Astronomy Picture of the Day

It definitely feels that way when it's 2am and you've been alone with a telescope for a couple hours. It can be a very meditative experience, knowing that the light hitting your eyes could be hundreds of millions or even a billion years old.

I guess the word I would choose is humbling. Like how being in a great temple, church, or other huge space can put you in a very contemplative state even if you aren't religious.

Here's a shot I took of Comet PanSTARRS in the Spring of 2013. Camera was a Canon DSL of some sort (can't remember which, I've gone through so many). I set out to photograph the comet but never actually saw it with my eyes. I pointed the camera to where I thought it should be and then relied on the sensitivity of the CMOS sensor to see what I couldn't see. The lights in the background are from the communities of Woodland Hills and Calabasas, at the west end of the San Fernando Valley (Los Angeles).

You may need to double-click on the image to get full resolution before you can see the comet.

Yep, double clicking and enlarging the image worked. Great photograph!

M31
UK, Oct 2023
Bortle 5
About 80 mins integration

Some pinched optics, which need some attention. Just waiting for clear skies. It’s a long wait 😁

Don't wait too long!

About 20 years ago I operated a backyard observatory that was qualified by the IAU to conduct precision astrometry for fast-moving objects. The telescope and imager were optimized for capturing faint objects (down to Mag. 20) with relatively short exposures (30 seconds). The raw images were never "pretty", just utilitarian. On one evening, with especially calm air, I knew that M51 -- aka The Whirlpool Galaxy -- was almost directly overhead. Here's a 30 sec image I captured that night.

This isn't a pretty image, but a good example of how my backyard observatory worked. I had tasked the telescope to take five successive images, at twenty-minute intervals, of the object marked with a yellow box (a newly-discovered Near Earth Object). Additionally, I noticed a second object, marked with the red crosshair, moving through the five images. A fruitless search through astronomical databases suggested that the second object was a potential new discovery. I made some back-of-the-envelope calculations of where the potential discovery object should appear the next evening, and tasked the telescope to take five more images at twenty-minute intervals. It did show up the next night, and I was informed by the IAU that this was indeed a newly discovered Main Belt Asteroid, designated 2004PC27. Eventually, it would be named for the Nobel Prize for Peace laureate Elie Wiesel.



The graininess of the image is characteristic of the hypersensitivity of the image sensor I was using. This, despite the fact that the sensor was water-cooled to minimize electronic noise. The newly-discovered Main Belt Asteroid, estimated to be 1-2km in diameter, was discovered at a distance of 170 million km from earth, at about Magnitude 18.5 in brightness.

Here's what my telescope setup looked like.



The smaller, piggy-backed telescope is a 90mm refractor, which I usually used as a star tracker for main telescope guidance. But sometimes I'd put an optical eyepiece on it to look at planets, and sometimes I'd put on a high-res digital/optical sensor to capture the odd image.

Here's an image taken through the 90mm refractor, showing the Orion Nebula.

Some great pics here! I humbly add this from my first night out with my Vespera Pro. Have always been into photography and astronomy so this is a nice distraction from buying more watches! First is the Orion Nebula (1,600 LY away) and the second is, well, the moon!

Just some phone pics but crazy Wolfman sky tonight.