Best of 2017-18 video up on YouTube

Finally got my "Best of" video for last year done.  Check it out at:

Mikey's Best of 2017-18

 https://youtu.be/VRyTXA6UUis

Sh2-261 (Lower's Nebula) in RGBHa

One of the things we astro-photographers do when its cloudy is spend time doing the post processing of the images we've taken when the skies were clear.

Sh2-261 - February 9, 2019
GT102 f/5.6 with ASI1600mm Pro
15x30sec RGB; 25x300sec Ha

This object is Sh2-261, Sharpless 261, also known as the Lower's Nebula, is a faint region of doubly ionized hydrogen. Its apparent dimension is about 50 arcminutes in East-West direction and 30 arcminutes in North-South. So, it has an apparent size about twice the full Moon diameter. Of course the real size of the nebula is much larger! But we have no information about the distance of this hydrogen cloud, so we are not able to determine how large it is.

This image was taken with my 102mm APO refractor and ASI1600mm Pro camera using RGB filters and with Ha (the doubly ionized hydrogen wavelength).  Once I get another couple of clear nights I’m going to add in the Oiii (oxygen) and Sii (Sulphur) data to bring out the middle of the nebula.

NGC 2174 - The Monkey Head Nebula

Looks like 2019 is starting to have some more clear nights than last year. Of course, we are only in February, but so far, so good!

In late January I was able to capture a difficult object - the "Monkey Head Nebula" in narrowband (in the Hubble palette - SHO).

NGC 2174 - The Monkey Head Nebula
Jan 25-26, 2019   WO GT102 f5.5   6.8 hours
ASI1600mm RGBSHO
Details on Astrobin

NGC 2174 (also known as Monkey Head Nebula) is an H II emission nebula located in the constellation Orion and is associated with the open star cluster NGC 2175. It is thought to be located about 6,400 light-years away from Earth. Since emission nebulae are rich in Ha light, the SHO palette shows them off quite well.

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

Comet Wirtanen and the upcoming Lunar Eclipse

What a year.  I don't think I've had more than 20 nights that were good for astrophotography. Although I did notice that I have about 35 pictures up on my Astrobin site, many were either planets, globular clusters (which don't need really clear skies) or very bright nebulae. I'm looking forward to 2019; eternal optimist!

Recent attempts were to capture the brightest comet of 2018 - Comet 46P/Wirtanen. Closest approach was mid-December, but the full moon would be an issue so I started to capture it once it rose high enough to get out of the light pollution which is pretty severe to my SE-S. That was back in early December. Here is that attempt, feeble as it is. I tried to get some better shots later in the month, but processing issues have thus far prevented any reasonable result. And then came the rains.

Comet 46/P Wirtanen - Dec 4, 2018
WO GT102 Apo; QHY10 OSC Camera - 60x60 sec

The comet itself came very close to earth (about 170,000 miles on Dec 16) and so was quite large (over 3x the size of the moon). So even though it was a bright comet, the light was so spread out over such a large area of the sky that it was difficult to see with the unaided eye. As Wikipedia notes:
46P/Wirtanen is a small short-period comet with a current orbital period of 5.4 years. It was the original target for close investigation by the Rosetta spacecraft, planned by the European Space Agency, but an inability to meet the launch window caused Rosetta to be sent to 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko instead. It belongs to the Jupiter family of comets, all of which have aphelia between 5 and 6 AU. Its diameter is estimated at 1.2 kilometres (0.75 mi).

If, and when, I get the newer images processed I'll post them here.

Heads up - there will be a total eclipse of the moon on January. Here are the details from Sky and Telescope magazine.

Here are key events for the total lunar eclipse on January 20–21, 2019.
It's been more than three years since everyone in the U.S. has experienced a total lunar eclipse — the last one was September 27–28, 2015 — and skygazers are hungry for another! As the graphic at right shows, the eclipse will last almost 3½ hours from the beginning of the partial phase at 3:34 UT until it ends at 6:51 UT. Totality lasts 63 minutes, from 4:41 to 5:44 UT.

