Category Archives: Astronomy

A few bits and pieces from me, and some truly spectacular images from people who actually know what they’re doing.

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I was tweeting all night long (kept me awake), it looked like this:

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As Bill Cosby said, I told you that story to tell you this one.

While the moon was fully eclipsed, the sky was filled with stars, and Jupiter was rising, I had a “what the hell, why not?!” moment and tried to see what my “fast, easy, and portable” gear would show if I tried to image some non-lunar targets. What’s the worse that could go wrong, I end up with a gigabyte of useless files?

Using the 75mm telephoto lens, this is a 6 second exposure of the lower portion of Orion. Longer exposures started to show the stars as lines instead of points, due to the Earth moving. Nonetheless, the “belt” and “sword” stars of Orion are clearly visible (along with a lot of dimmer stars) and the middle “star” of the sword can clearly be seen to actually be a diffuse nebula, not a star.

Using the 18mm wide angle lens, this is a 10 second exposure of Orion. The entire constellation can be seen quite clearly. Just peeking through the branches at the far lower left corner is Procyon. Not half bad for slapping a camera on a tripod and seeing what happens.

Straight overhead, still using the 18mm lens, the Pleiades open cluster and the “V” of Taurus are clearly seen in another ten second exposure. The orange color of Aldebaran in Taurus is obvious.

As Jupiter started rising in the east, I turned the telescope setup that way. It’s blurry, since I had been focused on the moon and Jupiter’s a lot further away (I didn’t want to try to re-focus because it’s a real bitch to focus accurately on dimmer objects, something else I have to find a solution for in the near future.) Nonetheless, this one second exposure through the scope clearly shows Jupiter and three of the Galilean moons.

The proper way to improve these “quick and dirty” pictures is to line the telescope mount up very precisely and then have a motor drive the telescope in the opposite direction at the same rate. My little scope will do that, my big one will do it better, but for the eclipse I didn’t bring out the big scope and didn’t align or power up the drive on the little one. I just wanted to try, on the spur of the moment, to see if even something as simple as this could produce recognizable images. It did, so now I really want to try stepping up my game and getting the big equipment running.

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I mentioned this really loud owl that was out. I spent a little bit of time early in the evening walking around the neighborhood and trying to figure out where it was and trying to record the sound on my phone. Like my photos, it’s not really good gear to do a really great job, but it works.

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Finally, here are some links to a couple of truly fantastic pictures of the eclipse.

Phil Plait’s article on Slate.com has several amazing pictures of the eclipse, but the huge one by Rogelio Bernal Andreo is just jaw-dropping. It’s a composite picture — as I was noting, it’s hard (i.e., next to impossible because of all of that physics stuff) to get an image that is short enough to show the colors of the moon but long enough to show the stars. Get the moon, and the stars are extremely faint. Get the stars, and the moon is too bright and overexposed. Andreo took two photos, one for the moon, one for the stars, and then combined them. The result is stunning. And as the huge copy of the picture in Plait’s article shows, not only do you see the eclipsed moon, an immense star field, and Uranus, but you can also see two of the moons around Uranus.

Wow. Just…wow.

But today I found one that’s even better. It shows something that we see all the time around other planets, but I don’t know that it’s ever been seen around ours. It’s a moon going into shadow, into eclipse, seen from afar.

Around all of the outer planets you can see this regularly. In fact, the Galilean moons of Jupiter do it so regularly and it’s so easy to see that Galileo saw them in 1610, over four hundred years ago. Anyone with binoculars can see them today, disappearing as their orbit carries them into Jupiter’s shadow and reappearing as they come back into the sunlight.

Emily Lakdawalla at The Planetary Society wrote an article today with a video from the MESSENGER spacecraft, which has been orbiting Mercury since March 18, 2011. Looking back from 63.4 million miles away, MESSENGER recorded this video of the moon going into eclipse behind the Earth.

The only way that’s not the coolest thing you’ve seen today is if you also saw one of your kids being born!

 

I’m really tired. I was almost correct about one thing yesterday – I may not be too old to pull an all-nighter, but it sure kicks my ass in ways that it didn’t when I was twenty. But it was worth it. The eclipse was spectacular, the night was crystal clear, and here are the pictures!

