April 2023

Welcome to my April 2023 astrophotography blog post.  I was only able to get out for a few evenings (and days!) this month with my telescope and camera, but a lot has been going on here, so let’s get to it.

April 9:

The following deep sky images were taken on the 9^th using a .5 focal reducer on my camera which allows the camera to take a wider field of view. With the focal reducer I get about a half of a degree of width of the sky, or about the width of the Moon.  Without the focal reducer I photograph about a half of that width.  I was most interested in a pair of galaxies, NGC 4038 and NGC 4039, that are undergoing a galactic collision 45 million light years away. The Antenna Galaxies have two long tails of stars and dust that are the result of the galaxies moving closer and closer to one another.  The tails are pretty faint, so I had to boost the gain (and background noise) to really see them. The phase they are in is called a starburst, where clouds of dust, gas and entangled magnetic fields are causing rapid star formation.  The densest regions of the collapsing and compressing clouds are believed to be the birthplace of star clusters.

I love checking out nebulas, and removing the stars that surround them to get a closer look at what the nebulas actually look like. Here are a pair: C 31/IC 405, the Flaming Star Nebula, and C 50, which is a star cluster within the Rosette Nebula C 49.

C 59 (NGC 3242) is a planetary nebula in Hydra. It’s called the Ghost of Jupiter or the Eye Nebula.

I photographed two open star clusters. M 44, the Beehive Cluster, and M 67 are both in Cancer.

I also found two interesting galaxies. NG 2903 has cool spiral arms, and NGC 3411 is one of the most distant objects I have imaged at 305 Mly away. It is a very faint object, with a magnitude of 11.74, which makes it difficult to capture with my relatively small telescope. It blows me away that the light from this elliptical galaxy has traveled hundreds of million light years and found my 8-inch mirror.

The Sun is headed to what is called its solar maximum, when it has the most solar activity sunspots. With the solar filter I use, I am not able to see the flares that are often shown on the edge of the Sun’s horizon, but it does show where flares are coming from with dark spots. Here is what April 9th was showing with two sunspot areas:

April 15:

On the April 15th I used a HyperStar lens on my telescope. This lens allows me to capture about 3 degrees of width of the sky, so images appear smaller, but I get a much larger field of view. HyperStar also changes the camera F-stop from 10 to 1.9, which means I can take much shorter exposures.

To give you an idea of what this looks like, compare this image, M 44 (the Beehive Cluster) taken with the HyperStar lens with the M44 shown above when I used the focal reducer. This is one of the objects studied by Galileo in 1609, when he resolved about 40 stars in the cluster. It is now believed to contain at least 1000 gravitationally bound stars.

Here are a few more Globular Clusters: M 13 and M 3. M 13 is visible all year long if you are above 36 degrees latitude north, and with a magnitude of 5.3 it is naked eye visible on a clear night. M 3 is made up of about 500,000 stars.

Here are a few more galaxies: M 51 and M 63. M 51 shows two galaxies that are sharing material between them. M 63 galaxy is believed to have about 400 billion stars.

One of the great things about the SharpCap software that I use to capture my photos is the Plate Solving feature. Plate Solving is when the image that the camera captures is used to locate exactly where in the sky the telescope is pointing. This is handy because if the object I want to look at isn’t in the center of the image, then the software will move the telescope so that it is centered. Once the software knows exactly where the telescope is, it can then show what other objects are around the centered object. This is called annotations. Here’s what that looks like. The first image shows the Leo Triplet of galaxies with M 66 in the center. The 2nd image shows the annotations, or a screen shot of all the deep sky objects surrounding M 66.

When I captured an image of M96 and looked at what else was nearby in annotations, I saw that M 105, NGC 3384, and NGC 3389 were also nearby, so I took a photo of all of them.

