Wakawakawakawaka...

Wakawakawakawaka?

What's that?

The video arcade games Pacman and Ms Pacman were very popular when I was in college.  Alas, I was a poor college student.  Quarters were precious to me so I didn't actually get to play games in the arcade often.  

I had friends who were hooked on them and they could often be found in the student union basement recreation center spending their coins and developing their arcade skills instead of studying.  Who knows how that turned out for them?  Last Starfighter, perhaps?

Wakawakawakawaka!

Why the Pacman reference in this blog?

I was finally able to image NGC 281 last weekend and its results are recognisable as its "also known as" name, the Pacman Nebula.

Yep, there is a Pacman Nebula.

NGC 281, Aka the Pacman Nebula

This is the image as it first appeared.  Not much there and pretty disappointing.  If you squint and hold your tongue just right, you might see it.

Pacman Nebula, almost invisible

I almost didn't try to capture an image.  I couldn't see anything, at first.  I figured that perhaps the scope's alignment was off.

But, just in case, I had SharpCap capture and stack a bunch of frames while I went into the house for more coffee.

Here is what I saw when I came back to the laptop.

ARP

Arp?

It turns out that there is a catalog of peculiar galaxies!  This is my type of catalog!

The Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies is a catalog of peculiar galaxies.  It was produced by Halton Arp in 1966 and was originally published by the California Institute of Technology in the same year. 

The primary purpose of the catalog was to present photographs of examples of the different kinds of peculiar structures found among galaxies.

There are a total of 338 galaxies presented in the atlas.

This is one of them.  I captured it last night shortly after moonset.

Arp 28

Arp 28.  It's a peculiar galaxy. Click for the bigger version.

The Arp 28, magnified, is below.

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.