The pilgrimage to Palomar, constellations by DSLR, and the Azusa fire

I have been fortunate to visit two of the great research observatories in California: Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton, overlooking San Jose, which got me into all this in the first place; and Mount Wilson Observatory, where I’ve gotten to observe twice with the 60-inch telescope.

For a long time I have been meaning to get to the third major research observatory in California: Palomar. The building of the 200-inch (5-meter) telescope during the Great Depression was one of the first scientific “megaprojects”, something akin to the Apollo program or the search for the Higgs boson, and it caught the public interest in much the same way. After serious war-related delays, the great machine was finally dedicated in 1948, had its official first light in 1949, and started regular research observations in 1950–a program that continues to this day. The 200-inch telescope was absolutely the world’s largest telescope from 1948 to 1976, and effectively the world’s largest telescope until the first Keck telescope came online in 1993. The 6-meter Soviet BTA-6, which was completed in 1976, was more of a publicity stunt than a functional instrument and has not lived up to its potential, although I hear it is being overhauled so maybe that will finally change.

If you are remotely interested in the history of big telescopes in general and the history of the 200-inch in particular, I highly recommend The Perfect Machine, by Ronald Florence. If I started relating all the interesting anecdotes about the building of the telescope, we’d be here forever–it will be faster and more enjoyable to read the darn book.

Anyway, yesterday I was staring down the barrel of a 3-day weekend with no definite plans. I decided that it was finally time to go see the “big eye” at Palomar Mountain. London and I didn’t get on the road until early afternoon, so we got down there too late to visit the observatory yesterday. Instead, we went to nearby Palomar Mountain State Park for a phenomenal sunset and some early evening stargazing.

I had along a new toy: Vicki loaned me her Nikon D70 DSLR. She’s had it for three or four years, I’ve just never used it. It’s been on my to-do list, though, and Kevin’s results on Mount Baldy a couple of weeks ago gave me just the kick that I needed. I have been waiting not-s0-patiently for the full moon to pass so that I could try my hand at photographing constellations.

London in the meadow by Doane Pond, with the handle of the dipper hanging overhead.

After sunset London and I went down to Doane Pond, which sits in a nice little bowl with mountains on all sides. We went on a night hike around the pond, which resulted in us accidentally scaring several bullfrogs and them scaring us right back–few things are more alarming than an unsuspected animal making sudden noisy movement right by your feet in the dark. I also stopped at various places around the pond to photograph the sky, the pond, or the sky reflected in the pond.

I should preface all this by saying that I have no idea what I’m doing. This is my first time using a DSLR, I have no idea what about 95% of the controls do, and if you actually know photography you’d best put your beverage down now so you don’t spit it all over the keyboard. Nevertheless, I have read that one can get passable constellation photos with exposures of  30 seconds or less, and you are about  to see my first round of results.

I’ve been rereading Leslie Peltier’s Starlight Nights. I think of it, and Timothy Ferris’s Seeing in the Dark (the subject of this previous post), as “books about the why”. Loads of books will tell you how to stargaze, but very talk about the actual thoughts and emotions associated with the practice. If you want to know why to stargaze, go read Starlight Nights and Seeing in the Dark. Just be warned–if you’re not a stargazer now, you may be one by the time you’re done (also, if you’re not, I don’t know what you’re doing here, but welcome!).

Peltier writes with great warmth about his favorite stars, especially Vega, which was the first star he knew by name. I’d be hard pressed to name one favorite star, but I have a favorite constellation, and that is Cassiopeia. When I started getting into astronomy in the fall of 2007–almost five years ago, now–Cassiopeia was the first constellation I learned. All that autumn I turned my gaze northeast at dusk and found Cassiopeia first. She pointed me on westward to Cepheus and Draco and ultimately to Hercules and M13. To the south she led me to Pegasus, Aries, faint and frustrating Triangulum, and of course Andromeda and its magnificent galaxy. And following in Cassiopeia’s train as she climbed the eastern sky I found the Double Cluster and Perseus, the Pleiades, the Hyades, Auriga and its nice trio of Messier clusters, and the constellations of winter. Our romance has only deepened as I’ve gotten to know her better, for the velvety black folds of her dress are adorned with star clusters and nebulae almost beyond counting. Naturally, I pointed the camera in her direction first.

