Train up a Child ... (Feb. 2013)

 

Gotta love this image.  My boy was four at the time.

NGC 7635, the Bubble Nebula (Sept. 24, 2013)

Full resolution image here.

OK, I've shot this before, but I needed a target after M27 set and before my next target came up.  Here it is.  This is the Bubble Nebula, or NGC 7635, in Cassiopeia.  It is a strange and wonderful object.  A very large, bright star is blasting the bubble out of a cloud of gas.  The star sits in what appears to be the upper right of the bubble.  Just below it is a knot of gas that the star is slowly blowing away with ultraviolet radiation.  The head of the knot glows like a star because it absorbs so much energy.  All the glowing gas you see here is ionized hydrogen and nitrogen, as the filter I used catches only those two.  The gas is glowing from radiation emanating from the same star.  It's such a dramatic scene!

Telescope: Astro-Tech AT111EDT and William Optics AFR-IV (eff. at f/5.6)
Camera and Exposure: SXVF-H9 (Ha-NII: 7x1200"), Alnitak Flat-man flats
Filter: Astronomik Ha-NII
Guiding: SX Lodestar and SX OAG
Mount: Takahashi NJP
Software: Nebulosity, Maxim DL, Photoshop CS3
Location: The Woodlands, TX

Dumbbell Nebula, M27, in OIII (Sept. 24, 2013)

Full resolution image here.

Finally, clear skies again.  I took a few images of M27 through an OIII filter in June and have wanted to go back to it.  This nebula is so dramatic in the light of ionized oxygen!  In fact, this nebula is quite a sight no matter how you look at it.  This summer while observing the excellent skies near Bear Lake, Utah, I glimpsed M27 in a low-power eyepiece through my SV80ED.  The nebula looked like a cotton ball, round and puffy, floating in the Milky Way!  M27 lies roughly 1,300 lights years distant in the constellation Vulpecula.

Telescope: Astro-Tech AT111EDT and William Optics AFR-IV (eff. at f/5.6)
Camera and Exposure: SXVF-H9 (OIII: 9x1200"), Alnitak Flat-man flats
Filter: Astronomik OIII
Guiding: SX Lodestar and SX OAG
Mount: Takahashi NJP
Software: Nebulosity, Maxim DL, Photoshop CS3
Location: The Woodlands, TX

Observing with the C8 (August 29, 2013)

So many cloudy nights!  Summer is like that here, but last night the sky cleared in the evening until very early morning.  Desperate for finely focused starlight, I set up the C8 on the EM-10 and had a look.  I jumped back and forth between 67x and 200x.

Best sight of the night? I'd say it was a tie between Epsilon Lyrae and NGC 6826, the blinking planetary.  The C8 pulls in a respectable number of photons, and "seeing" was decent at 200x last night.  I don't usually look at the Double Double with a large scope.  It's a whole new view at 200x, a much closer view than I can see in my little SV80ED.  NGC 6826 blinked for sure at 67x, showing brightly with averted vision but nearly disappearing when directly viewed.  At 200x, the little blue circle of light held steady.  I was surprised how bright the central star shone.

What was really fun was letting the Samsung tablet do the work.  The SkySafari app connects via bluetooth to a Firefly serial-to-bluetooth adapter on the telescope.  I just tell the app where I want to go, and scope moves right along.  To this long-time starhopper, the ease of moving almost made viewing too fast.  I must have viewed thirty open clusters last night.  Most of them looked great in the C8, framed nicely with the 2-inch, 30mm, 80-degree eyepiece.

A great evening of observing!

Pluto and Palomar 8 (July 10, 2013)

 

 (Click on pictures for larger images.)

Here is Pluto!  See it?  It is just to the east (left) and a little south of the obscure globular cluster Palomar 8.  (You will have to click on the image, at least.)  Palomar 8 is about 42,000 light years away, which is not that far for a globular, but we see it through the mid-section of our own Milky Way galaxy.  That is why there are so many stars in this image.  Lots of gas and dust also block the view, especially obscuring blue light.  That is why the cluster is just a dusty bit of reddish fluff near the middle of the image.

