Universe expansion rate - faster than expected

The universe is getting bigger every second. The space between galaxies is stretching, like dough rising in the oven. But how fast is the universe expanding? As Hubble and other telescopes seek to answer this question, they have run into an intriguing difference between what scientists predict and what they observe.

See the full article at PhysOrg.

Magnetic North - more north than it used to be!

(Marc Ward/Shutterstock)

Have a compass?  Ever used one?  They point north, right?  Well, sorta ... they point to the geomagnetic north, different from the geographic north, and it moves about 30 miles further north every year. But recently it started moving faster than ever before. Interesting stuff - and lots of interesting concerns.

See the full article at Science Alert.

NASA study verifies global warming trends

A new study by researchers from NASA has verified the accuracy of recent global warming figures.
See the complete article at Physics World.

(Image courtesy: iStock/oonal)

Now without getting into the argument of 'what' or 'who' is causing the warmup, I find it interesting that this new study, which uses data from two different systems, finds a statistical correlation between the two data sets indicating a relationship strong enough to verify that global warming is occurring.

I would like to get my hands on the raw data they used and run my own analysis, but this is just one more piece of evidence pointing to a warmer earth.

Black Hole finally imaged

The first-ever image of a black hole was released Wednesday by a consortium of researchers, showing the "black hole at the center of galaxy M87, outlined by emission from hot gas swirling around it under the influence of strong gravity near its event horizon."

Event Horizon Telescope collaboration et al

The world was treated to the first-ever image of a black hole today, as an international team of researchers from the Event Horizon Telescope project released their image of a supermassive black hole at the center of galaxy Messier 87 (M87). This image shows a dark disc with the outline of emissions from hot gases swirling around it under the influence of strong gravity near its event horizon.

Located in the Virgo galaxy cluster, the enormous black hole is 55 million light-years from Earth. It has a mass of about 6.5 billion times that of our sun.

And for those of you who may have seen the movie, "Interstellar" - yep, it turns out it looks just like that! Wow.

Check out the full article at NPR

Also, see the article in National Geographic and this YouTube video really explains the image very well - worth watching to the end.

'Bombing' Asteroids and the "Illusion' of Space

Japan’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft has successfully “bombed” asteroid Ryugu in the name of scientific research.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, said Hayabusa2 dropped a small explosive box which sent a copper ball the size of a baseball slamming into the asteroid, and that data confirmed the spacecraft had safely evacuated and remained intact.

Full article here.

Credit:  Getty Images

And just when you thought causality works - think again, or maybe you did already ... see the article here.

Fireballs

Apparently March and April have been good months for Fireball sightings.  Check the latest that occurred Thursday morning visible across the SE US.

Fireball Streaks Across the SE US

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)