Basically the same as for the April 2014 eclipse, where I went into a lot of detail on how each picture was taken, the exposure, and so on. I’m not going to do a lot of that today. If you need to know, the EXIF data should still be attached to the files, or you can just ask and I’ll be more than glad to answer.

Two sets of photos, taken simultaneously, the first one using the Meade ETX-125 telescope as a 1900mm telephoto lens on a Canon Rebel xTi DSLR, the second using a 75-300 Tascam zoom lense on a Canon Rebel xT. Exposures go from 1/4000 second for the überbright full moon, one to two seconds for the fully eclipsed moon.

Full moon, 99.99% full, in the early stages of the penumbral phase of the eclipse.

A few minutes into the partial, umbral phase,the darkening starting on the left side.

About a third of the way into the partial phase.

About half way.

Two thirds of the way. So far the exposures have been to show the illuminated portion with the shadowed portion of the moon left in darkness. But about this time in the eclipse, if you start to really overexpose the lit portion…

…you start to see the reds, browns, and oranges in the shadowed portion.

About 80% eclipsed.

Start of the totally eclipsed phase. Now longer exposures make for slightly more blurry pictures (I’m not guiding the camera or telescope, and the Earth and moon are both moving at a pretty good clip) but also bring out all of the colors.

About half way through the eclipsed phase. As noted before, when seen like this, it looks a lot like Mars.

About 95% done with the totally eclipsed phase.

Just starting to exit from totality.

Now we just reverse the process that brought us into the eclipse.

About a third of the way out.

About half way out.

About three-quarters out.

Still about three-quarters out, but showing the other pole. With the Meade, the field of view is just a bit too small to take the whole moon in at one time.

About 85% out.

About 90% out.

Very near the end of the partial phase, moving into the final (dim) penumbral phase.

Clear! Back to a very bright full moon.

With the zoom lens instead of the telescope, the image is smaller, but it’s actually tough to take a picture of the full moon because it’s so bright. This is a 1/4000 second, as fast as the Canon will go, and it’s still overexposed.

Entering the partial phase.

Halfway in.

Three-quarters in.

Totality.

A longer exposure shows the bright reds and oranges that can be seen. In addition, about one moon-diameter to the left of the moon’s disc you can clearly see a small, round, blue dot. That’s Uranus.

A picture with the zoom lens at its 75mm setting. This is a pretty good approximation of how it actually looked, with the palm trees dim in the foreground.

One of the things that’s always interesting is how many stars you can see during totality. With the bright full moon shining two hours earlier,you could barely see Rigel or Betelgeuse in Orion. With the moon eclipsed, you could see stars down to the limits of what’s possible given the light pollution in a major metropolitan area.

Almost back out of the final partial phase.

More comments, notes, and some semi-related pictures in a couple of days. I really, really need to get some sleep!

Reminder, there’s a total lunar eclipse tonight, in the wee hours of the morning before sunrise if you’re in North America or South America, in the comfortable hours after sunset if you’re in Japan, eastern Asia, New Zealand, eastern Australia. Or on a Pacific Island west of the International Date Line.

The fancy, scientific, big numbers data is here, but for North American viewers, the tl;dr version is:

• P1 = entering (dim shadow) penumbra at 1:15:33 PDT, 4:15:33 EDT
• P2 =entering (dark shadow) umbra at 2:14:48 PDT, 5:15:48 EDT
• P3 = entering totality at 3:25:10 PDT, 6:25:10 EDT (Obviously, if you’re on the US east coast, this is getting close to sunrise, which means moonset.)
• P4 = start leaving totality at 4:24:00 PDT, 7:24:00 EDT
• P5 = start leaving umbra at 5:34:21 PDT
• P6 = leave penumbra, eclipse ends, at 6:33:43 PDT

If you’re up and have a clear sky, it should look a lot like April’s event. But I’m already hearing from my New England friends that they’re likely to be clouded out. As for Japan and eastern Asia, there’s a freakin’ huge typhoon hitting, so maybe they won’t see it either.