My first constellation photo–click through for the full-size, unlabeled version.

This is not a triumph of astrophotography. It’s grainy, it’s too bright, and the composition is not stellar (to, er, coin a phrase). But Cassiopeia is there, and I even see the Double Cluster just clearing the trees.

After paying my respects to Cassiopeia, I turned south, to Sagittarius and the summer Milky Way. Here’s the best of the lot, without labels.

And the same thing with constellations and deep sky objects labeled. Not every bright deep sky object is labeled, only those where I can see at least a smudge or a couple of bright pixels. Still, there are at least 19 DSOs visible in what was probably a 20- or 25-second exposure.

I am really looking forward to trying this under darker skies. It never got truly dark at Doane Pond, because the nearly-full waning gibbous moon rose well before the end of astronomical twilight. I think that without the moon it would have gotten very dark–maybe not stupid-dark like the remote places in the Mojave, but darker than Mount Baldy.

One more: the Big Dipper over Doane Pond, with a couple of its stars reflected in the pond. The pond was about as still as it could be, given the number of big splashes caused by alarmed bullfrogs (and, therefore, ultimately caused by me!).

Two things you shouldn’t mess with. To truly grok the immensitude of the telescope, check out the normal-size, full-width ladder going up one beam on the near side. The fork arms on either side have stairways inside for servicing the drive motors.

Today we went up to the top of the mountain and toured the observatory. Oddly enough, I don’t have a ton to say about this, beyond the obvious things. Which are (1) it’s awesome, and (2) if you live within striking distance, you should definitely go. Get there in time to get tickets for the guided tour–it’s waaaaay better than the self-guided tour, the docents are friendly and know a ton about the telescope and its history, and you’ll get to go up onto the catwalk inside the dome and get a much better view of the scope than you can from the little glassed-in visitor area on the dome floor. You really need to walk under and around the scope to get a sense of how immense it is, and you can’t do that except on the guided tour. I have been around some big scopes, including the 3-meter Shane reflector at the Lick Observatory, and the 200-inch makes all the others I’ve seen look like toys. Even knowing intellectually how big it is, I still walked in and thought, “OMG that’s big.” It’s inhumanly big.

The only downside to the whole trip is that as I was packing us up to leave, I momentarily set my observing notebook on top of the car–and then forgot to get it before we drove off. That’s a bummer. I have almost all of the observations backed up in my digital observing log (a huge Excel file), but the notebook had lots of sketches and there were probably a few object descriptions that I had not logged digitally. There’s a slim chance it will turn up, but I’m not holding my breath.

One final thing: there’s a wildfire burning in the Angeles National Forest above Azusa. It started just this afternoon. London and I saw it when we were coming home on I-15, as a fat pyrocumulus cloud squatting on the San Gabriels like a big evil god. At sunset I went to the top of the Claremont parking garage and watched it for a while. It must have hit a new fuel source around then because as I was watching it took about 10 minutes to go from this:

to this:

While I watched, I saw and heard several helicopters making runs to dump either water or fire-retardant foam. At that time, the fire had spread to more than 1000 acres and percent containment was zero. I’ve been up in the mountains lately and they’re bone dry, so this could be a bad one. My prayers are with the firefighters, and the people whose homes lie in the path of the fire.

Last week’s full moon

Ever since the full moon of January 29, 2010, I’ve been wanting to catch another that was perfectly full. Not a day or even half a day early or late, but right on the button. I came pretty close last Wednesday, August 1. Here’s my best shot, taken with the Nikon Coolpix 4500 shooting through my Apex 127 Mak and 32mm Plossl.

It’s hard to say if this moon is really perfectly full or not; in a way it is, and in a way it isn’t. I know that’s enigmatic, and I’ll clarify it at the end of the post. But first, compare last Wednesday’s full moon to the renowned (by me, anyway) January 29, 2010, moon.

Here, let me make that comparison easier for you. As always, click for the big version.

Two things here are worthy of note. First, there is a difference in illumination. On the left, the east side of the moon is better lit, and on the right, the west.

