Today's Sun

This has been an unusual year; first the pandemic, then more clouds than I have seen, constantly, in decades. I know I've mentioned it before, but it has been difficult to get any images of the sun or anything at night. This morning, with no clouds, I went for the sun, and got something, at least. As shown in the image below, which was taken in hydrogen alpha light (around 652 nm, if I recall correctly), we can see one sunspot, AR2767, which is a member of the NEW solar cycle, cycle 25. Also visible are a few prominences on the East side of the sun. This is a stack of the best 2500 of 5000 frames taken to make the image.

Sun morning of July 23, 2020

Some Dews and Dont's

Last night was another first for me, and this entry is to serve as a reminder of what NOT to do. Yesterday afternoon, we had a brief thunderstorm. Short, but some heavy rain for a few minutes; typical. The sky generally cleared up afterwards, so I decided to try an imaging session. OK, all set up. Time to run the flats for the night, and...

Bullseye!

That's what I got. What should it have looked like, you ask? (Thank you for asking.)

Normal Flat image

I'm not the brightest bulb in the box, but even I can tell something is not right.

After checking everything in the optical train I could think of, and finding nothing amiss, I was left with only the camera itself. I'm loath to remove it, once attached to the scope, just because it changes what the flats correct in the image; ie, a flat is useful for removing “dust donuts” from an image, but only if the camera is in the same orientation for both the flat and image. Removing the camera means wasting time re-shooting flats. But, detach it I did. And, if you paid attention to the title of this entry, you already know what I found...condensation in the camera.

I've been running the camera this morning to see if I can replicate the issue. After half an hour, no condensation. My worry was that the desiccant needed replacing, which is possible, but a pain. According to the instructions, it could need replacing after 3 years; I'm currently at 5 years with out a (known) need for replacement. So, I'm guessing the moral to this story is, don't try imaging after a thunderstorm when the humidity is still 100%. (So how do they do it in Florida?)

The Sun Again

It's hard to believe that the skies have been as cloudy as they have been for so long. But... I guess we do the best with what we are given. In this case, there was an almost clear day for viewing the sun. I shot about 5 hours of a prominence. You never know if it is moving until you process the images later, and in this case, it seems to have been active. Although I recorded images every 2 minutes, the activity was sufficiently slow that processing every tenth image, ie, every 20 minutes real time, is sufficient to show the activity. It's taken me this long to post this just because I actually processed every image, then checked for activity and found that every tenth image was sufficient to show what I wanted to show. It takes a while to process over 130 images, then put them in a format to make into a video. Oh well, finished at last, anyway. Images taken on July 2, 2020.

Computer test

Your computer, that is.

This morning, June 19, 2020, I imaged the sun.

Prominence on western edge of sun this morning.

What you are seeing is a prominence on the western edge of the sun. (I think it is the northwest, but I get easily confused with my solar scope.) At any rate, this prominence is sufficiently well positioned to make me believe this is the area above sunspot AR2765, which is the sunspot imaged below (on the 13^th, the day I actually imaged it. I published the photo later, after processing.). Well, I decided to see if I could merge the two images to see how well they lined up.

Composite of 6/19 and  6/13.

What do you think? The image from today is black and white, and might be difficult to see as the separate image that it is pasted on top of the color image from the 13^th. Hence, the test of you computer to see if you see both the sunspot and the prominence. Personally, I think the prominence is from the sunspot. In other words, if we could have seen the sunspot from the side, like we can today, it would have looked much like the prominence image of today.

Play Time

I've decided on another imaging “campaign,” this time being the objects in the Caldwell catalog that are visible from my northern latitude. As with most catalogs, there is much crossover between them. The Caldwell catalog consists of 109 objects. I have filtered out objects below -39 degrees declination (can't see them) and of the objects left (I had already imaged some NGCs while doing the Herschel list), I have already imaged all but 25; at least at the start of this endeavor I needed 25. Since the start, I have imaged 3 more. One of those images proved to be a little more interesting than the others, for a reason that I hope will become obvious. It's C35.

C35. OK, the galaxy is just to the LEFT of center.

Although the target is a galaxy in the middle of the picture, which is actually hard to spot because it's an elliptical and looks very star-like, the target is not what's interesting. It's everything else.

C35 with some other objects identified.

The program ASTAP has supplied the information in this image, and the next one, showing what's identifiable in the image. That's quite a lot! But wait, there's more!!

OK, that A LOT!

Asking ASTAP to annotate “deeper” showed this! There's so much there, I can't really see exactly how much I've managed to actually capture, but I think it's a lot.

Moving on. While starting this venture, I missed one target, C61, and had to come back to it the next night. Neither night was exactly clear, but both were fair. At any rate, instead of C61 the first night, I went to the open cluster that looks like a globular, M4.

M4

Not too bad, considering the amount of clouds around.

Finally, I experimented with some Barlow lenses to see their effect. The target was the sun. Seeing is always a big problem for imaging the sun, but I wanted to know if better resolution is really visible with that scope. Well, you can decide for yourself; here are images of a sunspot and a few prominences, false colored, of course.

One of the first sunspots of the new cycle 25. 2x Barlow used

And a prominence  below the sunspot. 2x Barlow.

Same sunspot as above. 3x Barlow.

Following a Prominence

For the last 3 days, I have been following a prominence on the eastern limb of the sun. I think 2 things are happening; the prominence is changing and it is rotating into view. I know of no easy to tell which is having the greater impact on what we see. I'm hoping it will present on the surface of the sun in a few days. Unless something terribly wrong occurs, it will be cloudy and I will miss it's appearance. You can follow the last 3 days below; dates under the picture. The last image is just for any astrophotographers that might be reading. AutoStakkert 3 produces and unusual artifact, circled. I can't find any evidence that it appears in the original data and have no explanation for how it got there. Ideas anyone? All images except last one are composite of surface and prominence.

May 31, 2020

June 1, 2020

June 2, 2020

Weird artifact produced by AutoStakkert on June 2 data.

And a Last

On the night of May 30, 2020 I finished imaging the Herschel 400 list by getting an image of the somewhat unimpressive galaxy NGC 2787. Unfortunately, the sky had a fair amount of high cloudiness, which appears to be a permanent condition, as well as a just past first quarter moon. Nevertheless. I was able to pull out the image from the muk, at least enough to definitely say I got it. I used both my traditional method of confirming the target, which is a comparison to star charts, and using ASTAP to confirm the target by plate solving. By completing this project, I now have at least 500, possibly up to 600 galaxies, star cluster, and nebulas imaged. Not too bad for an old man with limited talent and equipment. At least, I think so.