Galaxy Season

And apparently more clouds and rain as well. After what seems like a very long time away from the scope, I was able to get out on the night of April 25^th and 26^th . The 25^th was by far the better night, and one of the few really good nights we get in Georgia. It was just luck, I suppose, that I was out then. In any event, I was able to get 2 images that I generally like. They are relatively close to each other in the sky, in Coma Berenices. I'll start with the image I took first.

M53

This is the globular cluster M53. It was taken first because I knew I would take the image using only the luminance filter and also while the sky wasn't completely dark; just mostly so. M53 is about 58,000 light years away. According to the web site Messier-Objects.com, the cluster contains about 500,000 stars and is moving towards us at 112Km/s (about 250,500 MPH). It has an estimated age of about 12.6 Billion years old.

A little later, I moved over the galaxy M64.

M64

I find this to be a very interesting galaxy. Notice the dark lane next to the nucleus. I suppose it's this feature that gives this galaxy the name of The Black Eye Galaxy, the Evil Eye Galaxy, or the Sleeping Beauty Galaxy (where did that come from?), take your choice. Different sources give different distances to the galaxy, but are generally in the range of about 20 million light years. The galaxy also has two disks of material that are rotating opposite of one another; ie one rotating clockwise, the other counter clockwise. One of the disks is the inner disk, the other the outer disk, with the dark area generally being seen as the area of separation between the two.

Galaxy showing dark lane near nucleus.

 Here's just the galaxy portion of the above image, processed a little differently to show better the "dark lane". That would be the dark area just below the bright dot that is the center of the galaxy.

Finally, our old friend Jupiter.

Unfortunately, this image was taken the night of the 26^th and the air was particularly unsteady. This was just before a storm front moving in that night, so I guess I'm glad I got it as good as I did.

It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's....

an indication you are at least as old as I am, if you know what comes next. However, in this case, it's a couple of images of one of the things I usually try to avoid imaging: a satellite. Specifically, an Iridium satellite. Even more specifically, and Iridium flare. What that is, is when the solar panels align with the sun, the satellite, and the person to cause and intense, short term brightening.

Iridium flare

This image is a 15 second exposure and shows most of the flare. You can see it starts fairly dim at the left side of the image, and over a few seconds, becomes very bright, and then start to dim again. Unfortunately, the exposure ended before the satellite returned to its original brightness. By the way, the star basically above where the trail of the satellite ends (and the brightest star on the right side of the image), is Regulus in the constellation of Leo, the Lion. Of course, this is a time lapse image, but visually, you see the satellite moving, in this case from left to right, and suddenly growing bright enough to the be brightest moving object in the sky, and then dim again, all in about 30 seconds. It's really kinda cool.

It should be noted that this is only a small portion of the entire image. The full image is below.

The big picture

This is a fairly large portion of the sky. The flare looks much small, huh? Almost directly below the flare,  but just out of the frame is what appears to be a bright light. Actually, it is. It's the moon.

Flare occurred about as far above the moon as the moon is above the trees.

This image shows the scale of the previous image, meaning in this case, just how much of the sky the camera saw. At least, you get some idea.

Just the moon from the image above.

This shows just how well a DSLR with a stock zoom lens, set to wide field, can capture the moon. Basically, this is what a “normal” DSLR would see. So, if you have one, and would like to know how well you might be able to take a picture of the moon, this is it. The image has been resized to 2x in “post processing”, meaning the imaged adjusting software I use, which is a very old version of Paint Shop Pro. The Mare are clearly visible. The camera was mounted on a tripod and a remote shutter release used to help minimize any camera shaking.

I was a little disappointed that I didn't capture the entire flare, so the next night, April 8^th, I went out to get another flare. However, there were a fair number of clouds. Even though this was a much dimmer flare, I think it still looked pretty with the clouds and moon just out of frame.

Iridium flare just below center of the picture, behind some clouds.

And here is just the flare part where you can see the satellite going from dim to bright back to dim.

Dimmer flare, but shows the entire flare

Finally, on the night of the first flare images, April 7^th, I took a few “through the telescope” images of the moon. One of the things I have been trying to do is get at least one image of each of the objects on the Astronomical League's Lunar List. Even though I already had an image of the crater Billy, I thought this was a better one.

Crater Billy

Obviously, this is the crater. But notice the crater floor; it's a dark gray and appears smooth. What's different? From my reading, the crater is considered an impact crater meaning, of course, something hit the moon and left a crater. But then the crater was flooded with lava, leaving the smooth and dark appearance. Looking at other craters, you will almost always see a central peak. That peak is the result of the impact. That Billy has no central peak implies that the lava flowed into it after the impact.

A Sunny Disposition

Images taken on April 2, 2017 near the Starlight Observatory.

This is the beginning of a venture into something I haven't done in years, and certainly not on my own. I now own a H-alpha, or hydrogen alpha, telescope that is used to look at the sun, and only the sun. Among other things, this will let me observe the sun in a way I haven't done from the observatory. The scope allows only light in the H-alpha band to come through to the eyepiece. The H-alpha band is around 656.6nm. Light at that wavelength is very red, hence the red images. Well, mostly red. Actually, the exposure allows the color to change to white because the image is overexposed, either slightly or a lot depending on which image we are looking at. However, if you looked through the eyepiece, the sun looks very red.

As a side note, the “red layer” of the sun is known as the chromosphere. The chromosphere is “outside” , or nearer to us, than the part of the sun we “normally” see. What we usually see is the yellowish photosphere. The chromosphere is, as I understand it, basically hydrogen that has been heated by the underlying layers of the sun enough to cause the electron to move to a different energy shell. When the electron drops back down to it's lower energy state, it emits a photon of light at the 656nm wavelength. While sunspots are visible in both the chromosphere and the photosphere, prominences are visible only in the chromosphere.

Surface of the sun showing features

As you can see in this image, we have three feature: sunspots, some of which I have pointed out, plage, which is an intense brightening on the surface caused by a mechanism similar to the mechanism that causes sunspots, and, right on the very edge of the sun, 3 prominences. The prominences are quite dim in this image, hence not really very “prominent” because of the exposure needed to see the other features.

Above is the same image, but with out the markings. Perhaps you can see a little more detail.

Same image as above, showing prominences. Longer exposure makes surface look white.

 

Last, but not least, is the overexposed, for the surface detail that is, image which shows more clearly the prominences. It's difficult to tell, but it appears that the uppermost prominences may be part of an arch. In the full resolution image, there appears to be a faint wisp of red directed towards the middle prominence.