More importantly, these pictures do not show the same stretch of moon! Check out this overlapped composite, with a few prominent landmarks labelled.

All of the offsets are consistently in the southeast-northwest direction, and the two moons are perfectly overlapped at the periphery. The difference between the images is not because the photographs are rotated in two dimensions, but because the moon was differently rotated in three dimensions. This effect is called libration, and because of it we can see almost 60% of the lunar surface from Earth.

Here’s the comparo again, this time with some of the limb features labelled.

On January 29, 2010, the northwest limb of the moon was tipped toward us, allowing a good view of the “shore” of Oceanus Procellarum and some prominent rim craters like von Braun and its equally-spaced outriders Lavoisier A and Harding. Another useful landmark is the bright crater Seleucus, just to the east of the much larger, dark-floored Eddington. On the opposite limb, Mare Marginis and Mare Australe are barely visible, and Mare Smythii is just a dark patch on the limb itself.

Now compare to last week’s fully moon. The northwest limb is rotated so far away that von Braun is completely lost, along with the rest of the shore of Oceanus Procellarum, and Eddington is a barely perceptible dark streak. On the other hand, the southeast limb shows excellent detail in Mare Australe, especially around the very dark-floored craters Lyot and Oken, and farther north we can see all the way across Mare Smythii to the lighter terrain beyond.

Now, as to the “perfection” of the fullness: there is some terminator-like shadow and detail visible in my  photo from last week, but not on the eastern limb where one might expect it. Instead, all of the visibly shadowed craters are around the south pole. This is where the story gets complicated.

There are three widely-discussed causes of libration: (1) the moon leading or lagging, relative to its own rotation, along its eccentric orbital path; (2) the tilt of the  moon’s axis relative to the plane of its orbit; and (3) rotation of the Earth, which from moonrise to moonset carries an Earthbound observer almost 8000 miles from west to east (which is why everything in the sky rises in the east–that’s the direction we’re constantly headed here on the surface). The moon is only 240,000 miles away, so this daily (or nightly) trip equals 1/30 of the distance from Earth to the moon. How much difference does that make? The average interocular distance for a human is 6.5 cm (2.5 inches), so look at something 30 times farther away (195 cm or just over 6 feet) first with one eye and then with the other. You just simulated diurnal libration.

Now, as I noted above, the eastern limb of the moon is darker than the western side in last week’s photo. The Sky & Tel online almanac said max fullness would be at 8:37 PM, PDT. But the moon was just rising then, about four hours before it would cross the local meridian. In other words, at max fullness the moon was dead overhead for people 4000 miles west of me, but the turning Earth wouldn’t carry me directly under the moon for another four hours–and by the time I got there, it wouldn’t be perfectly full anymore. I took the picture I used in this post at about 11:30–three hours too late for a perfectly full moon. I took other pictures at 8:37 and other times in between, but they turned out poorly–seeing near the horizon was rotten and my scope wasn’t properly cooled yet.

So I’m pretty sure that diurnal libration–the effect of the turning Earth–accounts for the less-than-even illumination from east to west in my moon shot. But that doesn’t explain why there are shadows at the south pole. I assume that the alignment of the moon and Earth was such that I was looking up the moon’s skirts, so to speak–so far south, relative to the moon, that I could see past the illuminated area and into the shadowed highlands beyond. If that’s true, then observers in the Southern Hemisphere, being even farther “below” the moon, should have been able to see even farther into the shadowlands.

The moral of the story is that if you want a good photo of the perfectly full moon, it’s not enough that the moon be visible in the sky at the moment of max fullness–you should also be right underneath it (it should be as high in the sky as it is going to get). Even if you get good enough seeing to get a clean shot of the moon low in the sky, you’ll be several thousand miles to one side or the other, and you won’t be seeing it face-on. On the flip side, if you catch the rising full moon a few hours before max fullness, or the setting full moon a few hours after, you might still get a fully-illuminated disk, because Earth’s rotation will put you along the same line as the incoming light. Sounds a bit hairy, but as Timothy Ferris wrote of making chancy observations, “You can’t catch any fish if you don’t get your line wet.”

Anyway, I had a lot of fun, and got a good look at some southeast limb features that I’d never seen before. I’m anxious to see what libration will bring me next.

