First Dark Site Light with the 14.7"

Last night looked good and I had a favorable enough work schedule to make a trip to Columbus. This was my first time with my newly built 14.7” (373mm) alt-az-mounted, Telekit Newtonian in a dark place.  For the past several years, I have been limited to 10” at the Columbus site.  I haven’t had any larger aperture there since 2011:

https://polarisb.blogspot.com/2011/03/camping-at-dark-sky-site-3-14-2011.html

What a difference five more inches makes!  A ten inch mirror (less the secondary) provides ~70k sq. mm (less the secondary) of light collecting power. A 373mm mirror provides >100,000 sq. mm! This increase was obvious.

Everything I looked at seemed new. Compare M15 to M2!  In that aperture, they look like different classes of object.  The Double Cluster seemed to go on endlessly. Mirach’s Ghost looked like a globular.

Highlights of the night, each a first find for me, included IC10 (surprisingly big and round), NGC 147, NGC 891’s dark lane, six members of the Abell 347 cluster (just east of NGC 891), M76’s lobes (with a nebular filter), and three members of Stephan’s Quintet.

I learned some things, too.  One thing is that I need more solutions for dew: by 11, everything external was fogging up if it wasn’t heated, and water was dripping off the telescope; things are laid out around the house today to dry. But today I am basking in the glow of a great night of observing!

Horsehead, Alnitak, Flame, NGC2023 (processed Sept. 2026)

I haven't done any deep sky imaging in a year because my camera broke and the software I used became obsolete.  I've been waiting for the tech, the software, and my workload to stabilize. But when Lloyd Smith of Deep Sky West Remote Observatory let some files go, I had to give them a try.  It's been fun to work with superb data.  This is the Horsehead Nebula, of course; the star Alnitak on the left; the Flame Nebula underneath the star; and NGC 2023 just under the Horsehead.

Jupiter and Luna, Sept. 8, 2026

This was the view around 2:18 p.m. in Spring, Texas, through my TS102SD f/11 and Canon R8.  A few minutes later, the Moon moved in front of the planet!

Moon Over Jupter, Sept. 8, 2026

I set a goal to watch the moon cover Jupiter on the afternoon of Sept. 8, 2026.  I wasn't sure whether it would be cloudy and did not want to set up an equatorial mount if it was.  So I put my 102SD f/11 on a photo tripod and alt-az mount (pretty shaky) and tried to (i) film the coverup and (ii) then watch the uncovering visually.  I found the moon in the finder and then was happily filming while the coverup happened.  Here's the video with the shakes mostly edited out.  Then the clouds moved in.  Clouds covered the emergence of Jupiter from behind the moon; they cleared about five minutes after, when I got a nice view of the planet beneath a sliver of Luna.  Canon R8.

Lunar Eclipse, August 2026

When is the moon full and also half (or some other fraction)? 

During a lunar eclipse!

I always hope to capture some images of the moon moving through the earth's shadow.  In this case, I caught a glimpse of deep penumbra (image #1, note the moon's lower left) before a thunderstorm blocked the view. By the time the storm cleared, the eclipse was nearly midway, deep in the umbra (images #2 & 3). I watched for a while as clouds came and went, as the the curve of the earth's shadow moved across the moon's face (images #4 & 5). I took a final shot as the earth's shadow created a moon shape that is impossible in the moon's monthly phases (image #6).

 These images were taken with a Canon R8 through a AT60ED and 1x flattener. 

Venus, Jupiter, Luna (June 2026)

This last week, rising Venus passed Jupiter in the evening sky while the moon passed through the same field.  On Wednesday, June 17, 2026, at 2:27 p.m., in broad daylight through the space between clouds, I watched the unlit side of the moon pass in front of, blocking, the half-lit crescent Venus. It's a very cool thing to see one celestial sphere pass in front of another!  I missed Venus's emerging from the lit side of the waxing crescent moon at 3:36, but I saw it just a few minutes after.  Of course, the moon and Venus appeared to be the same shape because they were both lit by the sun and were the same angle from the sun from my view!

I did snap a few pictures this week.  All were taken with the Canon R8, the wider field with the 35mm f/1.8 STM and the narrow moon and Venus pics through the AT60ED with the 1x flattener.

This is the moon approaching Venus the night before. Venus is the bright one, and Jupiter is between it and the moon.  The two bright stars to the right of Jupiter are Pollux and Castor.

These are the moon just after the conjunction. This is pretty much how the pair looked through binoculars.

 

 

 

Gathering of Jupiter, Venus, and Mercury, June 7, 2026

Here is the view to the west after sunset on June 7, 2026, from the mountains of Tennessee north of Knoxville.  The brightest light in the heavens is Venus. To Venus's left is Jupiter.  The bright stars to the right of Venus belong to Gemini. To the lower right, between the cloud banks, spot Mercury.  This is just a phone shot with a Pixel 9 Pro.