Fly by of asteroid 1994 PC1

I'm sure many of you heard of the passage of asteroid 1994 PC1 on January 18, 2022.  Well, if not, here are the details.

On January 18, 2022 a large, stony asteroid, passed relatively close to Earth. Astronomers believe it's size was around 3,280 feet, or, to put it another way, about 2 1/2 times the height of the Empire State Building (as many news outlets commented). Based on the designation of '1994' we’ve known about it since 1994. But based upon it's size and the fact that it's orbit allows it to pass Earth periodically at a close distance it is classified as a Potentially Hazardous Asteroid.

Closest approach occurred on January 18, 2022, at 4:51 p.m. EST, as the speeding asteroid passed 1.2 million miles (1.93 million km) from Earth, or about 5.15 times the Earth-moon distance. 

With a clear night that evening I was able to capture it's movement across the sky in the constellation of Pisces to the W-SW at 8:30 p.m. 

The video below is a composite of 24 images, each 5 sec long, taken one minute apart showing the asteroid movement over a period of about 23 minutes (from 8:14 to 8:37). You can see it move from the bottom left toward upper right in the frame. 

Equipment: WO GT102 f/5.5 and ASI533MC OSC Camera

 

The Seagull Nebula

Working off my backlog of images to process,  I finally got around to completing the Seagull Nebula.

The Seagull Nebula, IC 2177, is a large cloud of dust and gas that spreads across a distance of over 100 light years. It gets its name from the appearance of a seagull in flight.  IC 2177 is located about 3700 light-years away from Earth on the border between the constellations of Monoceros (The Unicorn) and Canis Major (The Great Dog).

IC 2177 - The Seagull Nebula in SHO
WO GT102 f/5.6 with ASI1600 Pro
25 hours integration time over the period 1/11/21 to 2/20/21

As typical of nebulae like the Seagull, the complex array of gas and dust that forms the head of the seagull glows brightly in the sky due to the strong ultraviolet radiation coming mostly from one brilliant young star — HD 53367 — taken to be the seagull’s eye. The radiation from the young stars causes the surrounding hydrogen gas to glow with a rich red color (Ha). Additional radiation from numerous hot blue-white stars is also being scattered off the dust particles in the nebula to create a contrasting blue haze in some parts of the picture which is picked up as ionized oxygen (O3).

This image, although completed in January and February of 2021, was only just now processed (for the fourth time) before I was able to get it just right. I learned a heck of a lot more about PixInsight during this 'adventure in processing', which I guess is a good side effect of the time spent.  RGB stars were planned to be included but those flat sets were corrupted somehow and couldn't be used. So the 'slightly modified' NB stars were used. Colors are not correct, but the image is satisfying.

With my new WO ZS61 waiting for clear skies, I'm sure to take this object for at least one more spin to see what a wider field can do.