Astronomy and astrophotography by Val Ricks for the love of the sky and its Creator. For a better view, toggle F11 and turn off the lights.
On eclipse day, I was exhausted from a long trip, so I stayed in Houston and went to work. The whole area was clouded out. However, live feeds of the event and NOAA satellite data were quite the show! Three cheers for NOAA satellites! Here's what I saw over Texas, the US, and Earth. Note that the center of the shadow, the umbra, is darker than the borders, the penumbra.
This is a data set from OMI Astro. It's 11.4 hours of R-Ha/G/B. This is actually one of my favorite parts of the sky. These two galaxies are very bright. In my 10", they look like a whirlpool and a wave, about of equal size. I can almost squeeze them in the same field of view with the eyepieces I use. It's quite a sight to come across these very bright objects. In the telescope view, they have no color at all because they are so dim, even though they are about as bright as galaxies appear at the eyepiece. Leave it to the camera to pick up colors. OMI collected the data with a Takahashi TOA 150. I was hoping to work with data collected with a refractor, and that's a good one.
This is 1/4000th of a second with the Canon T3i through the SW80ED with 0.85x flattener/reducer. We are near the peak of the solar cycle. The big spot upper right is numbered 3590 by those who count.
