The Astronomy Nexus

Here's an image from three days ago (June 29, 2009). This is a full-sized crop of the original. I've tweaked the image slightly (grayscaling to improve chromatic aberration, and a touch of unsharp masking), but the effects are cosmetic; you can still see the same details in the original. The smallest craters clearly visible near the terminator are less than 10 km across: for example, you can see Hyginus A, at 8 km, and it's clearly more than just a couple of pixels). Not bad for a $250 optical tube and a $250 compact non-DSLR camera. It's definitely better than the first few views of the Moon I got through a $3000 telescope 25 years ago!

It's been a quiet few months thanks to rainy weather here in northern Colorado.

June 29 was the first day in 3 months that I got more than a quick look at the sky. As a result, it was more of a "summer showpiece" sort of night, full of big bright things like the 1st-quarter Moon, globulars like M13 and M3, and bright nebulas like M57 and M27.

Saturn, which I'd hoped to observe more in the spring, is finally on its way out; I saw it briefly, but only very low, with already poor seeing made worse by the altitude. I was hard pressed to see any moons besides Titan and Rhea, and no details on the disk itself.

I did get a few quick photos through the 100mm refractor:

Gliese 581 is back in the news, since it apparently has a medium-sized planet in its habitable zone. We have no way of knowing yet if it actually supports life, but if there are intelligent beings there, and they look in the general direction of Orion, they'll notice that one star is peculiarly radio-noisy:

Finally got a few shots in the 100mm scope (24x telescope magnification, time: 1/100 sec. at f/4.5, approximately 10x zoom on the camera itself). Each of these was reduced in size by a factor of 4, whereas last night's image is a 100% crop. The larger image scale does make it clearer just how thin the crescent really is. Unfortunately, Venus was very low and so the seeing was rather poor; the final image quality isn't a whole lot better than with just the camera itself.

Just a quickie tonight: Venus is approaching conjunction:

(FZ28, ISO 100, 1/100 sec, f/4.4, full optical zoom of 18x)

If I get a chance to slap the camera on the 100mm scope in the next few days, I will, but Venus is rapidly heading away from the evening sky.

Last night, I spent all my observing time on Saturn with the 12.5" Dob, mostly with a 7mm Nagler (227x). This year, the rings are edge-on or very close to it. At the moment, they have opened up slightly, so I could just barely see the (normally very prominent!) dark space between rings and planet. There was a subtle darkening across the planet where the rings crossed; I'm not entirely sure whether it was ring shadow, a cloud band, or both.

By request of a friend on Facebook, my entry for Hug an Engineer Day, inspired by the ThinkGeek "Pop Quiz Math Clock", is now outside the Facebook zone:

I finally took the 12.5" Dobsonian for a spin the evening of March 3, after several months of using only the 100mm refractor (mostly as an astrophotography platform). Since it doesn't have a drive, the Dob's not much use for astrophotos, except of really big, bright things like the Moon:

First quarter moon. 12.5" reflector, 57x, FZ28 1/125 sec at f/4.5

First quarter moon, with a little extra zoom (about 4x) on the camera itself. 12.5" reflector, 57x, FZ28 1/60 sec at f/4.5

More after the break.

A quick image of Comet Lulin from tonight (Feb. 27, 2009):

No, it hasn't pulled a Shoemaker-Levy 9 on us; it's moving so quickly that registering images against the stars leads to multiple comet images. (8 images, ISO 800, 30 seconds each)

This time (Feb. 12), I tried taking a larger number (15-18) of shots just piggybacking the camera at full zoom (18x). At maximum aperture at this zoom, the lens has a clear aperture of about 20mm, so it behaves like a (very!) small 18x telescope. 20mm isn't a lot, but combine it with an exposure equivalent to 3 or 4 minutes, and you can pick up quite a bit. Here's M35, 14 exposures (best 80% of 18 actually processed) of 10 seconds each, ISO 800:

It's not quite as detailed as the digiscoped version I posted a couple of weeks ago, but it's not dramatically inferior either. You can just make out the small cluster NGC 2158. On objects like this, I may try slightly longer exposures (maybe 15-20 seconds) in the future to pick up some additional detail.

Additional images after the break (all using the same stacking and exposure parameters as M35). As usual, I've post-processed these significantly to help bring out fainter stars, and cropped the most interesting portions.