I have been out looking at the night sky, thinking how different sky gazing is now. It used to be you’d go look at “stars” or “constellations.” Usually I look for the named ones, Polaris, Vega, Orion…. But telescopes made looking different. You could see more, things that cannot be seen visually, details that cannot be seen without eyepieces or cameras…. I began to think about the stars that lie between the named stars. The sprinkles that fill the spaces, and the points of light that must lie between those that I see with my telescope. So while looking at the Gemini twins in the constellation Gemini, I decided to try to photograph the stars between the twins, Pollux and Castor. I did this by taking a series of images and then lining up the stars at the edges of each photo. It took 5 photos to cover the distance of about 6 degrees with the HyperStar lens. Since the stars doesn’t move “straight” across the sky, I had to rotate each photo a tiny bit to get the photos to line up right. What strikes me about all those stars is the different sizes and colors of them. It’s a good reminder for me, knowing that each of those tiny specks is a separate individual object, different in many ways, and all responding to the same forces, but all somehow related to and a part of our Universe, just like us. Every one of them is so much larger than us, but we are all made of the same stuff–matter. We all take up space. We all are impacted by gravity and energy. We are all evolving. Welcome to the neighborhood.

April 16:

There was a small window of clear skies on the 16th, so I thought I’d try out using the telescope without the focal reducer or Hyperstar. Just had my Mallincam DS10c camera on the back of the telescope. This is as narrow a field of view as I can get, and captures about a quarter of a degree of width. I knew I didn’t have much time, so I took a photo of the Sombrero galaxy to compare the size with the HyperStar image shown above as well as the focal reducer image taken last month.

The skies may have looked clear before the clouds rolled in, but it seemed that there was a lot of upper atmosphere turbulence, and Venus was really jumping around in my field of view. To take photos of planets I take a short exposure video, in this case 500 images. Then using PiPP and AstroSurface software I am able to enlarge the planet, have the software pick out the best of the images (this is called Lucky Imaging), and then stack all those best images on top of one another to come up with one picture. Venus wasn’t showing many of its features this night, but it did show the area between Venus’s daylight and night.

April 23:

As mentioned above, the Sun is approaching solar maximum, which will peak in 2025. One of the effects this has on Earth, is that we should be seeing more Aurorea Borealis, or Northern Lights in the months ahead. The 23rd showed an exceptional display, reaching as far south as Texas. Marianne alerted me that the sky seemed to be lighting up after dark, so I checked an app that I have on my iPhone, Space Weather Live. The app’s Auroral Oval map, shows where in the world the northern lights may be showing in about an hour. We were in the zone, so we drove out to the Limestone Road north of town, where there is a good view of the north. What was interesting is that visually, the northern lights were green, but the camera brought out more of the red colors with its long exposure. It was a great show! If you look closely at the first two photos, the bump at the center of the horizon is Crazy Horse Memorial.

Now for details about the photographs:

April 9: Set-up: Celestron 8” Evolution telescope with the Mallincam DS10c camera, .5 focal reducer and diagonal. Shown are the image, exposure and number of frames:
C 50 16 seconds 53 frames
NGC 3242 16 seconds 10 frames
NGC 4038 16 seconds 110 frames
C 31 16 seconds 40 frames
M 44 16 seconds 11 frames
M 67 16 seconds 16 frames
NGC 2648 16 seconds 15 frames
NGC 2903 16 seconds 28 frames
Sun Filter. Mosiac of 2 snapshot images taken at 0.1221 ms.

April 15: Set-up: Celestron 8” Evolution telescope Mallincam DS10c camera, and Hyperstar lens. Shown are the image, exposure and number of frames:
M 3 2 seconds 89 frames
M 13 2 seconds 47 frames
M 44 2 seconds 70 frames
M 51 2 seconds 73 frames
M 63 2 seconds 227 frames
Leo Triplet 2 seconds 53 frames
M 96 2 seconds 288 frames
M 105… 2 seconds 74 frames
Stars between Pollux and Castor in Gemini. Mosioac. Each photo was rotated to align the stars.

April 16: Set-up: Celestron 8” Evolution telescope with Mallincam DS10c camera.
M 104 16 seconds 52
Venus Exposure: 0.1221 ms. 500 Frames. Lucky Imaging of 10% of images.

April 23: Set-up: iPhone 13. Night mode, all 3 second exposures.

For all telescope images: Post processing with Topaz DeNoise and Photoshop Elements. For the iPhone Aurorea Borealis photos, cropping done in Photoshop Elements, otherwise, no post processing.

Until next month, Clear Skies! -Hank