Quick Entry

 On January 12, 2021I imaged 3 more Caldwell objects, C24, C51, and C67. I have to admit that some of the objects, which should be visible in my 8 inch scope from an urban setting, are at best difficult to image and see anything. C51 definitely qualifies as one of those. However, the one that was easiest to see/image was C67. It's an interesting galaxy. More specifically, the center is interesting. The first image is the full frame image; the second cropped to just the galaxy. See if you can see that the center of the galaxy seems to look like a “period” (dot) with 3 bright “comas” around it (plus, of course, the longer, dimmer arms).

C67

C67 aka NGC1097 and NGC1097A (the small one to lower left)

Something Found

 One of the web sites I often check is call SpaceWeather.com. In their January 29^th entry, they had a picture of a “concentric crater”, something I had never heard of before. A (very) little looking around the internet reveled a list of about 60 possible such craters, as well as the current theory of their formation, and it's not what you would first think. Apparently, the initial crater forms the initial bowl shape, then the inner ring is formed from underneath the bottom of the crater from magma pushing up on it creating the inner ring. Or, something like that. At least it isn't from a second, very well aimed meteor! Moving on. I decided to see if I might have accidentally imaged a concentric crater and, lo and behold, I did! It turns out to be in the same area of the moon as the one shown in the Spaceweather article. Very close, actually. So, I'll start with the larger view, thanks to Virtual Moon Atlas, and work our way down to the concentric crater, whose name is HESIODUS A.

Full moon

Area of moon where I found Concentric Crater (as did Spaceweather)

My image of same area above taken in 2016

Showing Pitatus Crater for reference to full moon image.

Hesiodus A, the concentric crater, enlarged from above image.

“Combo-bite”

When the grandkids were young, one of which still is, we often resorted to offering “combo-bites” to get them to eat some things they may not have otherwise eaten. Obviously, a combo-bite is a bite that contains more than one type of food. In today's entry, the combo-bite is a combination of two of my hobbies: amateur astronomy and amateur radio. I'll start with the radio, which was the reception of an image via slow scan TV from the International Space Station. The image was one of several sent from the ISS celebrating the 20^th anniversary of amateur radio on the ISS, referred to not surprisingly as ARISS. This was the image sent at 10:46 EST (1546Z) and is one of many different images sent from the ISS. Obviously, the ISS needed to be flying overhead, so I used the Heavens-Above.com website to track the ISS to know when it was overhead and for how long it would be visible (usually about 10 minutes). The most I could get in any one pass was 2 images. I was able to receive 8 such images, 6 of which are different. Had I been willing to stay up around the clock (I wasn't), I could get a pass about every 90 minutes and received lots of images. However, I think the ISS was transmitting only about 6 to 10 different images, and I suspect it would have become something less than fun around 2AM. Anyway, here's the 12/26/2020 1546Z image, which was the best of the 8 received.

Image from International Space Station, via SSTV

The other image for today was inspired by the first activity. On the images received on December 29^th, I noticed a fair amount of noise. At the time, I wondered if the noise could have been caused by solar activity. I remembered later that, while possible, it was highly unlikely to have been caused by the sun that day. None the less, I decided to look at the sun. There was more than usual activity, so I tried to image it. Results below.