) which are extreme cases, fitted out with some peculiarities. They lack of a bulge and a dust-ring. In some cases the thin disc is "warped ". They are underdeveloped systems, simple featureless discs showing a flat rotation curve. Due to a small amount of interstellar matter, the internal extinction is low and also the star formation rate is minimal. The resulting low stellar density causes a low surface brightness. Many systems are classified as nearby dwarf galaxies. From their spatial distribution it follows, that these "retarded types" are most common objects in the cosmos.

I took a very short photo of it, 150 seconds, but managed to get some idea of it, although with a lot of noise. It's probably better viewed the way it is, but CLICK ON IT FOR A LARGER (AND NOISIER) VIEW. Notice the double star below it.

Back in business...

2010-01-10T06:21:00.000-08:00

I have been without my new Meade 14” LX200 ACF telescope for the better part of three months as it needed repair for a defunct GPS capability. It toured the country to get to Meade headquarters in California, then to Mexico for additional work, and finally home to my observatory. I didn’t lose much photography time, though, since clouds have pretty much blanketed the Grand Traverse area until last evening, Jan. 9th, when I had an hour of reasonably good seeing in 10 degree temperature.

During my waiting period I purchased a SBIG AO-8 adaptive optic unit and an AP CCDT67 telecompressor to go deeper into the sky. The results are in: Success on all fronts.

Below is a 3 minute image of M42, the Orion Nebula, which is always a winter favorite. The Nebula is the brightest starforming, and the brightest diffuse nebula in the sky, and also one of the brightest DSOs. Shining with the brightness of a star of 4th magnitude, it is visible to the naked eye under moderately good conditions, and rewarding in telescopes of every size, from the smallest to the greatest Earth-bound observatories as well as outer-space observatories like the Hubble Space Telescope. It is also a big object in the sky, extending to over 1 degree in diameter, thus covering more than four times the area of the Full Moon.

My second object was a nebula I had never imaged before, M1, the Crab Nebula. It is actually the remnants of a supernova which exploded in the eleventh century AD. It was noted on July 4, 1054 A.D. by Chinese astronomers as a new or "guest star," and was about four times brighter than Venus. According to the records, it was visible in DAYLIGHT! for 23 days, and 653 days to the naked eye in the night sky.

The nebula was independently rediscovered in 1758 by Charles Messier as he was observing a bright comet. Messier cataloged it as the first entry in his catalog of comet-like objects. Images taken several years apart reveal the slow expansion of the nebula. Tracing back its expansion consistently yields a date for the creation of the nebula several decades after 1054, implying that its outward velocity has accelerated since the supernova explosion.

Below is my three minute image of it. CLICK ON BOTH IMAGES FOR A LARGER VIEW.

Black Holes – Science Fiction or Reality?

2010-01-05T06:56:00.000-08:00

A black hole is an object that is so compact (in other words, has enough mass in a small enough volume) that its gravitational force is strong enough to prevent light or anything else from escaping.

The existence of black holes was first proposed in the 18th century, based on the known laws of gravity. The more massive an object, or the smaller its size, the larger the gravitational force felt on its surface.

The name "black hole" was introduced by John Archibald Wheeler in 1967. It stuck, and has even become a common term for any type of mysterious bottomless pit. Physicists and mathematicians have found that space and time near black holes have many unusual properties. Because of this, black holes have become a favorite topic for science fiction writers.

However, black holes are not fiction. They form whenever massive but otherwise normal stars die. We cannot see black holes, but we can detect material falling into black holes and being attracted by black holes. In this way, astronomers have identified and measured the mass of many black holes in the Universe through careful observations of the sky. We now know that our Universe is quite literally filled with billions of black holes.

We cannot glimpse what lies inside the event horizon of a black hole because light or material from there can never reach us. Current theories predict that all the matter in a black hole is piled up in a single point at the center, but we do not understand how this works.

There are so many black holes in the Universe that it is impossible to count them. It's like asking how many grains of sand are on the beach. Fortunately, the universe is enormous and none of its known black holes are close enough to pose any danger to Earth.

Stellar-mass black holes form from the most massive stars when their lives end in supernova explosions. The Milky Way galaxy contains some 100 billion stars. Roughly one out of every thousand stars that form is massive enough to become a black hole. Therefore, our galaxy must harbor some 100 million stellar-mass black holes. Most of these are invisible to us, and only about a dozen have been identified. The nearest one is some 1,600 light years from Earth. In the region of the Universe visible from Earth, there are perhaps 100 billion galaxies. Each one has about 100 million stellar-mass black holes. And somewhere out there, a new stellar-mass black hole is born in a supernova every second.

Supermassive black holes are a million to a billion times more massive than our Sun and are found in the centers of galaxies. Most galaxies, and maybe all of them, harbor such a black hole. So in our region of the Universe, there are some 100 billion supermassive black holes. The nearest one resides in the center of our Milky Way galaxy, 28 thousand light years away. The most distant we know of lives in a quasar galaxy billions of light years away.

Some of the nearest black hole regions are to be found in objects I have been photographing this past year. For example, M51, the Whirlpool Galaxy. It's nicknamed "the Whirlpool" because of its well-defined spiral arms. It actually consists of two galaxies -- the big spiral (NGC 5194), and a smaller galaxy (NGC 5195) that looks like it's being reeled in by the bigger one.

The smaller galaxy is actually moving away from the bigger one. As they move apart, their gravity is pulling out long streamers of stars that form a "bridge" between the two galaxies. The encounter has also ignited an intense outburst of star birth in the larger galaxy. Since most of the new stars are born in the galaxy's spiral arms, they make M51's spiral structure particularly obvious.

In 1992, Hubble Space Telescope images revealed a dark "X" across the bright core of M51's larger galaxy. This X may be two disks of dust that encircle a black hole about one million times the mass of the Sun (about one-third as massive as the black hole at the heart of our own Milky Way galaxy). They form an X because we're viewing them edge-on (like viewing a Frisbee from the side instead of above). They are about 100 light-years wide, and hide the bright inner region of the disk where gas and dust are heated as they spiral in to the black hole. You cannot see the X in my photo of M51, but it’s there. CLICK ON THE IMAGE FOR A LARGER VIEW.

Another galaxy with black holes is our nearest neighbor, M31. A giant spiral galaxy, it spans about 125,000 light-years, and contains several hundred billion stars….perhaps a trillion. At a distance of about 2.4 million light-years, it is the closest large galaxy to the Milky Way, and the only one that is visible to the unaided eye.

Using telescopes on the ground and in space, astronomers discovered two large clumps of stars that appear to form a "double nucleus" in M31. The two bright clumps that form this double nucleus are actually the brightest regions of a disk of stars that completely encircle a supermassive black hole. From measuring the speeds at which these stars orbit the center of the galaxy, astronomers deduce that the black hole is about 30 million times as massive as the Sun and roughly 10 times as massive as the central black hole in the Milky Way. Again, you cannot detect the double nucleus in my image of M31, but you may be able to see a satellite trail which seems to emanate from the orange star, bottom right-center if you look closely by CLICKING ON it for an enlarged view.

Since nothing can escape from the gravitational force of a black hole, it was long thought that black holes are impossible to destroy. But we now know that black holes actually evaporate, slowly returning their energy to the Universe. The well-known physicist and author Stephen Hawking proved this in 1974 by using the laws of quantum mechanics to study the region close to a black hole horizon.

