Astronomy Archives - Page 45 of 71

July 18, 2020December 16, 2020

7/17/2020 Comet NEOWISE

I returned to the Maumelle River WMA with Carl to try for the comet again. The conditions were not as good as Wednesday night. Clouds, haze, heat, mosquitoes. The sky did do some clearing so I took some shots. I set up a tracking mount this time since I wanted to shoot at 300mm instead of 50mm. I hoped to take 30 second subs but my slapdash polar alignment didn’t allow for that. I settled on 10 seconds which was still too long but without tracking, I could only have done a second or so.

The haze cut down the contrast a lot and in fact toward the end you could barely make out the comet in binoculars. When I first looked at the images, I thought the night was a bust but decided to stack 10 images (with Deepsky Stacker) and see what that looked like. I was able to get something I could work with. I processed the result in Lightroom Classic. Each frame was 10 seconds, ISO 3200, 300mm FL, f/5.6.

I might be kidding myself but I think I can barely make out the ion trail above the bright dust trail to the right of the comet’s head. The dust trail curves downward slightly while the ion trail is straighter.

July 16, 2020December 16, 2020

7/15/2020 NEOWISE

Comet C/2020 (F3) NEOWISE from Wednesday evening. From the side of Highway 10 at an entrance to the Maumelle River WMA. This was a single 4 second image at f/4 with a 50mm lens on my Canon 800D at ISO 800. In my 10×42 binoculars, I could see a tail stretching about 3 degrees or six times the width of the Moon. This was taken at about 9:30 PM. It was directly below the Big Dipper tonight and should get higher in the evening sky for a while. Go see it.

July 11, 2020December 16, 2020

7/10/2020 M81 & M82 & NGC 3077

Friday night was my second night out with my 11″ SCT (Elf) and the new Hyperstar adapter. Clouds, heat and humidity made things a challenge but I managed to get this before packing it up. First, I spent a while collimating the Hyperstar. This was not too hard and I hope it will stay but we’ll see. A few months ago, I learned that my CGEM mount has as polar alignment routine, not just the common star alignment, and using this gave me very little drift over the evening.

Anyway, I queued up 120 30 second images with what is essentially a 532mm f/1.9 telephoto lens. Unfortunately after about 40 minutes it clouded over and I had to cut it short. Also I found airplanes or satellites in a few of the images so I wound up with 69 images to combine. The largest galaxy is M81 or Bode’s Nebula. Above it is M82, the Cigar Galaxy. In the lower right and not very impressive in comparison is NGC 3077, the Garland Galaxy. The Hyperstar is used for wide angle small scale imaging so we don’t see a lot of detail here. Horizontally this image is about 4 times the width of the Moon.