June 2022

Welcome to my June EAA Astrophotography blog, hosted by the Black Hills Astronomical Society. EAA is short for Electronically Assisted Astronomy, which means that rather than looking through my telescope’s eyepiece, I mount a camera where the eyepiece goes and look at night sky objects on a computer monitor. I then use SharpCap software to collect several minutes of that light and save the photos you see here. Let me know if you have any questions! I had a great month of viewing from both at home and at remote sites, so let’s get to it.

The Moon is one of my favorite targets, and this month I wanted to compare taking just a snapshot of the Moon to collecting several minutes of individual photos that are “stacked” on top of each other, to see if there is much difference in what I’d get. See much difference?

Here are a few globular clusters. The first three are big ones, with M 13 in Hercules having hundreds of thousands stars all bunched together in a sphere with a diameter of about 145 light years. The last two, M 69 and M70 were the last two-star clusters I needed to photograph all the Messier Catalog clusters.

This month not only did I get M 69 and M 70, but also M 24, the Sagittarius Small Star Cloud. With these three objects I have now taken photos of all 110 objects in the Charles Messier astronomical object catalog that he published in 1774! After 2 years I’ve got them all! The Messier Catalog objects are kind of the low hanging fruit for beginner amateur astronomers like me, and I’m waiting for my Messier Merit Badge to arrive in the mail anytime now.

The month also had a very cool line-up of planets, that culminated on June 24th, when for a few moments Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and the Moon were all visible and lined up in the morning sky. The skies were cloudy here on the morning of the 24th, but fortunately I went out to my favorite remote site a few days early, about 3:00 in the morning on the 17th, as the skies were clear and I was itching to see the line-up. I used my iPhone to do the capture as my telescope has too narrow a field of view. This photo is a composite of two images, so I could get the four of them in. I guess since the Earth is in the photo too, I have 5 planets there, but I missed Mercury.

Nebulas. With the coming of summer, the Milky Way shows up with all of its nebulas. When we see the Milky Way we are really looking into the edge of our galaxy, so there are lots of stars and nebulas there. When we look away from the Milky Way we can see some things in our galaxy, such as star clusters, but it is there where we can see other more distant galaxies. From our home observatory I had great skies on several nights. When I get good photos, I like removing the stars to make it easier to see the underlying nebula. Here are Sadr and its surrounding nebula, C 33 and 34 (the West and East Veil Nebulas), M 17 (the Swan or Omega Nebula), M 16 (the Eagle Nebula (with the Pillars of Creation in the center), and C 27 (the Crescent Nebula). C 27, M 16 and C 34 were taken up at a Dark Sky area in the Slim Buttes near the North Dakota Border. The skies were dark and pretty clear, the trails were an adventure to check out during the day, and camping was fun. Those three photos also had exposure times of about an hour each, which really improved the definition of the images.

While out at the Slim Buttes I also used my iPhone camera to capture some photos of the Milky Way. That part of South Dakota has some of the darkest skies in our region, so It was fun to be able to take home a few shots with my phone.

Finally, this month I thought I had discovered a new nebula, as something showed up on one of my photographs that was not on any of my star charts . . . so I started calling it the Martini and Olive Nebula. Black Hills Astronomical Society members Rod and Kip informed me that it was probably a reflection going on in my telescope, and Ron suggested that it was the bright star that caused the reflection and if I move my telescope a bit, I’ll see that The Martini and Olive will move, too. Anyway, they were right. I tried to duplicate it with other bright stars and the Mystery Martini and Olive appeared there, too, as you can see in the starless Sadr photo above. At least now when I’m looking at the brightest of stars, I have my friends, the Martini and Olive, there to greet me.

Until next time, Clear Skies. Hank