New Comet!

A new comet crept up on us this past weekend, one that should be visible for northern hemisphere observers soon.  I'm excited, as my favorite pastime in astronomy (besides just general astrophotography) is imaging comets.

New Comet ASASSN1 (C/2017 O1) already glows aqua from carbon-laced gases.
The comet is currently visible in the pre-dawn sky through modest-sized telescopes.
Rolando Ligustri

C/2017 O1, or Comet ASASSN1, is currently fairly dim and requires a medium sized telescope to see, but may brighten to within binocular capability as the year progresses. In fact, since its discovery on July 19th it has brightened almost 100,000 fold. It was discovered by the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN).

Details can be found at SkyAndTelescope  and Universe Today.  

New Horizon's Next Target

The Kuiper Belt object (known as 2014 MU69, 4.1 billion miles from Earth)
passes in front of a star and winks it out

Check out this article about the next target for the New Horizons spacecraft.  One of the team members that went to Argentina to capture the occultation (when one object passes in front of another - in this case, the Kuiper Belt object in front of a star) was Steve Conard, the lead engineer that built and tested the LORRI camera on New Horizons at APL in Laurel, Maryland. Steve is a member of the Westminster Astronomical Society, whom I met when I joined WASI back last year.

Complete article at NASA.

Uh-oh, bad news for life on Mars

The Martian surface may be even less hospitable to life than scientists had thought.
Ultraviolet (UV) radiation streaming from the sun "activates" chlorine compounds in the Red Planet's soil, turning them into potent microbe-killers, a new study suggests.

Complete story on Space.com

Geostationary Satellite in trouble

A satellite may be falling apart in geostationary orbit. On the morning of June 17, the Luxembourg-based satellite operator SES lost control of a large satellite in geostationary space, nearly 36,000km above the Earth's surface. Shortly after, the satellite operator began working with another company that specializes in space situational awareness to track the drifting machine, AMC-9. A few days ago that company, ExoAnalytic Solutions, saw the AMC-9 satellite begin to fragment.

There is a video showing the breakup and more details at:  ARS Technica

Jupiter - Like you've never seen it before - Part Three!

Just when I thought I had posted an awesome image of Jupiter from the Juno spacecraft, along comes this video (made up of multiple stills) of Juno's orbit around the poles of the planet.  This is absolutely fantastic. Never before have we seen the poles in such detail. And when the spacecraft gets to Perijove (closest point to Jupiter), it just knocks your socks off (at least I am currently barefoot!!)
And the music picked - perfect (extra points if you know the movie it came from).
Click the link below - you won't regret it.

Juno at Perijove

Jupiter - Like you've never seen it before! (Part two)

NASA’s Juno spacecraft was racing away from Jupiter following its seventh close pass of the planet when JunoCam snapped this image on May 19, 2017, from about 29,100 miles (46,900 kilometers) above the cloud tops. The spacecraft was over 65.9 degrees south latitude, with a lovely view of the south polar region of the planet.

You really need to head over to Nasa.gov to see the latest hi-res images from the Juno spacecraft!!

Jupiter - Three moons and Two shadows

Wow.  This year has really been awful as far as clear skies on moonless nights is concerned.  Hard to get any decent deep space imaging done under these conditions.

So I decided to see what's up in the lunar and planetary domain. Playing around with Starry Night Pro, the planetarium software I use to select and point my telescope to objects I want to image, I noticed an interesting configuration of Jupiter's moons on the night of June 3rd. Three of the brightest moons will be close to the planet, IO will transit the face of the planet and both IO and Ganymede would cast shadows on the planet surface - all during a few hours on the 3rd.

Checking the calendar I saw that the 3rd was a Saturday. Oh boy, a weekend night, I could stay up and not worry about work the next morning. And it turned out to be a clear night to boot.

So out came the telescope and imaging equipment. And although the atmospheric seeing was terrible (the images of Jupiter were boiling and roiling like crazy - not a good night for detailed planetary imaging) the event was interesting enough to make a go of it.

Jupiter and its Moons - June 3, 2017
EdgeHD11 - ASI120MC Planetary Camera
FL = 7200mm - Approx 1000 frames stacked

So here is the result - a mosaic of four images showing the progression of the three moons about Jupiter.  Clockwise from the top left: 10:30 PM, 10:44 PM, 11:12 PM, 11:17 PM. IO closest to the planet; IO's shadow to the left; Ganymede top right with it's shadow top center of planet; Callisto bottom right. You can see IO transiting the planet and just about ready to exit in the third image of this group. Seeing was so bad I could not capture IO's complete transit against Jupiter.

Jupiter - like you've never seen it before!

Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Betsy Asher Hall/Gervasio Robles

With the first set of science results from the Juno spacecraft, we are seeing a whole new Jupiter.  This image shows Jupiter’s south pole, as seen by NASA’s Juno spacecraft from an altitude of 32,000 miles (52,000 kilometers). The oval features are cyclones, up to 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) in diameter. Multiple images taken with the JunoCam instrument on three separate orbits were combined to show all areas in daylight, enhanced color, and stereographic projection.

Storms the size of earth.  Magnetic fields that are stronger than expected.  A north and south pole that are vastly different from each other.  In the next few months we will learn a whole lot more, and with the Great Red Spot as one of the new subjects for study, the excitement continues.

See Nasa.gov for the complete story.

Re-processed image of Comet Johnson

Using a technique of creating a synthetic flat from the original subs I was able to reprocess the image of Comet Johnson to bring out more detail and almost eliminate the gradients.

Gravitational Waves Are Permanently Warping The Fabric of Space-Time

Researchers have proposed a method for detecting exotic events in physics by looking for the scars they leave behind on the fabric of space.

By identifying how objects like cosmic strings or evaporating black holes leave behind memories of their existence on the Universe, it might be possible to move some rather strange phenomena from theoretical to empirical science.

Complete story at ScienceAlert

Comet Johnson

As promised, here is Comet Johnson from my imaging session on Monday, May 15th.  My light box is still not operating properly so I didn't take any flats to correct for the vignetting and other gradients. That is the reason for the slight ring-like halo around the image. And since I didn't have flats I couldn't stretch the image as much as I would have liked, but the result is not all that bad.

Comet C/2015 V2 Johnson - May 15, 2017
EdgeHD11 w/Hyperstar f/2
50x120sec Subs -20C QHY10