Total Lunar Eclipse of January 2019

The storm moved through, the skies cleared and so I set up in the freezing cold and wind to capture the best placed lunar eclipse in a long time.  I was planning to image this event, but the weather didn't look like it was going to cooperate earlier in the week.  With my remote focuser still in repair I would have to manually focus to get the images.

But the skies did clear, and this was a fantastic evening.  I stayed up to capture the whole event, setting up at 4:30PM and finally tearing down at 2:40AM the next morning.

I used my GT102 f/5.5 APO refractor with my Canon 50D as the imaging camera.  Backyard EOS was the imaging software.  Since I wanted to produce a time-lapse image, I had to sit by and capture a new frame every 6.5 minutes.  Here is the mid-eclipse shot at maximum totality.

Mid Eclipse - 12:12AM Jan 21, 2019
GT102 APO at f/5.5 - Canon 50D - ISO 400  4 Seconds

And the time-lapse, of 33 images.  Sorry for the 'bouncing' around, but I didn't take the time to register each image exactly.

Finally, the moon was rather dark during this eclipse, and so lots of stars could be seen around the area of the moon.  Here is a wide field shot at 8 seconds so that the stars can be seen.

All in all it was a great evening - but I'm still feeling the tingling in my fingertips from the bitter cold and wind while I was packing everything up.  I'm still planning on building an observatory to house both scopes.

Cave Nebula (in Ha)

I really like colorful astro images, but every now and then an object lends itself to just plain 'ol mono, albeit in this case mono at a single light frequency - that of Hydrogen Alpha, or Ha.  Normally, I would shoot two or three NB images (Ha, Oiii and Sii) and add in the broadband colors of R, G and B. On December 10 and 11 I took a small number of RGB and a lot of Ha, 40 subs each 10 minutes long. The RGB images just weren't good enough to use - this object needed at least 2 hours of each and I had only about 15 minutes of each. So I decided to process this DSO (Deep Space Object) in the Ha band only.

So here is the Cave Nebula, or Sh2-155.

Sh2-155 (Cave Nebula) in Ha
December 10, 11, 2018    GT102 at f/5.5    ASI1600mm Pro
40x600sec (6.7 hrs integration)

Sh2-155 (also designated Sharpless 155 or S155) is a diffuse nebula in the constellation Cepheus, within a larger nebula complex containing emission, reflection, and dark nebulosity. It is widely known as the Cave Nebula, which was coined for this object by Patrick Moore, presumably derived from photographic images showing a curved arc of emission nebulosity corresponding to a cave mouth. Although Sh2-155 is relatively faint for amateur observation, some of its structure may be seen visually through a moderately sized telescope under dark skies. Sh2-155 lies at the edge of the Cepheus B cloud (part of the Cepheus molecular cloud), and is ionized by young stars from the Cep OB3 association. It has been suggested that radiation from the hot O-type star HD 217086 is compressing the region, triggering the formation of a new generation of stars. A study of the region's young stellar objects by the Chandra X-ray Observatory and Spitzer Space Telescope shows a progression of stellar ages in front of the cloud, supporting the hypothesis of triggered star-formation. (Wikipedia)

Heart Nebula in the Hubble Palette

Back in early December I took 22 Ha subs of the Heart Nebula (IC 1805).  Then had to wait until early January to complete the imaging. On Jan 5 and 6 captured the 20x RGB and 20 Oiii and Sii.

So here is the Heart Nebula in RGBSHO.

Dec 11, Jan 5 and 6   GT102 f/5.5   ASI1600mm
30min RGB, 300min NB (Ha, Oiii, Sii)  5.8 hrs total integration

The Heart Nebula, IC 1805, Sharpless 2-190, lies some 7500 light years away from Earth and is located in the Perseus Arm of the Galaxy in the constellation Cassiopeia. It was discovered by William Herschel on 3 November 1787. This is an emission nebula showing glowing ionized hydrogen gas and darker dust lanes.

The very brightest part of this nebula (the knot at the western edge, lower right) is separately classified as NGC 896, because it was the first part of this nebula to be discovered. (Note: The field of view for my capture was not able to include NGC 896.)

The nebula's intense red output and its configuration are driven by the radiation emanating from a small group of stars near the nebula's center. This open cluster of stars known as Melotte 15 contains a few bright stars nearly 50 times the mass of our Sun, and many more dim stars that are only a fraction of our Sun's mass.   (from Wikipedia)

Hubble's Main Camera has a problem

Hubble Space Telescope's premier camera shuts down

The Hubble Space Telescope's premier camera has shut down because of a hardware problem.

NASA said the camera stopped working Tuesday. Hubble's three other science instruments are still working fine, with celestial observations continuing.


Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2019-01-hubble-space-telescope-premier-camera.html

New Horizons Successfully Explores Ultima Thule - Most Distant Target in History

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft flew past Ultima Thule in the early hours of New Year's Day, ushering in the era of exploration from the enigmatic Kuiper Belt, a region of primordial objects that holds keys to understanding the origins of the solar system.

Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI;
sketch courtesy of James Tuttle Keane

At left is a composite of two images taken by New Horizons' high-resolution Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), which provides the best indication of Ultima Thule's size and shape so far. Preliminary measurements of this Kuiper Belt object suggest it is approximately 20 miles long by 10 miles wide (32 kilometers by 16 kilometers). An artist's impression at right illustrates one possible appearance of Ultima Thule, based on the actual image at left. The direction of Ultima's spin axis is indicated by the arrows.

Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

This sequence of three images, received on Dec. 31, 2018, and taken by the LORRI camera onboard New Horizons at 70 and 85 minutes apart illustrates the rotation of Ultima Thule.
Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

The New Horizons spacecraft will continue downloading images and other data in the days and months ahead, completing the return of all science data over the next 20 months.


The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, designed, built and operates the New Horizons spacecraft, and manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. The Southwest Research Institute, based in San Antonio, leads the science team, payload operations and encounter science planning. New Horizons is part of the New Frontiers Program managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

Follow the New Horizons mission on Twitter and use the hashtags #UltimaThule, #UltimaFlyby and #askNewHorizons to join the conversation. Live updates and links to mission information are also available on http://pluto.jhuapl.edu and www.nasa.gov.

http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/News-Article.php?page=20190101