Welcome to Hank’s October 2023 Astrophotography Blog. Black Hills Astronomical Society had a private star party on the 6th at Sylvan Lake Lodge for a wedding party, and about 10 of us with telescopes showed up to brave the cold and show about 60 in the wedding party the night sky. October is normally past the time we’d set up for star parties due to the cold temperatures, but the skies were clear and I had on enough layers to keep from getting too cold. I ended up showing folks some old favorites, M 27 (Dumbbell Nebula), M 2 (a globular cluster in Aquarius), and Saturn. We got to talking about Saturn and its moons, and because Saturn is much brighter than its moons, in order to see them, I raised the gain on the image, enough that Saturn was a fat bright splotch, and the moons began to pop out. When I got home, I used an app that Sky & Telescope magazine posts online https://skyandtelescope.org/wp-content/plugins/observing-tools/saturn_moons/saturn.html to enter the date/time and telescope type I was using (some telescope set-ups reverse images in different ways) and there it was, showing these brightest moons and their names, which I show here.
The next day was warm and pleasant, and I put my telescope back on the mount in the observatory at home. I wanted to take images to again try out the new post-processing software I featured in September, Siril, so that evening I captured images of M 45 (Pleiades), M 33 and M 34 (in the Veil Nebula). When using Siril, the images capture a lot more detail if you take “calibration frames”, images that show errors that occur in both the camera (hot pixels, etc.) and mirrors (dust spots and such). As I was finishing up and getting ready to park the telescope for the night, the telescope OTA slipped through the dovetail joint that holds the tube to the mount, and it crashed at my feet, breaking the glass corrector plate. UGH! It is my guess that the cold temperatures of the evening had loosened the telescope in the dovetail mount enough so that it slipped out. I shipped it to Celestron in California and hopefully in the next few weeks I’ll have it back, all fixed! I’ve been having dreams about keeping the dovetail holder REALLY tight!
Here are the results using Siril and what a broken corrector plate looks like:
The big event this month was the Annular Solar Eclipse. Annular Eclipses happen more frequently than Total Eclipses. With Annular Eclipses the sun is not totally blocked by the Moon, and as with this one, if we had been in the right place we would have seen the Ring of Fire that shows the rim of the Sun. With Total Eclipses the Moon is close enough to the Earth that it blocks out all the sun’s light, which is called Totality. We would have had to travel to around the 4 Corners area of Colorado to see the Ring of Fire…just too far! As it was the Sun only showed about 65% blockage. I set up my small 4” telescope with my iPhone down at the Custer Library where over 100 solar worshipers gathered! To avoid over exposure while taking photos of the Sun (NEVER LOOK AT THE SUN!) I cut out one of the filters from a pair of solar glasses and taped it on the front of the telescope. The last photo shows the progression of the photos (clockwise) that I took over the couple of hours of the eclipse.
Finally, on the 28th, the evening before the full Moon, I looked up and Jupiter was in conjunction with the Moon! Conjunctions occur when an object appears to pass close to another object, but in reality, they can be very distant from one another. As the Moon averages about 238,855 miles from the Earth and on the 28th Jupiter was about 370,536,574 miles away from Earth, Jupiter was still well over 370 million miles from the Moon when they nearly touched. Jupiter looks a little wonky in this photo, as my hands were shaking from the cold!
I’ve got my fingers crossed that my telescope returns home safely in November and we are greeted by Clear Skies when it does!
Hank
