Greetings from the Tanglewood Observatory.
For most of this month, my telescope was back in California getting repaired, but I didn’t miss much, as our evening weather has been filled with clouds it seems. But I did get in a few nights lately.
Here to start off are a couple of globular clusters, M 13 and M 92. M 92, which is “only” 27,000 light years away, contains roughly 330,000 stars! M13’s stars are tightly packed, being more than a hundred times denser than stars that are closer to us, and occasionally bump into one another. Both are in our Milky Way galaxy.
I just love galaxies! They are so far away, and it’s amazing that I can even spot them at all with my little 8” telescope. M 83, or the Southern Pinwheel Galaxy is a barred spiral galaxy that shows interesting “dust lanes,” as astronomers say. Wine drinkers, on the other hand, might say that M 83 has “good legs.” It’s about 15 million light years away. M 88, on the other hand and is a spiral galaxy. I also caught a pair of galaxies that were close to each other: M 81 and M 82.
M 87 and M 49 look like red fuzz balls. These elliptical galaxies don’t have the well defined arms that the spiral galaxies have. A week ago I noticed that two other elliptical galaxies, M 84 and M 86, were close enough together to try to make a mosaic of my images so I could see where they are in relation to each other. Then in reading I found that they are part of a chain of galaxies in Virgo, so I put my HyperStar lens on the telescope to get a field of view of about 2 degrees, and was able to capture most of the galaxies in Markarian’s Chain. If you zoom in on the photo, you’ll see many other red fuzz ball galaxies swimming around in the chain.
I couldn’t get the lunar eclipse from our house, but I was able to put together a half Moon and the Moon a day before it was full as mosaics.
The last image of the Moon was taken with my wide field of view Hyperstar lens. It’s not very detailed, but it does show how big a field of view I can get with it, and when you compare that photo with the one of Markarian’s Chain, you can get an idea of how spread out those galaxies are.
Finally, I helped our Astronomy club write a grant last year to get a solar telescope setup, and was out at our observatory in Rapid City to try it out this month. I put my cell phone up to the eyepiece and took several photos of the Sun through the eyepiece. Note the solar prominence flaring up above the surface.
Just as a reminder, now that you’ve been vaccinated, the summer is a great time to see if your area has an amateur astronomer club. If so, chances are they have Star Party events where you can go look through telescopes. To find a star party, do a Google search: “astronomy near me.” See you next month.
Hank
