Nebulosity in the Pleiades?

The Pleiades, also known as the "Seven Sisters," and also as "Messier 45," is an open star cluster in the constellation Taurus.

It is naked eye visible and resembles a tiny "little dipper."

The cluster is dominated by young hot blue luminous stars, the brightest of which illuminate reflection nebula.

The Pleiades has nebulosity?  Who knew?

Whenever I took a peek at M45 through my widest field eyepiece, I could see the beautiful blue stars and maybe a hint of a blue glow between them, but no nebula . . .

I've seen photos from astrophotographers showing the nebula so I figured that it takes some serious equipment to capture it.

When I was out last weekend, I thought I'd try to capture an image with my modest gear.

I was amazed to watch as SharpCap integrated the frames from the ZWO ASI294MC.

Nebulosity!

Gorgeous Cold Morning

Thursday morning was really cold.

It was 430am and I was following my morning workday ritual.  I loaded my backpack, my running gear, and lunch box into the back of the car and then pressed the button to open the garage.

As I always do, I stepped into the driveway and took a survey of the sky.

No clouds.  It was clear.

Holy cow!  Venus, the Moon, and Jupiter were having a conjunction.  It was beautiful.  I stood there staring at it for a few moments.

On a lark, I reached into my pocket and pulled out my phone.  Honestly, I didn't expect much.  It was dark and it was a phone camera, afterall.  And then, I remembered that my phone, a Google Pixel 3XL, has a "Night Sight" mode for the camera.

I framed the image of the sky on the screen and pushed the button to take the photo.  The camera app put up a little message, "Hold still."

I held still.

A few moments later, this image appeared.

Venus, Moon, and Jupiter Conjunction

In it, you can clearly see Venus to the left of the Moon, with Jupiter to the right.  And a smattering of other stars.  On the right side of the image, the constellation, Scorpio stands out.

It's not great astrophotography, but is a pretty good image from a phone!

Below, I labeled the visible stars.

Labeled

With these images, you can click on them to see their larger versions.

Enjoy!

A Winter Astronomical Necessity

The sky was clear, cloudless, and dark last night.  And there were not gale force winds.

There was much rejoicing.

I had the telescope and equipment outside and set up by 8pm.  Moonrise was going to be after midnight.  This gave me hours of dark sky.  Yay!

The cold temperature was the challenge.  This piece of equipment is an enormous help, though.  Using it, I was good for hours even though there was frost forming everywhere.

Recommended

I placed one in the palm of each of my gloves.  Worked well.

So, what did I see?

It's About Time

It's really nice having a SkyWatcher Dobsonian telescope with Goto and tracking.

Just take the telescope outside, level the base and OTA, ensure it is pointing toward true north, power it up, enter the time and date, align it to a few, well known, bright stars in the sky, and then you are good for a night of astronomy. 

You ask, "Wait. You have to enter the time and date?  What's up with that?"

Yes, in this modern day of connected smart gadgets, telescope owners are still forced to engage in the archaic ritual of mashing keys on a membrane keypad to set the time and date on their telescopes.

SynScan telescope hand controller

No Astronomy Today

We had cloudy weather this week, culminating in ice and snow this weekend.

Crusty snow, my favorite! 

Weather like this is why the Cloudy Nights web forum exists. 👍😊

24

Twenty Four!

Yes, twenty four is the quantity of astronomy observing sessions that I made last year.  Most of the sessions were solitary.  

A friend stopped by once in the wee hours of the morning to see Mars when it was at opposition and at another time, a neighbor came out to see what I was up to because he was having trouble sleeping.  

Most of my astronomy visitors have been of the varmint variety.  Skunks, deer, bats, and coyotes.  Coyotes, fortunately, have kept their distance.  I know that they are out there because they have an eerie howl.  Skunks?  I wish they'd keep their distance, but there was the time when one made a beeline toward the open garage.  Bats?  I like bats.  They flutter about eating bugs.  Deer are just a nuisance.  They do, however, make a spooky chuffing noise.  It will make the goosebumps rise . . .

Being fundamentally a hermit, I'm fine with the dearth of astronomy visitors.  I get to choose the astronomy targets and revel under the glory of our Bortle class 4 sky!

Here are images of targets from the last astronomy session of 2018.  I spent a couple of hours staring at these two through the eyepiece and with the imager.

(Click on the images to zoom in!)

The Leo Triplet

Also known as the M66 group

The Leo Triplet consists of M65, M66, and NGC 3628. I like how nicely it fits into the field of view of my new ZWO ASI294MC.  M65 and M66 were discovered by Charles Messier in 1780.  NGC 3628, was discovered by William Herschel in 1784.  It is also known as the "Hamburger Galaxy!"  Yum. 😎

Surprisingly Easy

I wasn't expecting it to be easy.

Something always goes wrong with computer upgrades.  I'd better find some wood to knock on and ward off the jinx that will happen by even thinking that this upgrade was easy.

Some background first.  I purchased my astronomy laptop from Woot in December of 2015 shortly after buying my SkyWatcher Dobsonian.  It was on sale for less than $200.  I purchased it on a lark because it was so inexpensive and I had a little bit of budget remaining after my telescope related purchases.  I didn't really to expect it to be so useful as I gained skill with the telescope and imager.

It turns out that the laptop has been a real workhorse.  It has performed really well as my astronomy laptop.  With ASCOM drivers and Stellarium, it can control the telescope with ease over the Bluetooth link.  Also, not only has it helped me image planets and DSO's, it has done so under adverse seasonal conditions.  20 degrees (F) outside?  No problem.  Frost on the screen? No problem.  90% relative humidity?  It seems impervious to dew.

Why the upgrades?

Several times over the past year, the laptop has run out of disk space during an astronomy session.  This probably has something to do with my obsession with imaging Mars as it came into opposition.  😎 

There are few things worse than being outside with the telescope at 3am and having to make data culling decisions because the drive is full and there is more data that needs capturing . . .

And now, as I learn to use DeepSkyStacker, I need to keep the frames of data that I capture.  Usually, SharpCap deletes the raw data as it live stacks.  Frames of data from the ZWO ASI294MC imager are huge!

To do the upgrade, I purchased a solid state drive (SSD) from Amazon.

Pretty!