More low-cost solar observing

In preparation for the transit of Venus tomorrow, I did a little hacking and tinkering late this afternoon. Although the sun funnel worked well enough for watching the eclipse, as we’ll see below it is not perfect for photographing the sun in any detail. My full-aperture solar filter still hasn’t arrived, but I got to thinking about how to make a safe direct viewing setup.

I recently acquired a Celestron Travel Scope 70, a little 70mm (2.75 inch) f/5.7 achromatic refractor. Like a lot of small refractors, the dust cap for the objective lens has a smaller removable cap in the middle, in case you want to stop down the scope for more pleasant viewing of bright targets like the full moon. The diameter of the small hole in the middle of the big cap is 40mm, so with big cap on but the small cap off, the scope functions as a 40mm f/10.

I don’t have any loose solar film to make a 70mm solar filter or even a 40mm solar filter. But I do have a stack of eclipse glasses, each of which has two 1×1.5 inch eye holes covered with solar film. So I cut one of the eclipse glasses in half, made a round 25mm aperture in a square piece of cardboard, and mounted the eclipse glasses ‘lens’ (solar film still surrounded by two sheets of thin cardboard) and the 25mm aperture stop on the back side of the big dust cap. I didn’t think to take any pictures of the inside of the dust cap to show how it all goes together, but hopefully the general idea is clear enough. With the big dust cap on and the small dust cap off, the scope admits a 25mm beam of fully solar-filtered light to the objective, turning the scope into a 25mm f/16 solar refractor. And because the solar filter is on the inside of the big dust cap and protected by the small dust cap (in front) and the second piece of cardboard with the 25mm aperture stop (behind), I can leave it in all the time. Take the big dust cap off, the scope functions normally. Take only the small one off, I’ve got a 1-inch solar scope.

Two other design decisions to note. First, the finder–and I use the term advisedly–that came with this scope is without doubt the worst finder I have ever seen on a commercial scope from a brand name manufacturer. It looks like a 5×20 straight-through magnifying finder. However, right behind the (single, plastic) objective lens is an aperture stop with only a 1-cm hole in the middle. So in fact it’s a 5×10 finder with a plastic singlet objective. The immense irony is that the scope doesn’t need a finder at all; throw in a 32mm Plossl and you get 12.5x and 4-degree true field of view, so the scope effectively functions as its own superfinder. So I unscrewed both ends of the finder and dumped out all the plastic optics, turning it into a hollow sight tube. Why is this important right now? Because it’s really dumb to leave a magnifying finder on a telescope being used for solar observing; it’s too easy to forget what you’re doing and accidentally looking through the unfiltered finder and cause serious eye damage or blindness. There’s a good reason that every commercial telescope comes with a “don’t point the scope at the sun, dummy” tag or sticker or both. This is not something to mess around with. If you’re going to observe the sun with a telescope, cultivate the same habits of awareness and deliberate action that you would use around loaded firearms and power saws.

Oh, the included 45-degree prism diagonal is also rubbish and the light tripod looks pretty dodgy. Today I used my standard small-scope setup–an AstroTech 90-degree dielectric star diagonal and a Universal Astronomics DwarfStar alt-az head on a Bogen/Manfrotto tripod–and I’ll doubtless do the same in the future.

The other design thing was the sun shield. At first I tried going without but look into a dark eyepiece to catch a filtered (= comparatively dim) view of the filtered sun while unfiltered sunlight was hitting the top of my head and my upper eyelid had me squinting and developing a minor headache almost immediately. The plastic dewshield on this scope pulls right off, so I got a handy piece of cardboard (part of the packaging of a picture frame), cut a hole just big enough to admit the front end of the scope without the dewshield, slid the cardboard sunshield on and used the plastic dew shield (and dust cap with solar filter) to hold it in place. I also cut a second, smaller hole to let light in to my sight tube sun finder.

If you do something similar, make sure that the sun shield can’t get blown off and take the solar filter with it. In my case, the dewshield slides on a long way and grips both the sun shield and telescope tube firmly; a strong enough breeze might upend the whole setup, but it couldn’t blow off just the shield and filter. Again, eye safety is paramount; don’t take any chances.

