November 2022

Welcome to Hank’s November Astronomy Photo Blog. Fall departed and Winter is here in South Dakota, and I’ve been readying my telescope for the cold. I have a modified heating pad that I wrap around the mount where the batteries are stored to keep them from freezing, and I keep the batteries charged up by plugging in the charger while operating the mount. My telescope looks like it has a blue coat and a little plastic backpack on it! Also note, that starting this month you can cycle through the photos with your left/right arrow keys, or click on the arrows at the bottom of the photo.

Here are a few nebulae I found while out roaming around the sky. I’ve posted a few photos of the Rosette Nebula here before, but it was just so big and bright I had to take another.

And a few Open Star Clusters:

I was on the search to see galaxies this month, especially, trying to find ones that are at the limit of my 8” telescope’s seeing ability. Some of them are over 100 million light years away.

I look forward to November, as it is the first month I can catch the Orion Constellation, and not stay up all night. Here are photos of the Flame and Horse Head Nebula (with the L-Extreme filter) and without, and my favorite, the Orion Nebula. I’ll be loading up my blog this season with more from these two nebulas…. I just can’t resist!

Here are what I believe are 8 of Uranus’s 27 known moons. For all you English and Theatre Majors out there, all are named after characters in or mentioned in the works of William Shakespeare and Alexander Pope.

While planets are in the sky, I like to get photos of them. Here is one with Jupiter and its four moons and one showing its red spot. And my first photo of Mars for the season.

Jupiter is over 400 million miles from Earth, so to spot one of its Moons, it must be pretty big! To get an idea of just how big, check out this interesting video that shows the relative sizes of Jupiter’s 80 moons. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owpNfnLbeXU

The BIG EVENT this month was the total lunar eclipse on the 8th. The sky wasn’t supposed to be clear so I didn’t think I would be able to get anything, but as the moon started to eclipse, I could see it well, so I got out the tabletop telescope and iPhone. The skies got better for a time, so I set up the telescope and started to take photos. Shortly after the total eclipse the skies clouded over. The first photo shows the Moon taken by my iPhone. The rest show the progression to totality.

While at the Badlands Observatory later in the month, Observatory intern Beck Bruch showed me an image he had created using their photos from the eclipse. When I got home, I tried to recreate what Beck had done. The shadow that the Earth projects on the Moon shows a portion of the Earth’s curvature. By rotating and connecting the shadows, you get to see how big the Earth’s shadow is as it covers the Moon. In the center is a photo of the total lunar eclipse. Pretty cool!

Until next month, Clear Skies!

Hank