But it should be clear here. What could go wrong? Well, the Vegas odds are currently 50/50 at best on whether or not I’ll be able to wake up at 1:00 AM and go see it. (Sleep is goooooood. My body’s saying that I’m getting too old for this sort of thing. The little kid trapped inside is screaming bloody murder and wondering how I could ever be thinking such thoughts.)

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In other looking-at-the-sky news, an hour ago there was another great ISS pass over SoCal. It looked fantastic, horizon to horizon, almost directly overhead.

Now, let’s do some math and common sense thinking. Last night I had pictures from yesterday’s ISS pass and talked about exposure times.

• Fifteen seconds was okay, thirty seconds was getting overexposed, anything longer was out of the question.
• Last night’s pass started at 19:55, tonight’s at 19:05.
• Fifty minutes earlier means fifty minutes brighter, as in “not darker.”
• Earlier this year I had a really bright ISS pass just after sunset and all of my pictures were totally, 100% overexposed.

Now class, what kind of exposures should I have used tonight? Not rocket science, right? Fifteen seconds, tops! Probably more like five seconds, maybe only three. Or shot video…

Here’s what the best of my string of forty-five second exposures looks like:

See that long streak of the ISS passing across the sky? Or just evidence that it’s tough getting good help and I’m a slow learner sometimes?

Let’s see if I can get out of bed and not screw anything up too much tonight for the eclipse.

 

 

Nine days ago the moon was just over two days old and a sliver in the still light sky at dusk. I commented on how it was a bit difficult to focus due to the low contrast. The moon also looks a bit “off” against a blue background.

Three nights ago I posted a picture from the early 1970s where I didn’t have the kind of equipment I have today. I was trying to see if I could take a picture (B&W film) using my dad’s old camera (an Argus C3 I think) with the lens just held up against a pair of binoculars mounted on a tripod.

Below are some pictures I took an hour ago with my current DSLR and a small Celestron telescope.

The other note I would bring to your attention is that there’s another lunar eclipse coming up in just a couple of days. This eclipse is part of the same cycle as the lunar eclipse from April 15th earlier this year. My pictures from that eclipse are here, and a wrote an article about lunar eclipses and how to observe them here.

You should be able to see at least some of the total phase of the eclipse if you live anywhere other than Europe or Africa. If you’re on the west coast of North America (west of the Rockies, more or less) or in Japan or eastern Australia, you should be to see the entire total phase.

The eclipse will be in the early hours of Wednesday morning, October 8th. (Or very late on Tuesday night, your position on the planet may vary.) On the US east coast, totality starts at 6:25 am EDT. You’ll lose the eclipse into the brightening sky as the sun rises. On the US west coast, totality goes from 3:25 am PDT to 4:24 am PDT. That means either a really late night or a really early morning.

Assuming that the sky’s clear of course. If it’s going to be cloudy, enjoy a good night’s sleep and look here on Wednesday for my pictures. (Which assumes that my sky will be clear. Right now that looks like a good bet.)

Tonight it was very clear, the moon is 11 days & 20 hours old, and this is what I saw:

With the camera attached to the Meade ETX-125 telescope, it acts as if it were a 1900 mm telephoto lens. (For reference, my “big” zoom lens is a 75 to 300 mm.) The full moon is just a tad too big to fit into the full frame of the camera at that magnification. So I shot a bunch of frames at the left, right, top, bottom, middle, and so on.

The terminator is at the upper right here and you can see some good definition of the mountains and craters along that edge of the moon. The huge crater at the upper left, with rays shooting halfway across the globe is Tycho.

Here we see what appears to be the “bottom” edge of the terminator as you look at it with the naked eye.

A “center” shot.

The new remote control I have for tripping the shutter on the camera works great and eliminates a lot of the vibrations that have been a problem in the past, particularly on the portable telescope mount. Some day it would be great to have a heavy-duty, permanent mount, but that day isn’t today. We do the best we can with what we’ve got.

Then, as long as it was hanging there in the west near the horizon, I took a shot at Mars.

It’s red, it’s tiny, but it’s a disc.