Okay, so how did it work in practice? Pretty darned well. I had already aligned the sight tube with the telescope, so all I had to do was rotate the sun shield a bit to make sure the second, smaller hole lined up with the sight tube. Then I could point the scope roughly at the sun and pan around until a perfectly round beam of sunlight (projected on my hand) emerged from the sight tube. That always put the sun in the field of view of a 25mm Plossl (16x, 3 degree true field of view). The view of the sun at the eyepiece was reasonably bright–for an astronomical object, not compared to the unfiltered sunlight streaming down all around–and razor-sharp. The sunspots with their umbrae (dark centers) and penumbrae (lighter borders) were striking, like they’d been etched on stained glass.

Happily, the filtered scope yielded nice, even light all over the surface of the sun, no matter where it roamed in the field of the view. My one beef with the sun funnel is that it can be hard to get really good photos because of the inherent granularity of the screen material. Inevitably some part of the projected sun is brighter than another, and if you manage to get the light perfectly centered, it can easily wipe out the sunspots. The best way I’ve found to avoid this flashlight-beam effect is to photograph the sun from a bit to the side, out of the direct path of the projected light (that’s how I got this very sharp photo), but then the sun is out of round–not ideal if you’re hoping to combine images into a composite or movie, or even get a nice, square-on shot of a circular sun.

For example, in the photo above the sunspots on the left are sharp enough–the big one even shows the umbra and penumbra clearly–but the dimmer two on the right are lost in the flashlight glow of the sun lighting up the screen material from behind. And in this view the sun is already way out of round.

Also note that this image is flipped horizontally compared with the image from the refractor. In fact, this image is correctly oriented. Normally Newtonian reflectors show things rotated by 180 degrees, but projecting the image on the screen undoes that and gets everything back to normal. The solar filter on the refractor just cuts down the intensity of the light, it does nothing to reorient the image, so the image at the eyepiece is right side up but, because of the 90-degree mirror, flipped left-to-right.

I didn’t go to all of this trouble just for the transit of Venus. I mean, I happily would have, had the transit been the only game in town. But it’s not–the Astronomical League has a Sunspotters observing program, and now that I have the gear for solar observing, I might as well start logging. I’ll keep you posted on that.

Now, I should point out that the flashlight-beam effect washing out the sunspots in the sun funnel is mostly a photographic concern. For visual appreciation, even solo, I think the sun funnel still wins. A 4-inch image scale and the ability to put your head and eyes wherever you want–and even wear polarized sunglasses to observe–can’t be beat. But for photography, I prefer the filtered direct view–even in a one-inch scope.

Fortunately I’ll be rolling with both tomorrow. Now if the weather just cooperates…

The mountains of the moon, and the moons of Jupiter

My latest efforts at white-trash astrophotography (or, if you prefer, afocal projection photography, or digiscoping), wherein I hold my digital camera up to the eyepiece of my telescope and take pictures:

The moon last night, at last quarter. I love this phase because the mountains that form the eastern rim of Mare Imbrium–the immense incomplete circle in the moon’s northern hemisphere–are still catching the light of the setting sun, creating an arc of light in a sea of darkness. Galileo saw the same thing with his 1-inch telescope 403 years ago, and correctly inferred that the lights in the darkness were mountaintops on the moon, catching either the first (when waxing) or last (when waning) rays of the sun, and that therefore the moon was not a perfectly smooth sphere, but a world with similarities to our own.

And, hey, it looks pretty. I like how the arc-of-light-in-darkness motif is repeated by the smaller craters along the terminator to the south of Mare Imbrium.

Jupiter and the Galilean moons, tonight. As with previous efforts (see here and here), this is a composite shot. To get the moons to show up at all, I had to completely overexpose Jupiter,  so this is a combination of two images. The order of the moons from right to left is also, by chance tonight, their order from closest in to farthest out from Jupiter: Io (by itself on the right), Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. This is only the second time I’ve gotten Jupiter and all four kids in one shot; often one of the little bleepers is off in Jupiter’s shadow.

All photos taken with a Nikon Coolpix 4500 digital camera, Orion Apex 127mm Maksutov-Cassegrain telescope, and Orion Sirius Plossl eyepieces (32 mm for moon, 25 mm for Jupiter and family).