The quantum theory describes the behavior of matter on the smallest scales. It predicts that tiny particles and light are continuously created and destroyed on sub-atomic scales. Some of the light thus created actually has a very small chance of escaping before it is destroyed. To an outsider, it is as though the event horizon glows. The energy carried away by the glow decreases the black hole's mass until it is completely gone.

Sci-fi movies have thrived on concepts of worm holes as a means of space travel being inside of black holes. The intense gravity inside of a black hole would crush any space traveller who got too close. However, the controversy is far from over. Microscopic wormholes may provide a breakthrough in our understanding of quantum gravity, or they may completely invalidate our present models, or they may yet prove to be a dead end. I suspect the only worm holes science will find are in the wood in your home's foundation.

Hawking's theory that black holes end with a whimper and not with a bang showed that there is still much to learn about black holes.

However, Hawking's glow is completely irrelevant for any of the black holes known to exist in the Universe. For them, the temperature of the glow is almost zero and the energy loss is negligible. The time needed for the black holes to lose much of their mass is unimaginably long. However, if much smaller black holes ever existed in the Universe, then Hawking's findings would have been catastrophic. A black hole as massive as a cruise ship would disappear in a bright flash in less than a second.

Two Stunning Discoveries of 2009 in the Solar System

2009-12-26T07:02:00.000-08:00

Just as in so much of building an information base on virtually any topic, astronomy is no exception. With the repair of Hubble and more and more amateur astronomers with better and better equipment, the information about the physical universe continues to stun us all.

Example 1: Who would have thought there were lakes on the largest moon of Saturn? Titan has a diameter roughly 50% larger than Earth’s moon and is 80% more massive. It is the second-largest moon in our solar system, after Jupiter’s moon Ganymede, and it is larger by volume than the smallest planet, Mercury. Titan is primarily composed of water ice and rocky material, and, with a dense atmosphere, has lakes of liquid hydrocarbons on its surface. The atmosphere of Titan is largely composed of nitrogen, and its climate includes methane and ethane clouds. The climate—including wind and rain—creates surface features that are similar to those on Earth, such as sand dunes and shorelines, and, like Earth, is dominated by seasonal weather patterns. The image below shows a glint of sunlight reflecting off one of the moon’s northern lakes, a region that’s been in darkness during the Cassini mission until Saturn recently passed through equinox and spring returned to the northern hemisphere.

Hints of specular reflection off of liquids on Titan's surface had been seen as far back as 2003, using radar pulses from the giant radio dish at Arecibo, Puerto Rico. But that effort probed a region near 26° south, and there was no way to pinpoint a specific feature associated with it.

Not so with Cassini's sunglint. After careful checking, team scientists traced this specular reflection to the southern shoreline of a lake called Kraken Mare which covers about 150,000 square miles, an area larger than the Caspian Sea on Earth.

Example 2: Homer's Iliad tells the story of Troy, a city besieged by the Greeks in the Trojan War. Today, a lone robot sits besieged in the sands of Troy while engineers and scientists plot its escape.

Welcome to "Troy" – Mars style. NASA's robotic rover Spirit is bogged down on the Red Planet in a place the rover team named after the ancient city.

So why aren't scientists lamenting?

"The rover's spinning wheels have broken through a crust, and we've found something supremely interesting in the disturbed soil," says Ray Arvidson of the Washington University in St. Louis.

Spirit, like its twin rover Opportunity, has roamed the Red Planet for nearly 6 years. During that time, the rover has had some close calls and come out fighting from each. In fact, it's been driving backwards since one of its wheels jammed in 2006.

Below, Spirit surveys its own predicament. The bright soil pictured left is loose, fluffy material churned by the rover's left-front wheel as Spirit, driving backwards, broke through a darker, crusty surface. At right is the least-embedded of the rover's six wheels.

From the beginning, the rovers' motto has been "follow the water." Both rovers have been searching Mars for minerals formed in the presence of H2O. Mars appears dry today, but minerals can provide clues that water was once there.

"It's been easy for Opportunity to find such minerals," explains Arvidson. "Opportunity landed in an ancient lake bed. Spirit has had to work much harder. Spirit landed in basaltic plains formed by lava flows chewed up by repeated meteoroid impacts. There's been little evidence of anything that was ever very wet."

But when Spirit reached an area of Mars called the "Columbia Hills," the whole complexion of the mission changed. "Spirit came across iron hydroxide, a mineral that forms in the presence of water. That alerted us to the change. We started coming across more and more rocks formed in the presence of water."

Then Spirit got stuck in a patch of loose soil on the edge of a small crater. Heavy sigh. Stuck again.

But wait!

"Spirit had to get stuck to make its next discovery," says Arvidson.

As the rover tried to break free, its wheels began to churn up the soil, uncovering sulfates underneath.

"Sulfates are minerals just beneath the surface that shout to us that they were formed in steam vents, since steam has sulfur in it. Steam is associated with hydrothermal activity – evidence of water-charged explosive volcanism. Such areas could have once supported life."

"And most amazingly, the boundary between the sulfate-rich soil and the soil with just the generic concentration of sulfates runs right down the middle of the stranded rover. Spirit is lodged on the edge of a crater -- sitting astride the boundary!"

M31 - Our nearest neighbor galaxy

2009-12-18T15:38:00.000-08:00

Of the objects visible in the night sky, we are all familiar with the moon, planets, and stars. What we cannot see without a telescope are galaxies, with one exception...the galaxy nearest to our own Milky Way.

A galaxy is a massive, gravitationally bound system that consists of stars and stellar remnants, an interstellar medium of gas and dust, and an important but poorly understood component tentatively dubbed dark matter. The name is from the Greek root galaxias [γαλαξίας], meaning "milky," a reference to the Milky Way galaxy. Typical galaxies range from dwarfs with as few as ten million stars up to giants with one trillion stars, all orbiting the galaxy's center of mass. Galaxies can also contain many multiple star systems, star clusters, and various interstellar clouds. The Sun is one of the stars in the Milky Way galaxy; the Solar System includes the Earth and all the other objects that orbit the Sun.

Depending on just what level of statistical error can be tolerated, catalogs of galaxies in the Hubble Deep Field list about 3000. This field covers an area of sky of only about 0.04 degrees on a side, meaning that we would need 27,000,000 such patches to cover the whole sky. Ignoring such factors as absorption by dust in our own Galaxy, which make it harder to see outside in some directions, the Hubble telescope is capable of detecting about 80 billion galaxies (although not all of these within the foreseeable future!). In fact, there must be many more than this, even within the observable universe, since the most common kind of galaxy in our own neighborhood is the faint dwarfs which are difficult enough to see nearby, much less at large cosmological distances.

Below is a picture I took of M31, the Andromeda Galaxy, our nearest neighbor of the over hundred billion such galaxies that we know exists. M31 is estimated to have 1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion) stars in it. My image is a Track and Accumulate image of 40 images, each 45 seconds in length, or the equivalent of a 30 minute exposure.

CLICK ON TO SEE A LARGER IMAGE.

The Universe Beneath

2009-11-26T11:28:00.000-08:00

For millennia, mankind has looked upward to the stars, watched the phases of the moon, learned about the wandering stars identified in later ages as planets, and thought the earth was the center of everything. The earliest astronomers were probably shepherds or watchmen at town gates.

