Two Star clusters and a Dark Nebula

I can't describe how great it is to have all my equipment operating at peak performance. And with a run of clear nights over the last 6 weeks I've finally arrived at the point where I am wishing for some cloudy nights so I can have the time to process all the images I captured!

Last time I wrote about imaging the Cygnus Wall, part of the North America Nebula. I did get about 7.5 hours of integration time in the HaOiiiSii (Hubble palette) and RGB stars, but the post-processing of the subs is giving me a whole bunch of trouble. So while I'm still trying to get this done, I took a break and decided to process some of the simpler objects taken with the standard RGB color palette.

First up is NGC 6712, a small globular cluster in the constellation of Scutum.

NGC 6712 Globular Cluster - September 26, 2019
GT102 f/5.6 - ASI1600mm Pro
20x60sec RGB 

Next, another globular cluster, M71, in the constellation of Sagitta. M71, or NGC 6838, is a star cluster at a distance of about 12,000 light years away from Earth and spans some 27 light years across.

M71 Globular Cluster  -  September 22, 2019
GT102 APO f/5.6 - ASI1600mm Pro
30x10sec RGB

Finally, my first dark nebula, is LDN 1165, in Cephus. Nebulae are giant clouds of dust and gas. Dark nebulae have a higher concentration of dust, which blocks almost all the light from the background stars, thus producing a region of the sky that is dark and featureless - what appears to be a hole in the sky.

LDN 1165  -  September 22, 2019
GT102 APO f/5.6 - ASI1600mmPro
60x60Lum, 30x60RGB

With the cloudy nights coming up, I think I'll be able to complete the processing of my other images. Stay tuned.

New Equipment Up and Running

For those of you following my blog you know of the myriad of problems I've been plagued with over the last couple of years trying to get all my telescope equipment to 'play nice' together. Well I finally decided to try an option that I've been examining for months - placing a NUC (small PC) mounted on my pier so that all cameras, focusers and mount cables can be connected directly to the USB ports without having to travel from my notebook to the mount over USB-LAN. This would also have the side benefit of improving my cable managemnet - reducing the dangling cables tht could cause snags and otherwise make it bad to image overnight unattended.

Well the decision paid off big. Not only did all my connection issues go away, but the USB3 ports made the whole system operate much faster. I've now tested the setup over three nights and not a single problem occurred - well, maybe a few, but they were human in nature not due to equipment faults.

Tonight I'm going to image the Cygnus wall - part of the North America nebula. I also have Sh2-101 (the Tulip nebula) taken last evening (and earlier) that I need to process. So, while I was waiting I took a quick single sub of the moon while the sky was still dusky. A green filter was used to help bring out the contrast.

Moon - September 7, 2019
GT102 f/5.5  ASI1600mm   0.005 seconds  Green Filter

M16, the Eagle Nebula, in Ha only

M16 - The Eagle Nebula - July 25 & 27, 2019
WO-GT102 APO (4" f/5.6) refractor and ASI1600mm Pro Camera
42x300 sec Ha subs

Summer offers some of the most interesting and colorful deep space objects in the night sky. This is because the arm of the Milky Way stretches up from the southern horizon revealing a bunch of bright nebulae. Unfortunately, my telescopes are set up in my backyard and the property is sort of "in a bowl" so to speak - trees line the horizon all the way around blocking any object lower than about 20-25 degrees in altitude. So whenever the skies are clear enough to capture some of these objects I have a limited window in which to get them.

Over the last month or two I've been attempting to capture M16, the Eagle Nebula, in SHO narrowband. As I mentioned in my last post, I ran into all kinds of problems - equipment failures, cloudy or poor sky conditions, etc. Bottom line is that never got good data in Oiii or Sii (the O and S in the SHO Hubble pallette). Not to let that bug me I decided to take the good Ha data and process a monochrome, Ha-only image of M16.

So here it is in all its B&W glory. In turns out that monochrome Ha data can be extremely interesting as it tends to show more of the finer, more tenuous detail in the outer edges of the nebula. Once I get the remaining Oiii and Sii data I can reprocess the image in color - that is, if I can get the data within the next week or so as M16 is setting earlier and earlier each night and soon will be out of my view. Forecast is for clear nights this week, so who knows - maybe I can get the remaining subs.

The Eagle Nebula is part of a diffuse emission nebula, or H II region (Ha). This region is known to contain active star formation and is about 7000 light-years distant. The cluster associated with the nebula has approximately 8100 stars and it is this group of stars that are the source of the energy that makes the nebula glow. Because this was taken with my short focal length, wide field refractor, the famous "Pillars of Creation" are a bit difficult to see. The Pillars were made famous in a 1995 Hubble telescope photo and has become the most recognizable Hubble image. Maybe next year, when I replace my defective large scope mount, I'll capture this again with much higher magnification and resolution.