The real treat here is the planet's juxtaposition with the globular.  But Pluto is hard to see!  The dimmest stars in this image are about magnitude 16.  Pluto is around magnitude 14, but quite a few magnitude 14 stars shine here.  How to find Pluto?  Well, I used two resources: the chart on pages 52-53 of the June 2013 Sky & Telescope, and sky-map.org, which plots planet locations against the DSS2 All Sky Survey.  Pluto is the only magnitude 14 object at the location, and I can see stars in the image two magnitudes deeper.  I am confident I have the planet here.  Care to find it in the above image?  If not, here is the same image with pointers:

Want a closer look?  Here is the pixelated, enlarged view.  Some star magnitudes are labeled so that you can more easily spot the planet.  You might compare this view with the survey view on sky-map.org.  Search for "palomar 8."  For a few weeks right now, the sign for Pluto will be very nearby.

There is a time warp in this image.  The light from Pluto has been traveling from the Sun (roundtrip to Pluto and back to us) for about 8 hours 37 minutes.  Light from Pluto itself (sunlight bouncing back) traveled about 4 hours 22 minutes.  Light from Palomar 8 has traveled from the other side of the galaxy for 42,000 years.  We are literally looking back in time.  Light from the Sun reaches the earth in a bit more than 8 minutes.  Pluto's relative distance from the Sun, as compared to ours, is understandable in light minutes: 8 minutes v. 262 minutes.  It's easy to see why the diminutive ball of rock is so cold.

I call Pluto a planet in this post.  Some would prefer it be designated something else.  I have no interest in that debate.

I used the AT65EDQ for this image.  I wanted to see how deep the scope and color camera combination would go.  Partly I wanted to "observe" Pluto with a 65mm scope.  I think it's amazing that such a small scope will allow me to see such a dim object.

Telescope: Astro-Tech AT65EDQ and TeleVue NPR-1073 (eff. at f/5.2)
Camera and Exposure: SXVF-H9C (39x240"), Alnitak Flat-man flats
Filter: IDAS LPS-P2
Guiding: Meade DSI Pro and Hutech 50mm
Mount: Takahashi EM-10
Software: Nebulosity, Maxim DL, Photoshop CS3
Location: The Woodlands, TX

NGC 6910, Sadr, and IC 1318 (July 2013)

 Full resolution image here.

The star cluster in the upper left is NGC 6910.  I took a close-up image of it a couple of years ago with the 10" Newtonian, here, but I wanted to go back for a view of the larger context.


The bright star to the right of the cluster is Sadr, or Gamma Cygni.  It is the heart of (the constellation) Cygnus, the Swan.

The nebulosity throughout the image is known as IC 1318, though this is not all of it.  IC 1318 covers an area all around Sadr.

This is second light with the AT65EDQ.  This image is also a test of the TeleVue focal reducer NPR-1073.  The 65EDQ's only obvious drawback is its speed.  TeleVue's 0.8x reducer takes the 65EDQ down to f/5.2, plenty fast for my purposes.  Star images are not perfect in this image, but they are certainly close enough for me (and I'm not sure where the fault lies, at this point).

The image has been reduced slightly to lessen the effect of lingering noise in the image.

Telescope: Astro-Tech AT65EDQ and TeleVue NPR-1073 (eff. at f/5.2)
Camera and Exposure: SXVF-H9C (35x480"), Alnitak Flat-man flats
Filter: IDAS LPS-P2
Guiding: Meade DSI Pro and Hutech 50mm
Mount: Takahashi EM-10
Software: Nebulosity, Maxim DL, Photoshop CS3 (one Carboni action)
Location: The Woodlands, TX

Abell 39, PN G047.0+42.4 (Spring 2013)

 Full resolution image here.

This is Abell 39, a planetary nebula in the constellation Hercules.  The nebula fascinates because it is almost perfectly spherical.  Like all planetary nebulae, Abell 39 is the remains of a dying star.  The dying star is the central star within the nebula.  The sphere glows primarily in the light of oxygen excited by the radiation from the central star.  Here is a close crop of the nebula:

 Telescope: Astro-Tech AT111EDT and William Optics AFR-IV (eff. at f/5.6)
Camera and Exposure: SXVF-H9 (OIII: 31x1200" and combined in RGB with R (14x300"), G (15x300" + 90% OIII), B (15x300" + 20% OIII)), Alnitak Flat-man flats
Filter: Astronomik RGB & OIII
Guiding: SX Lodestar and SX OAG
Mount: Takahashi NJP
Software: Nebulosity, Maxim DL, Photoshop CS3 (one Carboni action), Registar
Location: The Woodlands, TX