The moon’s changing shape over the course of a lunar month doubtless was an object of curiosity at first. Since its phases were spread over a little more than twenty-seven days, it became a predictable marker of time.

However, other bright objects in the night sky became markers as well. The brightest star, Sirius, captivated the Egyptians. The name Sirius comes from the Greeks. The star was known as Sopdet to the Egyptians. Sometime during the Middle Kingdom (2080 and 1640 BC), Egyptians began to use the rising of the star on the day it became visible just before sunrise as the beginning of their New Year.

However, as time went on, the Aristotelian and Ptolemaic world-view gave way to that of Copernicus and Galileo. Understandably the Christian church got involved because of the too-literal interpretation of the Old Testament, was proved wrong, and had to admit that science, too, had something valid to say.

Today, Galileo’s protagonists would be amazed to learn that the Vatican has recently hosted a conference to study the possibility of alien life in the universe. Sponsored by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences , the event took place on the Vatican grounds from November 6-10. The study was part of events marking the UN-designated International Year of Astronomy.

“The questions of life’s origins and of whether life exists elsewhere in the universe are very suitable and deserve serious consideration,” said the Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, an astronomer and director of the Vatican Observatory.

Chris Impey, an astronomy professor at the University of Arizona, said it was appropriate that the Vatican would host such a meeting.

“Both science and religion posit life as a special outcome of a vast and mostly inhospitable universe,” he told a news conference Tuesday. “There is a rich middle ground for dialogue between the practitioners of astrobiology and those who seek to understand the meaning of our existence in a biological universe.”

Thirty scientists, including non-Catholics, from the U.S., France, Britain, Switzerland, Italy and Chile attended the conference, called to explore among other issues “whether sentient life forms exist on other worlds.”

Earlier this year I posted the “What if Factor.” I addressed the topic the Vatican’s beginning discussions will ultimately lead to. To refresh your memory:

The history of Christianity has rested on the assumption that rational beings with spiritual souls residing in earthly bodies are found on this world only. The recent discoveries of exoplanets outside our solar system leads the scientist and theologian to conclude that it is almost unthinkable that intelligent life does not exist anywhere but Earth. There are billions of galaxies with billions of suns with countless billions of planets in the physical universe. The odds that Earth alone has intelligent beings is slim indeed.

To put this into context, in 1999 the Hubble Space Telescope estimated that there were 125 billion galaxies in the universe, and the number of galaxies discovered grows each year.

Jewish and Christian belief in an “original sin” by a set of first parents is well known to the world. What if earth-like beings, similar to humans, exist in other galaxies? If they descended from an “Adam and Eve” on their planet, did their first parents sin and pass that original sin to their offspring? If so, was there a need for a redeemer, another Christ? If the experience of the human race on Earth is any guide, most probably.

Could the Second Person of the Trinity be the Redeemer on other planets? Why not?

What if their “Adam and Eve” did not sin? Would their descendants be tested somehow? I don’t think God makes robots. Free will and choice are apparently part of his plan.

So much for the universe that surrounds us. What is equally as fascinating is the universe beneath us.

Cain Burdeau of the Associated Press recently filed this report:

The creatures living in the depths of the ocean are as weird and outlandish as the creations in a Dr. Seuss book: tentacled transparent sea cucumbers, primitive “dumbos” that flap ear-like fins, and tubeworms that feed on oil deposits.

A report released Sunday recorded 17,650 species living below 656 feet, the point where sunlight ceases. The findings were the latest update on a 10-year census of marine life.

“Parts of the deep sea that we assumed were homogenous are actually quite complex,” said Robert S. Carney, an oceanographer at Louisiana State University and a lead researcher on the deep seas.

Thousands of marine species eke out an existence in the ocean’s pitch-black depths by feeding on the snowlike decaying matter that cascades down – even sunken whale bones. Oil and methane also are an energy source for the bottom-dwellers, the report said. The researchers have found about 5,600 new species on top of the 230,000 known. They hope to add several thousand more by October 2010, when the census will be done.

The scientists say they could announce that a million or more species remain unknown. On land, biologists have catalogued about 1.5 million plants and animals.

They say they’ve found 5,722 species living in the extreme ocean depths, waters deeper than 3,280 feet.

“The deep sea was considered a desert until not so long ago; it’s quite amazing to have documented close to 20,000 forms of life in a zone that was thought to be barren,” said Jesse Ausubel with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a sponsor of the census.

“The deep sea is the least-explored environment on Earth.”

More than 40 new species of coral were documented on deep-sea mountains, along with cities of brittlestars and anemone gardens. Nearly 500 new species ranging from single-celled creatures to large squid were charted in the abyssal plains and basins.

Also of importance were the 170 new species that get their energy from chemicals spewing from ocean-bottom vents and seeps. Among them was a family of “yeti crabs,” which have silky, hairlike filaments on the legs.

In the mid-Atlantic, researchers found 40 new species and 1,000 in all, said Odd Aksel Bergstad, an oceanographer with the University of Bergen in Norway who was reached by telephone in the Azores islands.

“It was a surprise to me to find such rich communities in the middle of the ocean,” he said.

“There were not even good maps for the area. Our understanding of the biodiversity there was very weak.”

Researching the abyss has been costly and difficult because it involved deep-towed cameras, sonar and remotely operated vehicles that cost $50,000 a day to operate, Carney said.

Once the census is complete, the plan is to publish three books: a popular survey of sea life, a second book with chapters for each working group and a third focusing on biodiversity.

It is an exciting world we live in today. Take a look at my image of a dense star cloud in our Milky Way and perhaps you, like me, will stand in awe of the immensity of creation and the creativity of its Creator. So many stars, so many galaxies…and just waiting to be discovered…so much life above, around, and below us.

(CLICK ON IMAGE FOR LARGER VIEW.)

Water on the Moon? You’ve got to be kidding….

2009-11-15T12:23:00.000-08:00

My study of the moon has always had a “given” truth…one of those notions that science could never question. After several landings on the moon and detailed mapping of its surface, there simply was no question that the moon was a lifeless, waterless, barren orb of dry dust and rock that have remained that way for millennia.

For these past four decades, the rock solid truth of planetary science (pun intended) has been that the Moon contains no water. Nada, zip, zilch. Not only did the lunar samples returned by Apollo astronauts contain no trace of water, but they also lacked any minerals whatsoever hinting that water existed in the distant past.

This sure bet started to get a second look in the 1990s, when the Clementine and Lunar Prospector orbiters found evidence that water ice might be stashed in permanently shadowed crater floors near the Moon's north and south poles.

More recently, reanalysis of some lunar samples have turned up water traces in little beads of volcanic glass, and from this they conclude that the lunar interior might contain water at abundances of up to 745 parts per million — less than 0.1% — but not zero!

NASA said Friday, Nov. 13th, it had discovered water on the moon, opening "a new chapter" that could allow for the development of a lunar space station.

The discovery was announced by project scientist Anthony Colaprete at a midday news conference.

"I'm here today to tell you that indeed, yes, we found water. And we didn't find just a little bit; we found a significant amount" -- about a dozen, two-gallon bucketfuls, he said, holding up several white plastic containers.

The find is based on preliminary data collected when the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, was intentionally crashed into the permanently shadowed region of Cabeus crater near the moon's south pole on October 9th.

