DART Hits Dimorphos

Certainly not of the level of technology that Captain Kirk discovered on Miramanee's planet, which was ultimately used to save her planet from doom (that was science fiction of course) but impressive nonetheless was the successful impact of DART – the Double Asteroid Redirect Test on Dimorphos, a small asteroid moon of Didymos. DART struck the little asteroid – hoping to nudge it slightly off-orbit – at 7:14 p.m. ET (23:14 UTC) on Monday, September 26, 2022.

Didymos-B aka Dimorphos

I remember back in the day discussing the unlikelihood of anything that could redirect an asteroid, but here we are, a first test of doing that very thing. Now this asteroid is very, very small compared to the one on that Star Trek Episode (The Paradise Syndrome, which aired Oct 4, 1968) but it is a first ever to test the viability of redirecting an asteroid impact threat to Earth. 

NASA has a number of images and videos of the impact. 

Here is the series of stills taken as DART approaches Dimorphos.

And here is a actual view from the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS): A NASA and University of Hawaii project to patrol the sky every night in search of incoming asteroids as DART hits the asteroid.

EarthSky has a good writeup on the mission. We won't know for sure yet if the mission was a complete success. We need to wait for data to come in on the change in Dimorphos' orbit. 

The Eastern Veil and the 'Bat'

Yikes.  It's been almost two months since my last post. Have I been that busy on other things? Why, YES. Work, gardening, my retirement business, church activities and a new puppy. Now that's a lot of things keeping me busy.

Cloudy skies for most of the time made imaging a real challenge. But I did get in a few objects; just took awhile to find the time to process them. Turns out that a recent image run is what I processed first. So here it is: the Eastern Veil nebula and a starless cropped close up of the section known as the 'Bat'.

The Eastern Veil Nebula is part of the larger Veil Nebula, a cloud of ionized gas and dust. It is located in the constellation Cygnus the Swan.  This object is actually the visible portion of the much larger Cygnus Loop, which itself is a supernova remnant.

Eastern Veil - GT102/ASI2600 - f/5.6
August 19, 30 and 31, 2022
46x300sec Ha; 46x300sec Oiii; 20x60sec RGB

The star that was the source of the supernova weighed in at 20 times more massive than the Sun and exploded some 10,000 to 20,000 years ago. If you were living at that time you would have seen an object in the daytime sky that would have been brighter than the planet Venus. During the 20,000 years since the explosion the remnants of that star have now expanded to an area roughly 3 degrees in diameter (six times the size of the Moon). It is estimated to be about 2,400 light-years distant.

This rendition is a combination of the Ha and Oiii narrowband (HOO) palette combined with RGB stars.  A total of 8 hours integration of the narrowband and 1 hour for the stars.

The lower section of the nebula is known as the 'Bat'. I cropped the original NB image to capture just the Bat and removed the stars to produce a starless version. I generally don't like starless astrophotos but this nebula looks pretty good when portrayed starless.

The "Bat"