Notes from the underground

This is my teaching time of year, and between that and attending a conference in England the week before last, I have had precious little time for observing. But I did get out this week for half an hour to take some pictures of the full moon. Not nearly as detailed and sharp as some of the others I’ve taken in the past, but most of those were taken with 6-10″ scopes, and this was taken with my 2″ SV50.

Now that moon is on the wane, every night will be better and better for observing comet Harley 2, which is cruising through Cassiopeia right now. S&T has a nice page with info on the comet and finder charts. I haven’t looked for it yet, but it’s on my to-do list.

Finally, the fourth installment in my series on the world’s largest telescopes appeared in this month’s PVAA newsletter. This link will be good for the next three months, after which it will be available on the Nightwatch archive site.

The unrestrained Jupiter worship has got to stop

In a comment on the recent Jupiter impact post, Mike asked,

Uh. If this [i.e., big things slamming into Jupiter] is happening to Jupiter three times in thirteen months, what does that tell us about the odds of it happening to us?

The answer is that Jupiter giveth, and Jupiter taketh away.

In my experience, about 99% of the popular sources out there only mention the second, positive part: Jupiter is the solar system’s vacuum cleaner, hoovering up tons of wayward comets and other “small bodies” (all the way down to mere dinosaur killers) that would otherwise bomb us back into the Paleocene. The spate of recent impacts would tend to confirm that. Three cheers for Jupiter! Our hero! Let’s have a ticker tape parade!

Barf.

Can we all take the Jupiter worship down a couple thousand percent? Because that ain’t the whole simple story. Jupiter also giveth, and what it giveth, we don’t wanteth.

Ever wonder why there are so many Earth-crossing asteroids?  I mean, the solar system has been here for close to 5 billion years. Shouldn’t the space rocks have hit something or gotten shot out of the system by now? In fact, the vast majority of them have. Earth-crossing asteroids have orbits that are stable on multi-million year timescales… which means that on the multi-billion year timescale of the solar system, they should be history. But they’re not, because new ones keep migrating in from the asteroid belt all the time, to replenish the ones that either get flung elsewhere or (gulp) hit us. And why do new asteroids keep coming in from the belt? Because of orbital resonances with stinkin’ Jupiter. That big bully keeps throwing rocks at us!

Now, it’s true that most near-Earth asteroids are destined to either spiral on it toward the Sun or get flung out of the inner solar system, and that only a very small fraction actually hit the Earth. And it’s also true that Jupiter sucks up a lot of comets and asteroids that might otherwise come in and hit us, and that the occasional impact damage from Earth-crossing asteroids is probably preferable to getting creamed by an unfettered rain of comets barreling in from the outer solar system. So on the balance, we’re better off with Jupiter than without. Jupiter is like that one tough guy among your childhood friends, who would keep other groups of kids from hassling your group, but might punch you really hard in the shoulder once a while, for no apparent reason.

So let’s lay off with the fawning science news coverage and virgin sacrifices. Jupiter is nice to have around, but it is nowhere near 100% cool.

—————————————–

In other news, I took the shot at the top from my driveway the other night, shooting with a Nikon Coolpix 4500 through an Orion XT12i telescope and 13mm Stratus eyepiece. The moons from left to right are Ganymede, Io, and Europa. I could see Callisto off to the right as well, but it was out of this shot.

The moon and Saturn tonight

It was almost freakishly clear and calm here in Claremont this evening. My friend and fellow blogger Andy Farke came over and we spent some time looking up.  First target was the waxing crescent moon. Here in town, the seeing is often so bad that at anything over 100x, the image looks like it is under a rippling sheet of water. But tonight we were able to push on to 240x with no problems. I’d say the effects of seeing (atmospheric turbulence) didn’t start to be noticeable until 120x and even at 240x it wasn’t a dealbreaker.

Here’s Mare Nectaris and vicinity (click for the larger, unlabeled version). The line of craters formed by Theophilus, Cyrillus, and Catharina is an easy catch in binoculars at this phase. The Altai Scarp is an immense range of cliffs, hundreds of miles long. Mare Nectaris formed as a multi-ringed impact basin, much like the Chicxulub crater from the “dinosaur-killer” asteroid, and the Altai Scarp is the largest surviving stretch of one of the outer rings.

