May 2022

Thanks for checking out my May photos! I was gone for a week this month, but I got a few photos to share with you. To start off with, I was in Vernal, Utah on May 15th, getting ready for a 5 day trip down the Yampa and Green Rivers through Dinosaur National Park (a great trip–highly recommended!). I took my small 4” telescope, iPhone and holder for the total lunar eclipse. Just about sunset the Moon appeared already partially dark and I got a few shots. But clouds soon crowded out the Moon until totality, when it popped out into clear skies! You can tell how clear the skies were for the totality shot, by the sharpness of HIP 76106, the star sitting near the edge of the Moon. One thing I learned is that with the solar eclipse we saw on August 21, 2017, totality only lasted a few minutes. The lunar totality this month lasted about an hour and a half! All because the Earth casts a much larger shadow than the Moon. Thanks to Jim and Andrea for hanging in there with me for the Vernal photos.

In my quest for Caldwell targets, I found a few to capture. C 37, the open star cluster, only has about 50 stars in it. C 36’s photo had much better skies than in April. In 1941 and 2019 astronomers observed supernova explosions in galaxy C 36!  I’m keeping my eye on it!

Cygnus has some remarkable stuff in it. C 27 (NGC 688) is called the Crescent Nebula. It is in a region of the sky with many stars, so I used my StarNet+ app to remove the stars to get a better look at the nebula.

C 34 (NGC 6960) West Veil Nebula is also in a star dense part of Cygnus. So I did the magic of StarNet+ on it as well. I have both C 27 and C 34 on my list to photograph again…soon!

I had some very clear skies, so I retook photos of three galaxies from April: M 61, M 89, and M 100. The colors and definition really stand out better.

In March, you may remember that I got a great photo of the galaxies in Markarian’s Chain using my wide angle Hyperstar lens. This time I zoomed in using a .5 focal reducer and got this close-up of a pair of galaxies known as “The Eyes” in Markarian’s Chain. NGC 4438 and 4435 are interacting galaxies, meaning they are gravitationally bound and in this case are sharing interstellar material. NGC 4438 (and possibly NGC 4435) is believed to be a lenticular galaxy, which is like an elliptical galaxy  (made up of old stars), but not like spiral galaxies with their long arms.

I recently got a solar filter to let me view the Sun and found an almost clear day to check it out. The photo at top is a composite of 2 photos. The tiny dark spots are sunspots, which are “dark, planet-size regions of strong magnetic fields on the surface of the Sun. They can spawn eruptive disturbances such as solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs),” Space.com. The small image on the left shows the sunspot region labels, and the image on the right is a blowup of region 3023.

This month’s challenge: Zoom in on 3025 to see if you can find it….it’s pretty faint! If you see other spots on the Sun it might be an indication that you need to clean your computer monitor.

Until next month, Clear Skies!

Hank