May 2023

Welcome to Hank’s May 2023’s astrophotography blog. This was a month of poopy skies, but amazing new things to see! I was reminded that astrophotography isn’t just about trying to take great photographs, but being there for great moments. You just need to keep showing up, and stuff will show up for you!

The skies were not only cloudy, but smoke from the fires in the west and in Canada made their way to the Black Hills. I was out when I could be, and here’s what I found:

Planetary Nebulas are the remains of old stars that cast off shells of cosmic dust and gas. They sometimes look like a donut, with an old star somewhere in the middle.

I also caught a few globular clusters—old stars that hang out together, like the guys down at coffee at the Our Place Café in Custer.

Spring is a great time to see galaxies, as the Milky Way moves out of the way in the sky and we can see things beyond our own galaxy. The first photo, M51, the Whirlpool Galaxy, was the first deep sky object taken with our new iOptron CEM40 mount. The last two photos are the same galaxy, taken one right after another. The night sky had so much stuff in the atmosphere that the galaxy was a red color. After taking the photo I lowered what they call the “saturation” of the photo, and it cleaned it up considerably by taking out the color. An interesting thing to note is that in traditional astrophotography, the photos are taken with monochrome cameras, and they use different filters to make up the colors.

On the 15th the skies were rapidly clouding over, so I grabbed one last photo of M 101. It’s a cool galaxy in Ursa Major—where the Big Dipper lives—and is visible here all year around. Little did I know, that in a few days another amateur astronomer would take a photo of it as well, and on examination, discovered that a bright spot had appeared in it. M 101 is about 20 million light years away. When you look at it and you think you are seeing its stars—those are stars in our galaxy, between us and objects that are far far away. We really can’t see stars in those distant galaxies—just their glow. The bright spot in M 101 is a Supernova, an exploding star. Not only is that explosion very far away (do the math: Speed of Light (186,000 miles per second) times 60 seconds in a minute, times 60 minutes in an hour, times 24 hours in a day, times 365+ days in a year, times 20,000,000 years), but the explosion happened 20 million years ago and is just now reaching us. So I’ve been waiting for the skies to clear….even a little….so I could take a photo of it. On the 29th the skies were clear enough, and sure enough, the place where there wasn’t a spot a few weeks earlier was now there. Supernovas are said to be the biggest explosions that humans can ever witness. Good thing they are so far away!

For me, the big event was on the morning of the 17th. I got up about 2:00 am and drove out to my favorite viewing place near us, Mud Springs. It’s in an area north of Jewel Cave where there was a fire a few decades ago and burned off all the trees. It has great views. I was there to see an event that happens now and again, when one celestial object slips behind another. It’s called an occultation. In this case Jupiter was heading for a rendezvous with the Moon. It all happened just as the Sun was coming up to the horizon, which means that the light was changing constantly. I took LOTS of photos and here are a few of the progression. What I’ve learned about these kind of events, is that you wait and wait for something to happen, and then BOOM, it’s here and it’s over.

I also made a video of the progression, using a recording of the Frogs of May, one of my favorite bunch of frogs that live out at the Meeker Ranch Preserve. Check it out here: https://youtu.be/tVGRioFkheA

Beginning this month I have been using the iOptron CEM40 mount in my new observatory. It’s working great. For those photos I used my 8” Celestron SCT telescope, diagonal, .5 reducer and Mallincam DS10c color camera.

For the remote shoot at Mud Springs I used the same 8” Celestron SCT telescope and Celestron Evolution mount with StarSense.

With all the deep sky photos I did 16 second exposures. To calculate the total time of the exposures multiply the 16 seconds by the number of frames:
C6: 19 frames. M 57: 25 frames. M 27: 20 frames. M :3 18 frames. M 56: 12 frames. M 51: 39 frames. M63: 31 frames. M 81 color: 36 frames. M 81 mono: 20 frames. M 101 (May 15: 34 frames) (May 29: 65 frames).

Each Jupiter-Moon photo captured a single exposure of between 500 milliseconds to 1.9531 milliseconds.

Until next month…..clear skies! -Hank