After the satellite struck, a rocket flew through the debris cloud, measuring the amount of water and providing a host of other data, Colaprete said.

The project team concentrated on data from the satellite's spectrometers, which provide the best information about the presence of water, Colaprete said. A spectrometer helps identify the composition of materials by examining light they emit or absorb.

What to Look for in November

2009-10-30T06:19:00.000-07:00

I have used most of my posts displaying astrophotographs I have taken of DSOs. November is not a great month for additional work in that department. However, once in a while the night sky clears and the casual observer might want to know what’s visible above. So here goes…for November.

Weather permitting, the big show during November will be the Leonid meteor shower. The meteors annually appear, emanating from the constellation Leo, which rises in the east later in the evening. Below is a Japanese astronomer's long exposure of the 2001 Leonids. (CLICK ON FOR A MORE DETAILED IMAGE.)

"On Nov. 17, 2009, we expect the Leonids to produce upwards of 500 meteors per hour," says Bill Cooke of the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. "That's a very strong display.

Since we begin the month with a return to Eastern Standard Time, everything will get darker by an hour, so be aware that night-time viewing will be easier for all you early risers.

Jupiter is still king this month. Look for it in the south. You can’t miss it.

Mercury is lost in the light of sunrise.

Mars rises around midnight and is very high in the southeast before dawn. It's below Gemini's head stars, Pollux and Castor. Use binoculars to watch Mars near the Beehive Star Cluster. It will be attractive to watch the ice cap change if you do have a scope and are willing to be up that late.

Queen of the morning planets is Venus. I saw it the other morning on a trip into TC. Almost looked like a UFO. I saw another bright object brighter than Venus, but, alas, it was an airplane.

Venus is so bright that it's easy to spot if you look low in the east 60 to 30 minutes before sunrise.

Saturn, only a hundredth as bright, is above Venus and somewhat to the right. Unless you get up before dawn on a clear morning, have a scope, and know where to look, you probably won’t be able to identify it.

I’ll be anxiously awaiting the return of Saturn in the night sky later in 2010, to watch the reappearance of its slightly-tilted rings. We went through a year of ringless Saturn this year.

The Fireworks Galaxy and the Snowball Nebula

2009-10-22T11:23:00.000-07:00

Although I spent some time in a previous post discussing the NGC catalog, and the following two NGC DSOs were cursorily discussed, the two NGC DSOs visible during this time of year hold great interest for the astrophotographer looking for new objects to image.

At the risk of being repetitious, the first, NGC 6946, is both a spectacular and dim galaxy in Cepheus. At a distance of 10 million light years, this galaxy is one of about a dozen nearby neighbors to the Milky Way.

This galaxy has had an enormous number of supernovae explosions in the past 60 years. If we could watch this galaxy with years passing as seconds, every moment or two we would see a star blow up!

From our vantage point in the Milky Way Galaxy, we see NGC 6946 face-on. Nearly 40,000 light-years across, NGC 6946 is also known as the Fireworks Galaxy, appropriately named because of all of the explosions of massive supernovae.

Below is my Track and Accumulate composite of 16 images at 45 seconds each.

As the weather turns cool this autumn, perhaps it is a bit premature to look ahead to winter. However, the sky above has a constant reminder of what is coming — snow. NGC 7662, also known as the Snowball Nebula, is visible in moderately sized telescopes as a bluish ball. Located in the fall and early winter constellation of Andromeda (home to our nearest galaxy neighbor, M31), it contains a blue dwarf star at its center, thus having one of the hottest nuclei of any planetary nebulae.

The distance to this nebula is not known with any real accuracy, but some estimates put it at about 5,600 light years away.

Ninety-five percent of all stars we see in our own galaxy, the Milky Way, will ultimately become “planetary nebulae.” This includes the sun. Much as a butterfly emerges from its cocoon, planetary nebulae are formed when a red giant star ejects its outer layers as clouds of luminescent gas, revealing the dense, hot, and tiny white, or bluish-white, dwarf star at its core. The other 5 percent of stars — that is, those born with masses more than eight times larger than our sun — end their lives as supernovae.

Below is my enlarged T & A image of this beautiful nebula.

Speaking of autumn, dark cloudless nights are going to be the exception from now on. Sunset comes earlier each day as we cross the autumnal equinox. As of November’s first Sunday, we will lose daylight savings time, and I will be able to get to the observatory early in the evening. However, because of the generally cloudy skies in our area during November, I’m afraid my viewing nights will be few indeed.

M33 - The Triangulum Galaxy and M11- The Wild Duck Cluster

2009-10-11T06:53:00.000-07:00

Since I have come to be a fan of the Track and Accumulate method of capturing Deep Sky Objects (DSOs) that the SBIG cameras are known for, I always knew that if I wanted to go deeper into revealing details of DSOs, I would have to learn how to get my camera to self-guide. Self-guiding basically involves calibrating on a bright star with a separate camera…in this case, one that involves a separate computer chip which does the task…and letting this second chip tell the telescope where to stay as it tracks the DSO.

Well, I tried it and here is my first result…M33…tracked for 297 seconds, or almost five minutes. This is hardly an excellent accomplishment, because self-guiding with a properly aligned scope can hold the DSO without star movement for hours, but it is my first step up on the ladder to achieving what amateur astrophotographers with their 50K investments in cameras, scopes, etc. are producing.

M33 is is a member of what’s known as our Local Group of galaxies. Along with our own Milky Way and Andromeda, the group of about 50 galaxies travels together in the universe, bound to one another by gravity. In fact, M33 is one of the few galaxies that is moving toward the Milky Way despite the fact that space is expanding, causing most galaxies in the universe to grow farther and farther apart. It is located about 2.9 million light-years away in the constellation Triangulum.

Contrast this DSO with M11. M11 is one of the most condensed open clusters in the sky.

An intriguing and tantalizing sight in binoculars, it is wonderful in a telescope, and is many observer’s favorite open cluster.

Located in the constellation of Scutum, it is sometimes mistaken for a loose globular cluster. M11 is also called the “Wild Duck Cluster” because of it’s resemblance to a flight of wild ducks when viewed in a telescope. Appropriate viewing for this time of year for duck hunters!

M11, with an overall brightness of magnitude 5.8, contains as many as 500 stars ranging from 8th magnitude down to 14th magnitude.

This image of mine was a short 20 second “Grab” photo…no self-guiding needed. Obviously, with that short of an exposure, one doesn’t see the several hundred stars that would be visible if I used the T&A or self-guiding method, but at least it brings into focus what only appears as a blur in binoculars.

Two Great Nebulae…

2009-09-11T10:32:00.000-07:00

Summer is the best time to view two nebulae that are truly outstanding. Nebula is the Latin word for “cloud” … and that really describes it well. Many nebulae form from the gravitational collapse of gas in space. As the material collapses under its own weight, massive stars may form in the center. Some nebulae are formed as the result of supernova explosions, the death throes of massive, short-lived stars. Other nebulae may form as planetary nebulae. This is the final stage of a low-mass star's life, like earth's sun.

My image below is of M27, the Dumbbell Nebula. It is of the planetary type, with a dying white dwarf at its center. Taken in early September, this image is a Track and Accumulate, without focal reducer, of seven combined images of 40 sec. each.

