Category: Solar System

Here is my view of the Tau Meteor shower last night. It was no “storm” but to be fair every mention of “storm” that I saw included a big disclaimer.

You will see a few aircraft or maybe satellites and several flashes. Those flashes are the meteors.

This is about two and half hours reduced to 30 seconds. I used a reducer on my 18mm kit lens to achieve an almost full sky.

At the top is the Big Dipper, nearly vertical. Near the center, that bright star is Arcturus. Notice that the handle of the Big Dipper “arcs to Arcturus”. The bright star at about 4 o’clock from Arcturus is Spica, brightest star in Virgo. Over on the left, near 9 o’clock is Vega. North is at top, east to the left.

Last night at the River Ridge Observatory, I had first light with my new Starizona SCT Corrector IV and Baader Large SCT Clicklock Visual Back on my 11″ SCT (Elf). My first attempted object was the Crescent Nebula (with a dual narrowband filter) but the guiding was atrocious. Even PHD2 agreed. So I moved to the Elephant’s Trunk Nebula and the guiding was much better. I captured two hours of that but later found that the stars were slightly out of focus despite the Bahtinov mask. So, about 3AM I took out the dual narrowband, oriented the camera, got a new focus and shot the Moon. This is actually a composite of three shots made from 500 frames of video each 3ms long at unity gain. The Moon wouldn’t quite fit in the frame so three so that each mostly overlapped the one next to it.

Click on the image for a larger view.