NGC 6979 - Fleming's Triangular Wisp and Pickering's Triangle

NGC 6979 in HOO

Well it's been over 5 months since I've been able to image anything - lots of reasons, including the cloudy/rainy skies, busy at work, and telescope equipment failures. But over the past two weeks the skies cleared, equipment repaired (or replaced in some cases) and I was able to get back out under the night sky.

I spent a good amount of time on M16, the Eagle Nebula, but this past weekend I managed to capture part of the Veil nebula, Specifically, Fleming's Triangular Wisp and Pickering's Triangle. The entire Veil is large - it is made up of the visible portions of what is known as the Cygnus Loop, a supernova remnant. Many portions of the nebula have acquired their own individual names and catalogue identifiers, hence the long title.

The entire nebula is too large to capture in one image. The source supernova was a star 20 times more massive than the Sun, which exploded around 8,000 years ago. The remnants have since expanded to cover an area of the sky roughly 3 degrees in diameter (about 6 times the diameter, or 36 times the area, of the full Moon). The distance to the nebula is not precisely known, but is believed to be about 1,470 light-years.

NGC 6979
August 10-11, 2019   WO GT102 APO (4" Refractor)
ASI1600 mm Pro  8.3 Hours (50x300sec Ha; 50x300sec Oiii)

Here are two pieces of the nebula taken in bi-color, narrow-band imaging. Fifty exposures (or subs as we astrophotographers call them) were taken with a Hydrogen Alpha filter (Ha) and fifty with an Oxygen Filter (Oiii). These filters allow only a very, very narrow wavelength of light to get through to the camera's sensor. Since supernova remnants glow in both Ha and Oiii the use of these NB filters is ideal. The added benefit is that all the light pollution (and even the nearly full moon at the time of the image) is almost completely eliminated!  The center top of the image is Fleming's Triangular Wisp; the larger portion, to the right, is Pickering's Triangle.  The full resolution image can be found on Astrobin where I keep all my photos.

Later this summer I may try to capture the whole Veil using a process known as mosaic imaging where the telescope takes different subs from different parts of the sky and then stitches them together to form a whole image.  This takes a lot of time and all the equipment needs to be operating at peak efficiency.  

Later this weekend I will be processing the images I took of M16.  Look for M16 soon.

Jupiter - a target again - amateur detects impact on the giant planet!

It has happened a number of times in the past - in fact, 7 recorded impacts since July of 1994.  Texas amateur astronomer Ethan Chappel recorded this latest impact while waiting for some Perseid meteors to flash across the night sky. His Celestron 8 telescope captured the event as a flash of light in the planet's South Equatorial Belt (SEB).

For more, read the complete story at Sky and Telescope.

Is The Great Red Spot Unraveling?

Ever since I was a small boy I remember viewing Jupiter with my telescope and marveling at the huge red spot on the planet.  Known as the Great Red Spot (GRS), this phenomena has been a staple of Jupiter viewing for hundreds of years.

However, in the past few decades it has started to shrink, and continues to do so. In fact, the GRS used to be large enough to hold three Earths. Now only one would be sufficient to cover up the spot.

The giant storm appears to be unraveling. “I haven’t seen this before in my 17-or-so years of imaging Jupiter,” reports veteran observer Anthony Wesley of Australia. 

Will it disappear completely in our lifetimes?  Maybe.  I will be photographing Jupiter in the coming weeks. Stay tuned.

Complete story at SpaceWeatherArchive.

Teen discovers a Circumbinary Planet

A teen scientist from New York has discovered several distant exoplanets,
including a world that orbits two suns (artist’s concept shown).
T. PYLE/NASA/JPL-CALTECH

For all you Sci Fi fans ... remember Tatooine, Luke Skywalker’s home world in Star Wars?  That was a great sight on the theater's screen, a majestic planet orbiting twin stars.
Now, a teen in New York City has discovered just such a world orbiting a pair of stars far, far away.
Brian Wu, 17, presented his findings this week at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in Phoenix, Ariz.

For the complete story, go to Science News for Students

Black, Hot Ice May Be Nature’s Most Common Form of Water

A new experiment confirms the existence of “superionic ice,” a bizarre form of water that might comprise the bulk of giant icy planets throughout the universe.

The discovery of superionic ice potentially solves the puzzle of what giant icy planets like Uranus and Neptune are made of. They’re now thought to have gaseous, mixed-chemical outer shells, a liquid layer of ionized water below that, a solid layer of superionic ice comprising the bulk of their interiors, and rocky centers.

Read the complete story at Quanta Magazine.

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.