Finally, this picture was taken just four seconds after the second picture above, and I wasn’t going to use it since it’s a bit overexposed. Then I noticed the thing in the middle.

It’s way out of focus since I was focused on the moon, 362,544 kilometers away. At first I figured it must be a plane up at 35,000 feet, since we are right under the departure track from LAX to parts north and Asia-ward. But if it were a plane, wouldn’t we see the anti-collision lights? So maybe it is a bird at 350 feet? But those are really long wings for any bird normally seen around here.

A super-secret DOD spy plane, or even an old-fashioned U2? A Klingon bird of prey starship?

It’s a mystery! Maybe we’ll see it again during the eclipse in forty-eight hours!

“Low hanging fruit.” In common usage today, it means winning the easy game, picking up the simple rewards that are right in front of you, or taking advantage of opportunities that you practically are tripping over. Tonight’s photos are an instance of “low hanging fruit” in an astronomical photography sense.

When I took Jessie out for her evening constitutional, it was “clear and a million” here. It was about a half hour after sunset, just starting to get dark. The bats were out — it’s a good thing, keeps the bug population down. And hanging low in the west was a very thin crescent moon. I left Jessie to check her “pee-mail” and ran inside to get cameras and the little telescope.

A quick check of the ephemeris app (I like “Moon Phase”, it howls on full moon nights) shows that the moon was new on the 23rd at 23:15 UT. Since it was now about 02:00 UT on the 27th (19:00 on the 26th PDT), that meant that the moon was about 74:45 old, a bit over three days. That’s a thin crescent.

It isn’t that hard to see the moon as much as a day earlier than that, but it gets exponentially harder the earlier you get to new moon. Not only is the “younger” moon closer to the sun and lost in the glare, which means it’s closer to the horizon at sunset at a time when the sky’s brighter, but it’s also thinner and dimmer to boot. There are amateur astronomers who actively try to see how “young” a moon they can see. I think the earliest I’ve seen it is about 35:00 or so, but the records are 15:32 for the naked eye and 11:40 for optically-aided sightings.

So 74:45 is very pretty, quite noticeable, and not that hard to take photos of. With a mid-sized telephoto lens (75-300 mm) you can see this:

A wider-angle shot with the moon down near the horizon will often show trees, hills, and buildings along with the moon. This can help frame the picture.

In addition, you can see that the moon is floating through a sky that is still not that dark at all. For shots using a long telephoto lens, you should use a tripod if available, or at least try to brace yourself against something (such as a car). This will minimize blurring when the exposures get up to a significant fraction of a second.

Quickly setting up the little ‘scope, while it was still fairly light, I got this view. It’s similar to the view I got when I did this last year, but the moon then was 13% illuminated and 91 hours old, as opposed to 8% illuminated at 74:45 hours.

The first problem with taking these images is that it’s hard to focus, with the moon being difficult to see. This same issue also makes the pictures wishy-washy. The problem is in the low contrast due to the bright-ish sky and relatively dim moon. In a few days, the illuminated portion of the moon will be MUCH brighter and the pictures can be taken well after sunset so the background sky will be quite dark, giving you a high contrast situation. Good pictures, easier focusing.

Once the sky gets a little darker, your focusing gets easier and the contrast goes up, but now you’re looking through a whole lot more atmosphere. Even clear air is usually turbulent and gives a slightly fuzzy image as a result. (There’s a reason the Hubble Space Telescope and every other telescope we can manage are all up above the atmosphere.) At sunrise or sunset, longer viewing paths through the air, much more turbulence, much fuzzier pictures.

The other factor which didn’t help was vibration as I took the pictures. I have gotten a neat little toy which will trigger the camera remotely, which can reduce the vibration by a couple of orders of magnitude — but the battery is dead on the receiver. So much for being an old Boy Scout — I was not prepared.

Tomorrow I’ll try to remember to get new batteries. Of course, tomorrow it won’t be “clear and a million.” If I’m prepared in advance and looking forward to an observing and photography session, we’ll no doubt have the first significant rain for the first time in close to a year.

It’s okay. We need the water.