Leah Tiscione / Sky & Telescope

The timing of this one, with mid-eclipse at 5:12 UT, gives everyone in North America a ringside seat — though it'll be a late night for anyone on the East Coast. As veteran skywatcher Joe Rao notes in Sky & Telescope's January issue, the eclipsed Moon will appear high in a mid-winter sky, and this event occurs on the Sunday night of a 3-day holiday weekend in the U.S. So if it's clear that night, you'll have no (good) excuse for skipping this wonderful celestial event.

The diagram at upper right and the table below show you what to look for and when (UT times are all for January 21st; local times are on the 20th if "p.m." and the 21st if "a.m."):

Event	UT	PST	MST	CST	EST	AST
Penumbra first visible?	3:10	7:10 p.m.	8:10 p.m.	9:10 p.m.	10:10 p.m.	11:10 p.m.
Partial eclipse begins	3:34	7:34 p.m.	8:34 p.m.	9:34 p.m.	10:34 p.m.	11:34 p.m.
Total eclipse begins	4:41	8:41 p.m.	9:41 p.m.	10:41 p.m.	11:41 p.m.	12:41 a.m.
Middle of totality	5:12	9:12 p.m.	10:12 p.m.	11:12 p.m.	12:12 a.m.	1:12 a.m.
Total eclipse ends	5:44	9:44 p.m.	10:44 p.m.	11:44 p.m.	12:44 a.m.	1:44 a.m.
Partial eclipse ends	6:51	10:51 p.m.	11:51 p.m.	12:51 a.m.	1:51 a.m.	2:51 a.m.
Penumbra last visible?	7:15	11:15 p.m.	12:15 a.m.	1:15 a.m.	2:15 a.m.	3:15 a.m.

The Wizard Nebula in SHO (The Hubble Palette)

Thanksgiving night was a good clear evening, and I wanted to get some Sii subs to add to the Wizard Nebula that I imaged earlier this month. Since NB imaging can be done even in moonlit skies, and with no more clear nights in the near future, I decided to go ahead and capture about 100 minutes of Sii light even though there was a near full moon out.

The result was not too bad. Here is the redo of the Wizard Nebula in SHO, known as the Hubble Palette, since the Hubble telescope frequently images in this way:  Sii ->Red, Ha ->Green and Oiii ->Blue.

The resultant image shows that I really need to add much more data to get a cleaner, less noisy image; probably another 2 hours of each filter.

NGC 7380 - The Wizard Nebula
November 10,11 and 22, 2018
GT102 (f/5.6) with ASI1600mm Pro Camera
15x60sec RGB; 10x300sec Ha and Oiii; 20x300sec Sii

The Cocoon Nebula in RGBHa

After capturing the remaining green and blue subs on November 4th, I was able to complete the RGBHa composite of the Cocoon nebula.  I had already shot the 1 hour of Ha and most of the color subs before the clouds moved in on October 19th.

IC 5146 (also known as Caldwell 19, Sh 2-125, and the Cocoon Nebula) is a reflection/emission nebula in the constellation Cygnus. The NGC description refers to IC 5146 as a cluster of 9.5 mag stars involved in a bright and dark nebula. The cluster is also known as Collinder 470. It shines at magnitude +10.0/+9.3/+7.2. It is located near the naked-eye star Pi Cygni, the open cluster NGC 7209 in Lacerta, and the bright open cluster M39. The cluster is about 4,000 ly away, and the central star that lights it formed about 100,000 years ago; the nebula is about 12 arcmins across, which is equivalent to a span of 15 light years. (Wikipedia)

IC 5146 - The Cocoon Nebula in RGBHa
WO GT102 (4", f/5.6)
ASI1600mm 20x60sec ea. RGB; 15x240sec Ha