We had a look at Mars, which was a well-defined disc with hints–and only hints–of detail. I suspected the ice cap from time to time, but couldn’t convince myself that I’d really seen it, as opposed to just thinking the disc looked lighter where I know the ice cap ought to be. Still, a whole ‘nuther planet, y’know? Give me a telescope and a world to point it at and I get a little giddy.

The real treat of the evening was Saturn. At 120x it was crisp and jewel-like, but at 240x it was simply astounding. I have never seen so much detail in one of my own telescopes. The photo is by far my best ever for Saturn, but it just doesn’t do it justice, not by a long shot. The whole planet was striped with pastel bands, and we could clearly see the gap between the rings and the planet. The dark band stretching across the disc is the shadow of the rings. Three moons shone out proudly to the left of the rings; Stellarium informs me that they were Dione, Rhea, and Titan, from inward to out. After Andy left I even caught little Enceladus–she of the geysers–between Dione and the rings.

I also cruised over to the globular cluster M3 and it was very nice, a contained explosion of stars. It looked better than I’ve ever seen it, which is saying something since the moon was out. Most DSOs don’t suffer unduly from bad seeing since they are extended and dim to begin with, but globs do. I’m half-tempted to haul out the scope again and have a look at M13, which ought to be up now, but I have to sleep sometime. Good night, and clear skies.

Photos taken with a Nikon Coolpix 4500 digital camera, shooting through an Orion SkyQuest XT10 telescope and Orion Stratus eyepieces.

DIY pictures from the edge of space

This photo was not taken by NASA or the European Space Agency or the Air Force, or by any organization at all. It was taken by Robert Harrison, a 38-year-old IT director from Yorkshire, who put a garden variety point-n-shoot digital camera on a helium balloon. According to Sky News, his rig cost about 500 quid, or just under $750. Harrison programmed a little gizmo that makes the digital camera take photos or videos at set intervals. The big load of goodies is at his Flickr site. Be sure to check out the Icarus 1 videos, they are mesmerizing.

The balloon carries the camera up to 22 miles above the Earth, at which point the pod carrying the camera detaches from the balloon and parachutes back to the ground. Harrison uses a GPS locator to recover the camera.

Twenty-two miles is 116,000 feet, or 35 km, still well within the stratosphere. That’s much higher than commercial airliners fly (around 40,000 feet), and in fact only a handful of manned aircraft are capable of flying over 100,000 feet. At that altitude the sky is black and the curvature of the Earth is obvious, so it is informally known as the “edge of space”. Space itself is quite a bit farther up. In the US, the definition of an astronaut is someone who has been at least 50 miles up (264,000 feet, 80 km). By comparison, on its final flight SpaceShipOne reached an altitude of 69 miles (112 km), and low Earth orbit starts at about 100 miles up (160 km). I bring that up just to establish context, not to detract at all from Harrison’s achievement. Getting pictures back from altitudes higher than those reached by the SR-71 Blackbird (~85,000 feet) on a budget of less than a thousand bucks is flat-out amazing.

I wonder who will be the first to duplicate his feat?

The Moon and Pleiades, again

I wasn’t happy with the photo/sketch of the Moon passing the Pleiades that I showed in the last post. The field of view was too cramped to match what I saw at the eyepiece, and I put the stars in by flipping back and forth between Stellarium and GIMP and eyeballing things.

So this time I did it right: got a screenshot from Stellarium, pasted it into a layer in GIMP, placed the stars in a separate layer on top of that, and then got rid of the screenshot layer. Here’s the result, which is very close to what I actually saw Saturday night:

I liked the new version so much that I made a full-screen version. I don’t have any eyepieces that can actually show this much sky at once, but it looks pretty and I don’t care. Here it is:

Observing Report: A New High

Last night I was back down at the Salton Sea. I got down there right at sunset, found a spot in the Mecca Beach campground, and got the scope set up a little after 7:00. The sites on either side of me were empty but I had neighbors farther down the way and across the road that runs through the middle of camp. I walked around and invited people to come see the moon.