The other spectacular nebula is M57, the Ring Nebula. M57 is probably the most looked at and most photographed object in the sky. Much of its popularity rests on the fact that it can be seen in almost any sized telescope. Its appearance as a tiny ring of smoke in a dark sky is a sight not soon forgotten.

In looking back at records I noted, I first saw the Ring Nebula in August of 1999, so I have a bit of nostalgia because it was one of the most memorable sights I had seen in a large telescope. Located in the constellation Lyra, there are three stars in the constellation which form the “Summer Triangle”….Vega, Deneb, and Altair. Since Lyra is almost overhead, it is a bit uncomfortable to view in most telescopes except the Newtonians, because unless your refractor or SCT has a diagonal, you almost have to get on your knees to look up into the finder scope and then your main scope.

M57 is a planetary nebula, and if you look carefully, you can see the white dwarf star in the center. The circle of gases were caused as its former stage collapsed.

It is truly mind boggling that a modest amateur telescope with the latest electronic technology can do today what the greatest telescopes of only a decade or two ago could do. When I was a kid, Mt. Palomar, with its 200” mirror was the ultimate scope.

Below is my 4 minute exposure that is actually as good, if not better, than that taken at Palomar those many years ago. (I’ve seen the old photos.):

NGC 4565 & M63

2009-08-25T14:12:00.000-07:00

Last evening, even with my scope unable to use its GPS function, I was able to image two DSOs I had not attempted before. The first, NGC 4565, is an edge-on unbarred spiral galaxy about 53 million light-years away. I took a four minute exposure with dark applied of this beautiful galaxy. With a thin disk and bulging central nucleus, this magnificent edge-on spiral galaxy in Coma Berenices resembles a frosty flying saucer speeding through intergalactic space. Our own Milky Way Galaxy would look much like NGC 4565 if viewed edge on from a distance of 50 million light years or so. Roughly 125,000 light years in diameter, this beauty is about 25% larger than the Milky Way.

The other DSO I captured is M63, The Sunflower galaxy, is a beautiful spiral galaxy located in the constellation Canes Venatici. It is part of the M51 group of galaxies, located at a distance of about 37 million light years. With a mass of 10 billion suns and a diameter of about 60,000 light-years, the Sunflower Galaxy is only a fraction of the size of our Milky Way. My image is a one minute "Grab" exposure with dark applied.

The Andromeda Galaxy and the Bubble Nebula

2009-08-24T08:30:00.000-07:00

Last evening was a welcome night for taking DSOs. "Seeing" was great, which meant there was little atmospheric interference from moisture. My GPS function on my new scope needs repair, and this accounts for the elongated stars, but I was able to image a couple of stunners. The first was everybody's favorite, M31, the Andromeda Galaxy. I tried just a 2 min. unguided exposure of this galaxy, our nearest neighbor, with an f6.5 focal reducer, and was amazed to see the detail longer exposures failed to show before. (CLICK ON IT FOR A BETTER VIEW.)

The other object of interest...one I had never before selected...was the Bubble Nebula. Nebulae are gaseous cloud formations spewed off from a collapsed star which usually appears near the center of the image as a white dwarf star. You may have to use your imagination a bit to see at least the bottom half of the "bubble," but for a two minute unguided shot, I'd say you can tell where the nebula gets its name.

A Host of Summer Treats

2009-08-21T08:17:00.000-07:00

Imaging new objects in the sky is not only satisfying, but also food for serious thoughts about cosmology. Every time I go out to my observatory, I view it as a kind of sacred place where I am allowed the privilege of seeing God’s creation in ways not many are able to.

August is a great month, temperature-wise, to be under my observatory dome and the dome of the ages…the night-time sky. I’m like a kid in a candy store, looking for the best treats I can find.

One of the great thrills is imaging M20, the Trifid Nebula. Looking like a beautiful rose in bloom, I never get tired of it. I’ve blogged about it before, but the picture below is a more complete image with the blue-green coloration below it. It is a red emission nebula with a young star cluster near its center. I’ll spare you further details and just let you glimpse my ten minute image of it. (CLICK ON THIS IMAGE AND THOSE THAT FOLLOW FOR A DETAILED VIEW.)

Another treat of the summer sky is M24. It is not a "true" deep sky object, but a huge star cloud in Milky Way, a pseudo-cluster of stars spread thousands of light years along the line of sight, perceived through a chance tunnel in the interstellar dust. You can only see a portion of it here:

Since I began this post with reference to the sacred I find in the sky above me, what more fitting object to try to image than “The Eye of God.” The Helix Nebula, also known as The Helix or NGC 7293, is a large planetary nebula located in the constellation of Aquarius. Discovered by Karl Ludwig Harding, probably before 1824, this object is one of the closest to the Earth of all the bright planetary nebulae.

I won’t make too many excuses for my effort below, because it can be imaged much more clearly. However, in my 15 minute exposure, several clouds passed through, so that did affect the outcome. I definitely will be trying to do better on a clear night.

Spiders are feared by some. This condition is called arachnophobia. One of my children had this condition as a child. It was a particular problem because when you heat your house with wood, there are some big ones that get inside. However, NGC 6547, called the “Red Spider Nebula,” is a really treat to see. Unfortunately, it is huge, and I could only capture a part of it.

Found in the constellation Sagittarius, it is centered on one of the hottest white dwarfs ever observed, probably a member of a binary system. Stellar winds have been measured blowing from the central stars at over 300 km/s. These hot winds expand the nebula, flow along the nebula's walls, and cause gas and dust to collide. Below is a ten minute exposure of one side of the spider’s abdomen.

Finally, since I haven’t posted many star clusters, there is one worth seeing…M23. It is a glorious sight for small telescopes and binoculars in the summer Milky Way. There are over 120 cluster members in and it is considered to be one of the older open clusters. I took a 40 sec. picture of it at dusk.

This Year's Best...

2009-08-09T13:37:00.000-07:00

If you’ve been following my posts on astronomy, you surely are aware that I am a learner-in-progress when it comes to astrophotography. Yet, like so many producers of this or that, there comes a time when highlights of their work are published. So it is in my case. I am devoting this post to the twelve “best” astrophotographs I have taken this past year. (BY ALL MEANS CLICK ON EACH OF THE PICTURES FOR A DETAILED LOOK.)

At No. 1 is my recent photo of M51, the Whirlpool galaxy below. I am one of those astrophotographers who does not like to spend the hours it takes to get a picture worthy of publication. In other words, when I go out to my observatory I want to spend two hours maximum and come home with a picture or pictures that are worth saving. So, what to do?

Two solutions: First, invest in the biggest scope within my budget with lots of light-gathering capability. Second, invest in the best CCD camera I can afford. Both I have done. I have a 14” LX200 Meade ACF Go-To telescope and an SBIG ST-4000XCM CCD camera with built-in autoguider.

There are basically four approaches to use with a CCD camera. No. 1: Guiding with an autoguider using a radial off-axis guider; No. 2: Guiding with an autoguider using a separate guide scope; No. 3: Track and Accumulate, an SBIG patented technique where multiple images are added together with shifts to produce a longer equivalent exposure; and No. 4: Self-guiding.

Method No. 1: I have used an off-axis guider, but it involves handling equipment on the scope…a bump here or there can mess up a picture.

