July 2022

July 2022

Welcome to Hank’s July EAA Astrophotography blog. It has been a busy month, with a number of good nights for viewing, a couple of interesting field trips and a new resource:

If you weren’t already panicking about floods, fires, rising oceans, and what you see on the weather channel, then you might want to check out the Space Weather Woman’s YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkXjdDQ-db0xz8f4PKgKsag. Every week or so Tamitha Skov gives a look at what the weather is like in space. “What weather” you say? Check it out. There is stuff going on you’ve never imagined fretting over! Do you worry about dust storms on Mars? Do you want to know when an Aurora might show up? What’s this about solar storms? Here is this week’s forecast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3T4VI1VSPc

On to the night sky. I love the Moon, and I hope you do, too, because I seem to give a steady diet of it here.

I also love my new iPhone 13. It’s Night mode allows me to capture my second favorite thing—the Milky Way! This is a composite of 3 photos from my backyard that shows what we see on clear nights.

And Globular Clusters! These old stars like to hang out together, like old guys at McDonalds drinking coffee in the morning, in the outer reaches of galaxies. We’ve spotted about 150 in our galaxy, but there are probably more. Check out a few of ours: M 3, M 5, and M 53.

I am loving using my StarNet+ app to remove stars from nebula. It allows me to see features and areas that I couldn’t pick out before. Here are M8, M 20, M 27, with and without stars.

At the end of the month, I was at the Badlands National Park for their Badlands Astronomy Festival. It is a great dark sky location in western South Dakota. With the help of Rick, Chris, Mike, and Sage we were able to show participants at the festival 3 evenings of night sky objects on my computer monitor. One of the objects was the Andromeda Galaxy. It’s our closest galactic neighbor and cool to see. I had purchased a green laser pointer this month, and after going through the process of seeing a blob of Andromeda on the monitor, stacking the images to produce the galaxy in all its glory, we’d get them looking up at the sky and use the laser to point to where Andromeda was in the sky. Then when they’d look at the monitor again, they’d see how we nailed pointing to the galaxy with the laser! Beam me up!

Finally, while in the Badlands, Mike and I visited Ron Dyvig and Teresa Hofer’s Badlands Observatory. They have an Astro-Tourism/Observatory that is open for guided tours of the day (solar) and night skies. They have several telescopes for use on their observation deck and a museum that chronicles Ron’s work in astronomy (including the discovery of about 25 asteroids). A gallery of Teresa’s photos is on display in the lobby. The photo here shows their 26” Newtonian telescope that Ron built, that sits on the 2nd floor of the observatory. If you are traveling down I-90, they are about 5 miles east of Wall, SD in Quinn. You won’t want to miss it! Check them out at https://www.badlandsobservatory.com/

Check out their cool t-shirts!

Until next month, clear skies. -Hank