A Finale, Of Sorts
On the evening of August 27th,
2018, I finished a project started in 2014, although I didn't
formally make it a project until, maybe, 2016. That project was to
photograph all 110 of the Messier objects. The entire series serves
to goals : 1) to prove that I have “seen” all of the objects
(more on that later), and 2) to document the progress I have made in
photographing the night sky. The equipment underwent only one change
in that time, which was a change from a Starlight Express M516 camera
to a QSI 683 camera. Many of the images taken are on this blog.
Why “seen” in quotes? Two reasons.
First, my eyes are getting quite old and don't see dim things in the
night sky very well. All of the objects in the Messier catalog would
be considered dim. Second, the sky quality at the observatory has
deteriorated significantly, mostly due to light pollution, making
seeing dim objects that much harder. For me, photographing was the
only way to go.
So, which one was the last one? M73,
an open star cluster in the constellation of Aquarius. I circled the
four brightest stars. If you follow the progression of things,
Charles Messier first thought this might be a comet; enough so that
he made a note that this was something to be avoided in his search
for comets. Later, it was decided that this was a loosely associated
open cluster. Then, it was decided that it wasn't an open cluster at
all, but just four stars that made an asterism. It wasn't until 2002,
when M. Odenkirchen and C. Soubiran finally demonstrated that this is
just an asterism.
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| M73, Messier catalogue complete! |
Finally, for this installment of the
blog, a few images of the sun. Since I image primarily in shade of
gray, I' showing the images after processing, but before colorizing,
except for the red one which was shot in color.
There was a prominence visible that
was imaged in the normal configuration for the solar scope and one
with the scope using a 3x Barlow lens to magnify it. There was also
something (a filament) that was barely visibly visually, so much so
that I wasn't sure it was really there. As shown in the gray image,
it was difficult to see even with the camera. The red image is
essentially the same as the gray image, but color enhanced to
increase the contrast. I'm not sure why it was so difficult to see,
except that there has been a lot of high cloudiness this summer......
a LOT. Even the image of M73 was shot through high cloudiness. When
focusing, a halo was seen around the star I was focusing on (the halo
presumably from the clouds).
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| Prominence. |
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| Same one, but magnified 3x. |
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| Barely visible filament. |
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| Same image, color enhanced to increase contrast. The filament is the "line" running upper left to lower right. |