Method No. 2: I have an 80 mm guidescope and used it with a separate autoguider. No sustained interest in that approach. I don’t like the time it takes to calibrate a guide star before you start imaging the target. Also, my big 14” scope did not like to respond to the autoguider’s calibration, even though I sought advice from the best amateur astrophotographer in the business, Chris Hendron.

Method No. 3: My current method of choice is the Track & Accumulate technique. One finds out the maximum time of exposure that avoids star-trailing or even oblong stars, then takes multiple exposures (10, 20, or more) for that period of time …say 60 seconds. For the M51Whirlpool galaxy, I took 20 images at 45 sec. each giving me a 900 second exposure, or 15 minutes. If I had taken more exposures, the detail would be enhanced, but I liked the results, and was satisfied.

Method No. 4: In the future, I will go to the final technique of finding a good guide star and letting the camera self-guide itself. That will be the key to improved images.

Getting back to my best images…most of which were taken using the T&A method…

At No. 2, the Eagle Nebula, M16, also famous as the “Pillars of Creation”:

At No. 3, the Trifid Nebula, M20:

At No. 4, M42, the Orion Nebula:

At No. 5, the Omega or Swan nebula, M17:

At No. 6, M5 a dense star cluster:

At No. 7, M88 a spiral galaxy:

At No. 8, Jupiter with Red Spot:

At No. 9, the Irregular galaxy, M82:

At No. 10...Lunar craters Copernicus and Erotasthenes...and the Apenine mountains.

At No. 11, M31, the Andromeda Galaxy:

Finally, M101, the Pinwheel Galaxy:

So, there you have it…my best efforts at astrophotography over the past year. I still have much to learn and an absolute must is learning how to use the autoguider in my camera to self-guide.

Then, I can go home and watch some TV for a couple of hours while my scope, camera, and computer do their thing. But wait, I’m a “hands-on” kind of guy who likes to see things happen …so maybe I’ll never get to the point of perfection. But, hey, that’s okay…it’s all in the learning and doing when your gallery of objects is the universe.

M88 and M90...Beautiful Summer Galaxies

2009-08-01T11:48:00.000-07:00

On a so-so “transparency” night last evening, I trained my scope on M88, a beautiful, if not quite faint, galaxy. One of the Virgo cluster members, it was near the horizon as I imaged it for a total of ten minutes. The background sky was a bit on the dark blue side at around 10:30 pm as you can detect from the image. The galaxy was one of the eight galaxies found on March 18, 1781 by Messier, who thought it was “a nebula without stars.”

However, if you look carefully, you can see its spiral rings. Its appearance resembles a bit that of the Andromeda galaxy, but, unlike Andromeda, it is speeding away from our galaxy at about 1240 miles per second. (CLICK ON IT FOR A DETAILED VIEW.)

The second beautiful galaxy which I imaged was M90. This galaxy has a very compact and bright nucleus. Because of M90's proximity and motion inside the Virgo Cluster, M90 actually shows a blueshift - indicating that it is moving toward us rather than away.

So, M88 is speeding away from us, and M90 is coming toward us. Both are visible in the west. At a distance of 60 million light years, M90 has enough velocity to escape from the gravitational bonds of the Virgo Cluster of galaxies.

Below is my image of this apparently perpendicular spiral galaxy, using Track and Accumulate of ten one minute exposures.

M81& The Cocoon Nebula…NGC 5146

2009-07-30T04:54:00.000-07:00

On a night of excellent “seeing,” I was able to image two DSOs I had never tried to before. The first, M81, is a spiral galaxy about 12 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major. M81 is one of the most striking examples of a grand design spiral galaxy, with near perfect arms spiraling into the very center. Because of its proximity to Earth, its large size, and its active galactic nucleus (which harbors a supermassive black hole) Messier 81 is a popular galaxy to study in professional astronomy research. The galaxy's large size and relatively low apparent magnitude (lower magnitude implies higher brightness) also make it a popular target for amateur astronomy observations. Below is a Track and Accumulate image of about three minutes exposure.

My second DSO was the Cocoon Nebula. Difficult to get unless the atmosphere is in “good seeing” mode, NGC 5146. In small scopes it is very faint. It is a strikingly beautiful nebula, though, located about 4,000 light years away toward the constellation of Cygnus. Inside the Cocoon is a newly developing open cluster of stars. Like other stellar nurseries, the Cocoon Nebula is, at the same time, an emission nebula, a reflection nebula, and an absorption nebula. Speculation based on recent measurements holds that the massive star in the center of the above image opened a hole in an existing molecular cloud through which much of the glowing material flows. The same star, which formed about 100,000 years ago, now provides the energy source for much of the emitted and reflected light from this nebula.

I used a Track and Accumulate method, of 60 second exposures, to image it.

Star Clusters – M5 & a Dense Star Field near NGC 7000

2009-07-25T11:32:00.000-07:00

What is a star cluster? Basically it is a group of stars, anywhere from a few hundred to tens of millions, that are gravitationally bound together. There are two kinds of star clusters…Globular and Open.

Globular clusters are roughly spherical groupings of from 10,000 to several million stars packed into regions of from 10 to 30 light years across. They commonly consist of very old stars -- just a few hundred million years younger than the universe itself . A few posts ago, I featured a picture of M5 I took last August. I took another just recently with my SBIG 4000cxm camera, and here is a six minute exposure of it:

M5 is, under extremely good conditions, just visible to the naked eye as a faint "star." However, you have to use binoculars or a telescope to see anything but that. Spanning 165 light-years in diameter, M5 is one of the larger globular clusters known.

The Big Bang, or beginning of the universe, occurred 13.7 billion years ago. This cluster formed “shortly” after that…about 13 billion years ago. Its distance is about 24,500 light-years from us and the cluster contains more than 100,000 stars, or as many as 500,000 according to some estimates.

Open clusters are different from globular clusters. Unlike the spherically-distributed globulars, they are confined to the our galaxy, and are almost always found within the Milky Way’s spiral arms. They are generally young objects, up to a few tens of millions of years old. Below is an 8 minute image of a dense field of stars…which is technically not an open cluster…near the North American Nebula which I was trying to image. I suspect the NA nebula is below the image I took. I took leave of my observatory instead of trying for another shot, since the midnight hour struck and I am not one for much imaging after the new day begins.

What impressed me about this dense field of stars is that THERE ARE SO MANY OF THEM! To estimate distances between all of these would take years. They are, however, all in our Milky Way galaxy. BE SURE TO CLICK ON THE IMAGE FOR A BETTER VIEW!

M98, M100, and M101 – Summer Galaxies…and the Reappearance of Jupiter

2009-07-21T11:46:00.000-07:00

Toward the end of July, there is an abundance of excellent DSO’s to image. The constellations to the south and west offer treats of nebulae and galaxies that are hard to match. The only problem, as I’ve said before, is that you have to be willing to stay up late, because imaging doesn’t get going until that clock strikes before midnight.

One of the dimmer galaxies is M98. It is one of the faintest objects in Messier's catalog. M98 is nearly edge-on and displays a chaotic, diffuse disk, containing some blue regions of newly formed stars, and a huge quantity of occulting dust, which reddens considerably the light of the central small but bright nucleus.

Discovered in 1781, it is about 60 million light years away.

Since I have recently gotten my scope polar aligned and collimated…collimation is extremely important, as I will explain. A couple of weeks ago, I began a careful diagnostic series of "repair" missions to my telescope.