About eight people drifted in over the next hour or so, and most stayed for quite a while. We looked at the waxing crescent moon, Venus, Mars, the Great Nebula in Orion (M42), the Beehive (M44), M41 in Canis Major, and Mizar and Alcor. Saturn got up out of the near-horizon murk so we got a good look at the ringed planet and four of its moons. Mars showed a polar cap, some dark surface detail, and a possible cloud near the equator. Eventually we went on to galaxies–M81 and M82 in Ursa Major, which looked awesome in the same field of view, M55 and M56 in Leo (ditto), M51 and its satellite, and, most memorably for me, the Sombrero Galaxy (M104). The dark lane of dust that runs across the Sombrero was easy to see, and under those dark skies the galaxy showed a surprisingly extensive halo extending above and below the plane of the disc.

I’ve started working on the AL Caldwell Club so I spent some quality time on a couple of planetary nebulae, the Eskimo or Clown Face Nebula (NGC 2392) and the Ghost of Jupiter (NGC 3242). The Eskimo showed its prominent central star or ‘nose’, and in averted vision I could see some detail in the gaseous halo, but it was small and short on detail compared to the Ghost of Jupiter. The latter nebula was just awesome–it seemed about twice the diameter of the Eskimo, and there were definitely at least two concentric shells of gas around the central star, with the inner shell being brighter than the outer and clearly elongated out of round. Look at this image from about ten feet away and you’ll have a pretty good idea of what it looked like in the eyepiece.

I got a good look at Omega Centauri, the immense globular cluster that just gets over the southern horizon here. It was suffering from being down in the dense atmosphere near the horizon, but it was still a big ole ball of stars. At 92x, it looked as big or bigger in the eyepiece than M13, the Great Glob in Hercules, looked at 184x, and its stars looked smaller and more numerous. It is truly an outstanding object.

And speaking of M13, it was pretty darn good once  it got a good way up the eastern sky, with lots of resolution and long chains of stars emanating from the central ball.

It was  great night. As much fun as I had during the Messier Marathon last month, I had more fun last night just surfing around the sky and showing people cool stuff. I got better views of planetary nebulae, globular clusters, and galaxies than I have ever had from my own scopes. But the most amazing thing I saw all evening was, believe it or not, the moon.

I set up the telescope right before dark, tweaked the mirror alignment, and got the scope on the moon just by dead reckoning, without using the finder. The moon was exceedingly detailed and the entire globe stood out very clearly against the sky, which was not yet fully dark. And the moon was surrounded by stars, which was weird. Admittedly, it was still just a crescent moon, but between the glare from the moon and the evening twilight I didn’t expect to see any stars at all in the same field. They were there,  though. It occurred to me that the moon might be passing in front of a star cluster, as happens from time to time. Finally I got around to checking the finder scope and saw that the moon was cruising right past the Pleiades.

The view in a low-magnification eyepiece was indescribably beautiful, but I’ll try to describe it anyway. With the sky not fully dark, the razor-sharp moon seemed to hang suspended in front of a dark velvet blue sky, with the stars shining out like a halo of fireflies. The impression of depth was overwhelming–I could almost reach through the telescope and pluck the visibly spherical moon from among the streams of stars. Intellectually, I know the distances are all wrong–the velvety blue sky was in front of the moon, not behind it, and the stars were incomprehensibly more distant–but that’s what it felt like.

I took my best photo from last night and mocked up a very crude representation of what this looked like at the eyepiece. Imagine trying to tell someone about Michelangelo’s David when all you have to show them is a doodled stick figure and you’ll have a sense of what I’m up against. Nevertheless, here goes (image processing in GIMP, star positions from Stellarium):

UPDATE: I made a much improved, more realistic version of this image and put it in the next post.

So, I have a new favorite sport: catching the moon in front of star clusters during twilight. I’m sure it won’t happen that often, but the memory of just this first catch will last a lifetime. It was, hands down, the most incredible thing I have seen in any telescope of any size, anywhere, ever.

Best of all, it was accessible–anyone pointing even the most modest telescope skyward at the same time last night would have seen the same thing. So stay alert, you never know when the most seemingly ordinary of celestial objects will jump up and blow your mind.