August 2023

Welcome to Hank’s August 2023 Astrophotography Blog. I decided last winter to spend the summer putting up an observatory of some kind and get a more reliable telescope mount. My goal has been to easily do astrophotography all year long, so I made the jump. Controlling the old Celestron mount over WIFI or a USB connection was just not very reliable, and hauling out the telescope every night was getting to be a drag. So I bought an iOptron GEM40 mount; I did a little research and put up a hunter’s blind to house my telescope; I updated my Windows 10 laptop to Windows 11 (my advice is….DON’T); I purchased a small mini Windows 11 computer that sits in the observatory and controls the mount, focuser and camera; I installed an ethernet cable from the house to the observatory so the laptop in the house could control the minicomputer in the Observatory, and started using a new piece of software, NINA, to control everything. Without BHAS member Chris to walk me through the connections, settings, and set-up, I would have given up. A big shout out to him and THANK YOU!!!! I’m still working through getting my head around the new software and procedures I need to use to make everything work, but it is slowly coming together.

A Tale of Two Star Parties… This month I set up my telescope for two Black Hills Astronomical Society star parties. The first happened during the busiest tourist week of the summer—The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, that brings about a half million motorcycles to the Black Hills. The star party was sponsored by Custer State Park and was held at their airport. I was thinking that maybe we’d get a few dozen people to venture out during Rally Week, but as it began to get dark, over 330 showed up! It was amazing. Nearly a dozen of us had our telescopes set up and the visitors were just great. We were hoppin’! My strategy for these events is to go to high profile targets that are easy to see, do Live Stacking of the images so they show up on a fairly large screen within a minute or two, talk with people about the equipment and process I go through, answer questions, take a photo of the target, and go to the next object. Here’s what was on my screen at the Airport:

Later in the month, students from the School of Mines came out to our Hidden Valley Observatory (HVO) where our BHAS members set up their telescopes. I set up with a HyperStar attachment that changes my focal length from about 2000 mm to 390 mm. What this means is that the field of view goes from about a half of a degree (about the width of the Moon) to over 3 degrees. Everything looks smaller with HyperStar, but you can see a lot more sky real estate. It also changes the capture from an f10 to a f1.9, which means things get brighter, faster. You can compare the two setups with the images of M 13 taken at the Airport and the HVO. My favorite image is of M 51–right after I started to capture light of the Whirlpool Galaxy a meteor shot by, cutting through the galaxy! Here’s what we were checking out that night:

While I was getting time in figuring out how to run my new observatory setup this month, here are a few of the photos I took:

The big celestial event this month was the Super Blue Moon. A Blue Moon happens once in a blue moon, or when two full moons happen in a single month. What made this month special, is that the 2nd Blue Moon also coincided with a Super Moon event—When the moon grows in size because the Moon was nearly 17,000 miles closer to the Earth than on average, making it seem about 8% larger. As the Moon orbits the Earth, its distance from us varies. When it is closest, it is known as perigee; when it is furthest away or smallest, it is called apogee. The first image shows a composite of the first of the Blue Moons (too big to fit on my camera!). The second shows a photo I took of the Super Blue Moon with my iPhone at Stockade Lake in Custer State Park, that shows the Blue Moon at perigee, with Saturn just off to the side. Finally, a Super Blue Moon taken with my iPhone held by a holder looking through my small 4″ Neutonian telescope.

This old dog has learned a few new tricks this summer in setting up the observatory, and hopefully by the time of the first snowfall, my “Oh, Sh…” to “Oh, Boy” ratio will be seeing some improvement!

Until next month, Clear Skies! -Hank