Pew! Pew!

Space Laser!

I have one of these mounted on the business end of my telescope.  It is a rifle laser sight.  It shines an intensely bright thin green line towards whatever is in the crosshairs of the sighter scope, also visible in this image.

Careful alignment was necessary.

It's useful because I can determine where the scope is pointing or slewing without doing the contortions to peer through the sighter scope.

It works really well.  Even at cold winter temperatures.  Cold is usually a problem for green laser pointers, but I made sure this had good cold weather specs.

Pew! Pew!

While out with the telescope last night, I noticed something that I had not previously seen.

Nonpareils in Space

Nope.

Not kidding.  Every time I look at these objects, I think of nonpareils.

It makes my mouth water.

Nonpareil, a round flat chocolate candy covered with white sugar sprinkles.

Image borrowed from this Internet candy store, BlairCandy.com.  This looks like a good place from which to purchase nonpareils.

So, what are these tasty space objects?

All Sky and More

Beep.  Beep.  Beep.

I set an alarm for 0130 to awaken me this morning.

Taking a peek out of the master bedroom window, I was encouraged by the lack of clouds in the sky.

The moon was still shining brightly, but was due to set at 0230.

Plenty of time to get the equipment set up before moonless darkness fell.

My plan was to lean back in my observing chair and watch the near peak Perseids.

While watching the sky, I'd let the imager run on a couple of selected objects.  I wasn't planning a full session of imaging.  I wanted to count Perseids.

All Sky

After a couple of hours, and 40 Perseids later, I remembered that my ZWO ASI224MC imager came with an "All Sky" lens that I have never tried.  If I planned it properly, it probably would let me capture meteor images.  Perhaps, next time, though.  I didn't have the proper software installed and 0430 is not the time to try anything new.  Especially when sitting outside in the driveway.

On a lark, I perched the imager with the lens on my equipment table and attached it to the laptop.  This is one of the images that I captured.  I didn't spend a lot of time on it, so it's nothing fancy.  It's a really raw shot.  Focus isn't great.  Hot pixels are evident.  But, it is really representative of what I can see from my driveway.

The View from My Driveway.

In the upper left corner is the top of a tree near my garage.  It "touches" the Milky Way.  In the lower right corner is light pollution from the city.  You can see the Pleiades, Taurus, and Orion's shield rising through the city's lights.

 

A Cloud, But it Was Good!

Yesterday's astronomy forecast via email, courtesy of the fine folks at ClearDarkSky:

"Favorable observing conditions at Lynchburg College Observatory
Based on your  subscription.

Opportunities to observe at: (Clouds/Trans/Seeing)07-28 @ Hour 04 for 2 hours (0%/Above Ave./Excellent)"

I'm about a dozen miles from Lynchburg College, but my location is within the granularity of the forecast.

Good to excellent seeing?  On a weekend?  I'll take it!

It turns out that the forecast was fairly correct.  Good seeing all night long.

No clouds.  Good seeing.  Dark sky.  Milky Way was visible.  A few early Perseids streaked across the sky.  Moonrise was around 2am.  I finished shortly before then.

A Good Cloud

The regular readers of this blog have probably picked up on that I'm not fond of clouds.  Sure, it can be cloudy all day and I'd be fine with that.  On weekend nights?  Shoo, clouds.

There is a cloud, however, that I developed much fondness for last night as I explored Sagittarius with the telescope.  Sagittarius?  It is approaching Sagittarius season!

I was exploring Sagittarius with the help of SkySafari and my handy DIY telescope joystick controller, and I stumbled across the Sagittarius Star Cloud, also known as Messier 24.

Gorgeous, isn't it? (Click on this image and others to make them larger...)

The Sagittarius Star Cloud, 8 frames at 4 seconds stacked

Sagittarius is full of beautiful stars and nebula.  Here are a couple of the others that I imaged this morning:

Deep Sky Calculus and an Evil Eye?

This screen capture from https://www.goodtostargaze.com tells the story of the weekend.

Good to Stargaze?  Nope.

Sure. Seeing and transparency are in the green.  Clouds, humidity, and nearby thunderstorms, however, prevent any astronomy goodness.

It has been this way for a couple of weeks, meaning that the glairing moon is again starting to be a nuisance to anyone interested in enjoying deep sky astronomy.

The last good opportunity was in May.  I revisited some of the images that I captured then and realized that there were a couple that would fun to share.

As usual, click the images to make them bigger.

Europa Eclipse

Well, it wasn't a dark, moonless sky, but I did some observing anyway.

Europa, one of Jupiter's moons, was going to transit the face of Jupiter, casting a shadow in its wake.

Average seeing conditions were predicted last night by the astronomy weather forecast on the Clear Dark Sky website.  This tempered my expectations.  Average conditions meant that I might be able to make out the shadow, but details on Jupiter's face would be fuzzy and blurred.

I went out while hoping the actual conditions would turn out to be better than the forecast.  It sometimes turns out that way, but not last night.

The telescope tracked Jupiter for a couple of hours with hardly a corrective nudge from me.  I was pretty happy with that!

Halfway through the transit, I noticed something unusual.  Not only could I see Europa's shadow, I could also see Europa despite the glare of Jupiter!  Usually, moons are lost in the glare when they cross.

It was then that I put my planetary imager on the telescope and captured a few gigabytes of data.

Here is one of the images that I captured:

Jupiter, June 15th, 2019 at 0310 UTC

In addition to Europa and its shadow, you can also see the Great Red Spot starting to make an appearance in the lower left.

While it's not as good as an image that I'd like to have captured, I think I'm fairly happy with it.

 

Backyard Black Holes!

Last night, the astronomy session was one of the best that I've had in many months.  The new moon had already set, the sky was without clouds, transparency was good, as was the seeing.

I had to use a vacation day from work so I could stay out all night, but it was worth it!

By now, everyone has probably seen the iconic image of M87's supermassive black hole, first published in April of 2019.

It was created after years of data gathering and processing by the scientists of the  Event Horizon Telescope collaboration.

First image of a black hole, using Event Horizon Telescope 

observations of the center of galaxy M87. Credit: Event Horizon 

Telescope Collaboration.

Astronomy magazine has a good article here.

But what does this have to do with me as an amature astronomer?