Welcome to Hank’s August EAA Astrophotography blog. Even though it seemed to be raining a lot, I was able to get several nights of viewing in. But first, there were a couple of photos that I took last month at the Badlands Astronomy Festival that I forgot to add to the July blog….so here goes:
These photos were taken with my iPhone 13 that was mounted on a tripod to keep it steady. The first shows the International Space Station in 10 seconds of flight, the second is there to check to see if you can spot these two asterisms: the Big Dipper pointing to Polaris, which is at the end of the Little Dipper. Find ‘em?
I have not posted many dark nebula objects—where the dust in the night sky is not illuminated by neighboring stars. But if the background is lit up by stars, you can spot these dark spots. B 143 is in the constellation Aquila and it shows what looks like to me to be a big dark C.
Often when I take a photo of a nebula, I’m trying to get the most striking part, such as with the Pillars of Creation in the Eagle Nebula that was in my June blog. But what I’ve come to notice is that often there is more nebulosity surrounding my featured image. So here are a couple of images of nebulas, where I took as many as eight photos around the center image to get a sense of what’s in the neighborhood. These are called mosaics.
C 20 (NGC 7000) shown above is commonly called the North American Nebula. Can you spot Florida and the Gulf of Mexico? I was asking Chris, one of our amazing BHAS astrophotographers, about a photo he has hanging in our Hidden Valley Observatory and he said it was down around the Yucatan Peninsula. I looked it up and took a photo. Next time you are in our Observatory, check out Chris’s photo. It puts mine to shame!
Here are a couple of Globular Clusters. M 2 and M 75. I love these old stars!
The Tulip Nebula. The first photo was taken with my wide field of view Hyperstar Lens. The second was taken with my .5 focal reducer, and the last has the stars removed, courtesy of my StarNet+ software…
Here are a couple of planetary nebulas—the remains of stars that exploded, pushing bunches of dust and particles out around it. If you look close, you can see what remains of the star in the center of the Helix Nebula.
And my favorite….the Moon! In the Waxing Moon image, the prominent dark round crater located up and to the right of the center of the photo is named Plato. It is 61 miles in diameter and the crater walls get as high as 6500 feet. I thought you’d want to know. Can you spot crater Pluto in the 8/16/22 photo, too?
And finally, a few planets! The first shows a quick snapshot of Saturn about as large as I can photograph it. If you were to enlarge it, it would be really grainy. The second one is enlarged, and started its life as a 200 frame video that I was able to stack, one image on top of the other, making it less grainy. I’m waiting for a really clear night so I can hopefully see some details—like rings!!! Stay tuned!
There are two images of Jupiter here, too. The first shows a blown out photo of Jupiter—but the extra light lets you see four of its moons. In the second photo, I reduced the exposure time so you can make out a couple of Jupiter’s rings. Hopefully, I’ll be posting some better planet photos as soon as the skies clear up a bit!
I hope you have been checking out the images coming from the James Webb Space Telescope and the discussions about how we are having to rethink how our Universe is put together! Which is the cool thing about Science—as we get more data, we can change our understanding of the way things work…… unlike most other areas of human understanding.
That’s all for now kids! Clear Skies!
Hank