I knew I had a long evening ahead because it meant collimating my scope. Scopes can lose their factory settings in shipping. As a further repair element, I wanted to, once and for all, get the scope polar-aligned. Polar alignment took several (15 in all) iterations. Result? The evening was a success. Collimation went reasonably well, what with screwing tiny screws on the secondary mirror in complete experimentation mode, standing atop a ladder in the dark.

Anyway, the process has led to my ability to track and accumulate images without using an autoguider. I have the SSAG model by Orion with a 2X Barlow lens focused in a diagonal of an 80 mm guidescope, but perfection with calibrating guide stars will be a project all on its own. For now I am satisfied with the T & A method.

Below is my image of M98…an accumulation of 8 images of 25 sec. each, or a total exposure of over 3 minutes.

M100 is a grand-design spiral galaxy, and one of the brightest galaxies in the Virgo Cluster. It is tilted nearly face-on as seen from earth. It is among the first spirals that have been discovered. The galaxy has two prominent arms of bright blue stars and several fainter arms. The blue stars in the arms are young hot and massive stars which formed recently from density perturbations caused by interactions with neighboring galaxies which are lying just outside our image. M100 is estimated to be 56 million light years away. Sorry about the blue sky, but I took the image at dusk.

The most spectacular spiral galaxy, seen face-on, in my opinion is M101. I posted this in one of my earlier blogs, but with my adjusted scope and with darks applied, this image was exposed for over six minutes, so it has little noise.

M101 is the brightest of a group of at least 9 galaxies, called the M101 Group. M101 is twice as large as our Milky Way galaxy, and, I always find myself coming back to get a better image. I guess it’s my favorite galaxy.

Finally, before midnight, Jupiter reappears in the east, and will be with us for quite some time…into the fall.

This image tried to capture the moons of the giant planet, so Jupiter appears washed out and light-saturated. There are three moons visible. The first (top left is Europa. The second, below Jupiter to the right, is Ganymede, and the third bottom right, is Callisto. Hidden behind Jupiter is Io.

For an interesting slide show I prepared on the planets and their moons, go to http://www.slideshare.net/ejjhpiano/childrens-astronomy-presentation. The program is geared for Junior-high students, but there are plenty of up-close-and-personal images of the moons in our solar system.

The Eagle and the Swan

2009-07-11T09:49:00.000-07:00

The Hubble space telescope has produced startling images of deep space objects (DSOs). In the top five is one called “The Pillars of Creation.” Images made in 1995 by Jeff Hester and Paul Scowen using the Hubble greatly improved scientific understanding of processes inside the nebula. The picture taken depicts a large region of star formation. The Pillars is located in the Eagle Nebula, or M16, and is in the constellation Serpens which is in perfect viewing to the south as we near the end of July.

One cannot see M16 without telescopic help, but if you own one it is worth seeing.

The other night I was able to capture an image with my equipment. Below is a series of ten 25 sec. exposures of the “eagle”….which forms a prominent part of the Pillars image.

If you look carefully near the bottom of the image, you can see what appears to be a dark eagle flying upward. (You will have to click on image to see it enlarged.) This is the central “pillar.”

The next image, not taken by me but by a fellow astrophotographer, is an enhanced image of M16, which more clearly shows the eagle and the two other pillars, one on either side. (Again, click on image to see it enlarged.)

Finally, the Hubble shot:

Eerie, dramatic pictures from the Hubble show newborn stars emerging from "eggs" — not the barnyard variety — but rather, dense, compact pockets of interstellar gas called evaporating gaseous globules (EGGs). These striking pictures resolve the EGGs at the tip of finger-like features protruding from monstrous columns of cold gas and dust in M16. The columns — dubbed "elephant trunks" — protrude from the wall of a vast cloud of molecular hydrogen, like stalagmites rising above the floor of a cavern. Inside the gaseous towers, which are light-years long, the interstellar gas is dense enough to collapse under its own weight, forming young stars that continue to grow as they accumulate more and more mass from their surroundings.

The other DSO that I imaged was M17, the Swan Nebula. The nebula lies some 5,500 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius, and stretches 15 light-years across. I just mentioned that M16 was a nursery of new star formation...well, astronomers calculate that it’s one of the youngest and most massive stellar nurseries in our Milky Way galaxy. The nursery began forming new stars only a few million years ago. In May, a team of astronomers analyzing the nebula as seen via NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope estimated that more than 1,000 stars are forming in and around the nebula. The Swan Nebula is visible with binoculars in July and August, but one has to get a star map to find it. Astronomy magazine would be a great help for the casual observer, since it identifies constellations and highlights such as M16 and M17.

My picture is a 40 sec. image in RGB mode.

M20 and M22 – Fireworks in the Sky

2009-07-06T05:12:00.000-07:00

“And the rockets red glare, the bombs bursting in air…” At about 11:30 pm July 4th, my son and I were in my observatory imaging M20 and M22, when the Leland fireworks went into their thunderous finale. Leland is about three or four miles from where we were, and, inside the observatory’s dome, it seemed like we were next door. But we were observing our own fireworks that are perpetually on display in the heavens.

The moon was 95% full and I wanted to take a picture of M22. It was about a hand width east of the moon, so I didn’t know if the ambient light would blanche out the attempt. Nope. The SBIG 4000 CXM camera and 14” telescope mirror came through to our surprise. The first object captured was M22. Below is a 20 second exposure with dark applied in RGB format.

M22 is one of the nearer globular clusters to Earth at a distance of about 10,600 light-years away. Probably because of its proximity to earth, it is the brightest cluster of stars in our hemisphere. Kind of looks like a fireworks display.

The final attraction for the night was M20. The Trifid Nebula is a bright and colorful object, and is always a favorite of amateur astronomers. Trifid, loosely translated, means “divided into three sections.” M20 is an unusual combination of an open cluster of stars and different types of nebulae, including a dark nebula (the apparent 'gaps' ). The picture below was a 40 sec. exposure with dark applied in sRGB mode. M20’s distance from earth is not known, but it is close, as DSOs go…perhaps in the 5,000 ly category. In other words, the light from the nebula you see here began its travel to earth when the Sumerians began writing in cuneiform.

Returning to the Moon

2009-07-04T07:34:00.000-07:00

I was fortunate enough to remember when, on May 25, 1961, President Kennedy announced before a special joint session of Congress the dramatic and ambitious goal of sending an American safely to the Moon before the end of the decade. I also kept track of all the Gemini and Apollo launches that ensued until the famous landing of Neil Armstrong on the moon on July 20th of 1969, forty years ago this month.

Lately there has been renewed interest in returning to our nearest night sky friend. On June 18th, NASA launched the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter aboard an Atlas V rocket.

"Our job is to perform reconnaissance of the moon's surface using a suite of seven powerful instruments," said Craig Tooley, LRO project manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "NASA will use the data LRO collects to design the vehicles and systems for returning humans to the moon and selecting the landing sites that will be their destinations."

Well, LRO’s camera has been hard at work already in its task of mapping the entire moon to assist selecting future manned landings. One of its first images was taken in a region east of a crater in the lunar highlands south of Mare Nubium. The picture reveals details down to about 10 feet across. Below is the stunning image. (Click on it to see a larger image.)

The stunning capability of the new camera to image such detail was not available for Armstrong’s landing. In a previous post, I elaborated on the touch-and-go tense situation the first landing entailed. No one knew what Apollo 11 would encounter until, with fuel almost gone, the 1969 lander could have struck a large boulder which would have eliminated any possibility of return to earth.

