A Few More Entries Through Cloudy Skies

Clouds, rain, and summer haziness have all been factors in my ability to image this summer. They have left few opportunities. But, I have had some success. Since the last entry to this blog in which I presented current images, I've imaged about 45 Herschel targets, the moon, the sun, and Jupiter. I'll present examples of each this entry.

Clavius with craterlets "D" and "C" inside

Above is the crater Clavius with the smaller craterlets Clavius D to the left and C to the right situated in the middle of the main Clavius crater. To me, the craterlets D and C look somewhat like a pair of glasses, perhaps a pair of pince nez. Clavius is located near the southern pole of the moon and is about 136 miles in diameter. “D” is about 16 miles in diameter, while “C” is about 12 miles in diameter. The interesting point here is how well the craterlets are lit. Although the sun angle is very low, the tops of the craterlets appear to be as high as the rim on Clavius itself, or close to it. The low sun angle gives the image a somewhat 3D effect to me, which is one reason I like trying to image interesting things in this manner.

The sun, but I bet you already knew that.

This image of the sun was taken on June 29, 2019 and is a composite of two images. The first image is a much overexposed image to get the faint prominence seen on the left limb on the sun. The second is a much “better” exposed image that shows the sunspot (which I think is a left over sunspot from the just past solar cycle #24... I'm not 100% sure of that.). The color difference between the “rims” is because of my haste is trying to align a circular mask on the prominence image that I could use to allow the surface to show through. I didn't get the mask exactly aligned. I've used this technique before, but was having trouble seeing exactly where the circle of the mask was to get things aligned. At any rate, at least I am able to show generally that both the sunspot and prominence were both on the sun and in what relationship. This is a false colored H-alpha image.

Jupiter and moons (circled)

Next up is Jupiter plus 3 moons, which I have conveniently circled so you can find them. If you were actually looking through an eyepiece at this, the moons would be quite obvious. However, when imaging and trying to not overexpose Jupiter, the moons are much dimmer. Jupiter is low on the horizon (and will be this season), so imaging will be extremely difficult. Maybe that should be GOOD imaging will be extremely difficult. This image isn't great, but is certainly one of the better ones so far. The moons are, by the way, Ganymede “over” Io, with Europa to the far right.

NGC 4527, 4536, and just barely visible, NGC 4533.

Last is an image taken back on June 1, 2019 that shows the targets of NGC 4527 (galaxy near the bottom edge of image) and NGC 4536 (near the top edge of the image). Sharp eyed readers will notice a smudge just above the 2 stars in the middle of the image that's and extra; it's NGC 4533. At least one source on the internet says NGC 4533 is about 103 million light years distant; NGC 4527 about 46 million light years away, and NGC 4536 about 50 million light years from us.