March 2022

March marks the month that my monthly emails containing astronomy photos to friends and family becomes a blog. Thanks to the Black Hills Astronomical Society for hosting this. My goal is to share the marvels I find with my 8” Celestron Evolution telescope and mount, Mallincam DS10c camera, Hyperstar lens, focal reducer, and a host of software to help me find, capture, adjust and connect everything together. I also use a couple of pieces of post processing software that includes Photoshop Elements, Topaz DeNoise, AstroSurface and StarNet+ to bring out image details. I hope you enjoy this journey of looking into the night sky. All the past emails I sent out are here too. Just go to the link above, Hank’s Astrophotography Blog, or go to https://sdbhas.org/, click on the BHAS menu, find Member Blogs, and you’ll find them. Click on the photos and they expand!

I had a couple of great viewing nights, so let’s get to it. As the Milky Way moves toward the horizon, a number of Spring galaxies come into view. I was able to get some updates as well as new galaxies. Last month, using the wide angle HyperStar lens, I got a photo of a distant M 51, the Whirlpool Galaxy. Here’s a closer view.

M 63, M 64, M 87, M 94, M 101, NGC 2841, NGC 3180, NGC 4535, NGC 5474, are all galaxies that we can see pretty much face on or slightly tilted.

But many galaxies look to be turned on their sides, so we see only their edges, such as M 104, M 108, NGC 3115, NGC 4244, NGC 4631, and NGC 4657.

Of interest is a boxy looking galaxy, NGC 4449.

I also was able to use the HyperStar lens, with its wide field of view to capture a couple of groupings of galaxies, including 4 galaxies in Virgo, M 100 with a couple of small galaxies in the neighborhood, and my favorite, the Markarian’s Chain in Virgo. There are a couple of thousand galaxies in the Virgo cluster and are about 60 million light years away. If it’s fuzzy, chances are it’s a galaxy!

I was checking out the Moon again and using my Moon Atlas I started doing some research on the Tycho Crater. You can often see the rays that stretch out from Tycho, which were formed from the impact event, and we can see them because it is probably the most recent young large crater on this side of the Moon, being only about 108 million years old and 53 miles across. Its rays have not had time to wear down. Many large craters on the Moon are about 3.9 billion years old–which is old enough to get worn down, I guess, if your are a crater. Pieces from that impact are believe to have been found at the Apollo 17 landing site 1200 miles away, which is how they dated it. The rim to the floor of the crater is 14,500 feet, and the central peak is 7,900 feet high. What is also cool about this crater is that the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter was able to take photos of the peak rising up out of the crater. Check out these amazing photos from the Orbiter’s fly-over of the peak. Notice the giant boulder resting near the top of the peak. It looks like a bird laid its egg on that rocky nest. https://images.app.goo.gl/587MNR2zCAUvCBa59 .

This month I also found a new piece of free software, StarNet+, that can remove stars from photos. This can be especially helpful in being able to see “the forest for the trees” around star dense nebulas. Here are three before and after examples. The first is part of the Veil Nebula that I took last November. The second is of the Rosette Nebula that I took last month. The third is from this month, the Jellyfish Nebula.