The new LROC will take the guess work out of landing sites. Besides the LROC, ground controllers have already activated two other instruments: the Lunar Exploration Neutron Detector, or LEND, designed to identify regions enriched in hydrogen (a tracer for deposits of water ice); and the Cosmic Ray Telescope for the Effects of Radiation. The picture below was taken by the LROC in mid-July. It shows the actual landing site of Apollo 14. You can see the pod from which the lunar module left the moon on the right and the instrumentation site on the left. Notice the astronauts footprints between the two. Incredible. (Click on for a more detailed view.)

Amateur astronomers will be training their telescopes on the moon more frequently from now on. I know I will. NASA will be trying to image possible landing sites for a return manned voyage in ten years or so.

Just recently I took the picture below of Mare Nubium. It is 445 miles in diameter, and is just north of the famous Tycho crater. Although the LROC images were taken from about 31 miles above the moon, my image was taken at about 230,000 miles. Neat, huh?

Sunspots and Solar Flares

2009-06-23T15:31:00.000-07:00

During the summer weeks nighttime observations with or without a telescope is not for those who are “morning persons.” I am one such who likes to call it a day at 10:00 pm, just before the sun sets. So, what am I to do?

Fortunately, on any clear day, the sun is visible and I have just the ticket for doing daytime photography of our G2 star. I have a solar shield for my 14” scope and a Coronado PST h-alpha solar telescope riding atop the big scope. I also have attachments for taking digital photos with my Nikon Coolpix 995 camera.

Here is an image of several sunspots I took with the Nikon with a solar shield.

Sunspots quickly rise and more slowly fall on an irregular cycle about every 11 years. Significant variations of the 11-year period are known over longer spans of time. For example, from 1900 to the 1960s the trend of sunspot count has been upward; from the 1960s to the present, it has diminished somewhat.

I took the above photo about seven years ago when sunspot activity was beginning to wane. A minimum in the eleven-year cycle may have occurred in December 2008, but the current lack of activity is definitely pushing the minimum into the current year. I have been unable to locate many spots this year.

Although the details of how and why sunspots occur are still somewhat a matter of research, it is thought by some that sunspots are the visible counterparts of magnetic “tubes” in the sun that get "wound up" by rotation. If the stress on the flux tubes reaches a certain limit, they curl up quite like a rubber band and puncture the sun's surface.

Research has shown some correlations between sunspot activity and human health.
Mutations in some flu viruses, and subsequent world-wide flu outbreaks, correlate to sunspot peaks. During no less than 17 of the last solar cycles, sunspot peaks precede increased flu activity, including the 1918-19 Spanish flu pandemic which followed a sunspot peak in 1917.

I am no medical practitioner, but if the above is true, the swine flu most likely will not become significantly pandemic, since we are at a low spot in sunspot activity.

Solar flares are a bit different than sunspots, although the two are related. Sometimes in complex sunspot groups, abrupt, violent explosions from the sun occur, causing solar flares. Solar flares are thought to be caused by sudden magnetic field changes in areas where the sun's magnetic field is concentrated. Solar flares are accompanied by the release of gas, electrons, visible light, ultraviolet light and X-rays. When this radiation and particles reach the Earth's magnetic field, they interact with it at the poles to produce auroras. Solar flares can also disrupt communications, satellites, navigation systems and even power grids.

Below is an image taken by the Coronado h-alpha scope.

The h-alpha PST scope filters out much more of the light that an ordinary solar filter I used above to take the sunspot picture can do. By eliminating other light waves, we can see the activity happening in these specific chemicals and learn more about the sun and its behavior. So in the above picture, the sun appears to be boiling, with prominent solar flares visible.

Lately, I have been only occasionally able to see prominences and flares during this “quiet” time for the sun. However, I have not been observing the sun daily, as many scientists have. There is the theory, using a new model, that we are approaching a very active eleven year cycle.

Researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, have used a new model of the sun's interior to refine predictions of future sunspot activity. By using data going back over a century, the scientists were able to determine that the sun's magnetic field has a memory of around 20 years. This model was able to predict the past six cycles with around 97 percent accuracy, and has led to revised predictions about the next cycle, number 24.

According to Mausimi Dikpati, the next sunspot cycle will be between 30 and 50 percent stronger than the current cycle, with a peak in activity in 2012. Armed with a six year warning, mission planners at NASA, satellite controllers and engineers in the power industry ought to have ample time to take this looming danger into account.

Oh by the way, this coincides with the “Doomsday” predictions found in the Mayan calendar. Since November, at least three new books on 2012 have arrived in mainstream bookstores. A fourth is due this fall. Each arrives in the wake of the 2006 success of 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, which has been selling thousands of copies a month since its release in May and counts more than 40,000 in print. The books also build on popular interest in the Maya, fueled in part by Mel Gibson's December 2006 film about Mayan civilization, Apocalpyto.

Authors disagree about what humankind should expect on Dec. 21, 2012, when the Maya's "Long Count" calendar marks the end of a 5,126-year era.

I am not holding my breath for this non-scientific malarkey and plan on celebrating a great Christmas in 2012 with a possible view of the faint, fizzled out remnants of the star astronomer Mark Kidger has identified as the Star of Bethlehem. But that’s a topic for another post.

NGC 5907 and Three Friends in the Morning Sky

2009-06-16T10:00:00.000-07:00

Five days before the official beginning of summer, I thought about staying up late to head out to the observatory for some imaging. However, yielding to my need for beauty sleep, I was zonked at 10:00 pm.

Then, a funny thing happened on the way to the forum of my dreams. I awoke at 3:00 am, checked my Iphone for whatever, and decided I had had enough sleep, so, checking the skies, I dressed for a chiller night and, in the silence of the deep night, got the Meade 14” scope and SBIG 4000 camera prepared to do something I had not done before…take an NGC image.

Unlike the Messier catalog with its just over 100 objects, The New General Catalog contains 7,840 objects, known as the NGC objects. The NGC is one of the largest comprehensive catalogs, as it includes all types of deep space objects. It was compiled in the 1880s by J. L. E. Dreyer using observations mostly from William Herschel and his son John.

My object of interest was NGC 5907 in the constellation Draco. It is a spiral galaxy located approximately 39 million light years from Earth. It is virtually invisible to the naked eye with few detectable giant stars, being apparently composed almost entirely of dwarf burned out stars.

Also known as the Splinter Galaxy, it has an elongated appearance because of its edge-on alignment when seen from Earth’s vantage point.

I continued to roam the heavens for other objects such as M22, a globular cluster, but gave up because the light of dawn began to make imaging more difficult.

As I closed up shop at 5:00 am, and turned out the lights in the observatory, I was amazed to see a bright Jupiter, almost a third of the way across the sky from the east along ecliptic. Approaching the giant planet was the moon at third quarter, but what blew me away was Venus.

Spectacular as the morning star, it was low in the east and I thought I was seeing a UFO, so huge and bright did it appear. However, it didn’t dance and move at hyperwarp speed with changing colors and shapes, so I just enjoyed the wonder of this nearest planetary neighbor in its role as the age-old sentinel marking the beginning of a new day.

So, hitting the sack around 5:30 am, I managed to catch a few winks with no regrets.