M10 in Ophiuchus, June 14, 2021
M10 (NGC 6254), globular cluster in Ophiuchus
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Category Archives: Astronomy
Blue Horse Nebula, IC 4601
Blue Horse Nebula in Scorpius, June 2021
Antares – Rho Ophiuchus Region
The Antares – Rho Ophiuchus is low enough in the southern sky that I have to catch it while it is as high as possible but before it creeps behind the wall of my windbreak. It is a wide field area so instead of using the camera and scope in the observatory, I set up my modified Canon Rebel with a Canon L zoom lens on my Losmandy G-11 mount on the outdoor cement pier. Almost a year earlier I had set myself a tickler to look for an opportunity to capture this image while it was in the right part of the sky. I really should have just set up in the driveway on the tripod, like I did in the good old days, where I would have had a much longer view without obstruction. But I keep coming up with low objects I want to shoot and I keep having to use the tripod to find a place where I can reach them. Since I didn’t build the outside pier and windbreak for nothing, I used it this time, dammit.
The big surprise was the coma effect on the stars in the corners. I didn’t expect that from an L lens. Makes me appreciate the quality of the glass and configurations of the telescopes I use more. Next time I will stop down at least one stop. I also tried to use a nifty piece of freeware in processing called Dark Master which matches the temperatures of the dark calibration frames with the temperature of the light frames. But instead of helping, it introduced some serious artifacts. I was doing something wrong so I just skipped the darks and used flat and bias calibrations.
It is a crazy gorgeous region in the sky and while I may not have done it complete justice, I’m glad to have it in my gallery.
• Location: Torrey, UT
• Exposure: 2 hours 45 minutes, 5 minute subs
• Lens: Canon EF 24-105mm f/4 L IS USM at f/4
• Mount: Losmandy G11
• Autoguider: Orion Starshoot
• Guide-scope: ShortTube 80mm f/5.0 refractor telescope
• Camera: Gary Honis full-spectrum modified Canon T1i (500D)
• White Balance: Daylight
• Mode: Raw
• ISO: 800
• Acquisition and guiding software: BackyardEOS, PHD2 Guiding
• Calibration: Deep Sky Stacker (no darks)
• Processing: Photoshop CS5
Do we have free will?
Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe by Brian Greene
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Brian Greene is a terrific science writer. We armchair science explorers owe him a debt of gratitude for sitting down and working out his thoughts and observations in terms laymen can understand.
I bought the recently published book based on my interest in consciousness and free will. This work presents a head scratching paradox: it delves deeply into both subjects while starting with the premise that they don’t exist. Greene is an ardent material reductionist. He claims that belief right up front and expresses a deep commitment to the concept. Most physicists are material reductionists, whether they know it or not. For a material reductionist everything is explained by physical particles. Greene’s position is a modern version of Laplace’s “Demon” written in 1814. Laplace supposed the world was a giant machine where if someone (the demon) knows the precise location and momentum of every atom in the universe the future can be predicted. Like balls on billiard table, knowing where and how fast the cue ball is going can be used to predict where the other balls will all end up. In that sense, as Greene takes it, free will is nonexistent, everything that ever happened and is going to happen was determined at the big bang. Free will is just a sensation we have. As he is fond of saying, we are merely a bag of material particles. Explore the particles at a deep enough level and he is certain that everything will be explained.
3C 273 Quasar in Virgo. Imagine.
Roger Powell, maybe your ears were burning. And you know that emulation is the highest form of flattery. For a few years now I have been vaguely aware that it was possible for amateurs to capture the light of quasars from over a billion light years away. To register as even a spec of light in one of my images when it is that far away it has to be incredibly bright. Which quasars are. It is estimated that this one is over 4 trillion times more luminous than the sun. Which seems like, you know, a lot.
Roger did all the leg work on identifying this object as a prime candidate and I am knocking him off shamelessly. But it is an honest tribute to him. Roger is one of the founding members of the Macarthur Astronomical Society in Sydney, Australia. So such a thing is not his first rodeo. You can see his blog on capturing this, his first quasar, here.
Let’s talk observatories
The Last Stargazers: The Enduring Story of Astronomy’s Vanishing Explorers by Emily M. Levesque
A new science writer is born.
Levesque’s style is deceptively light and personal, the perfect touch to teach the reader, while they are not looking, a lot about modern professional astronomy.
Her writing is so invitingly personal that I constantly felt eager to share the experience of owning my own automated observatory with her. I looked her up and when I saw she was born in 1984, the same as my daughter, I thought it must be the charm of the age that was getting to me as a dad. Of course I knew this new author wouldn’t care about this reader, but it felt like Levesque was right there at the table with me swapping war stories late into the night.
Emily Levesque is a highly educated enthusiast about her profession and about the Cosmos. I look forward to her next book.
So, what are you working on Emily? Want to hear about my book? You’ll love it . . .
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Cloudy Lunar Eclipse
Sometimes it is forecast to be cloudy, but it looks like it might be worth the risk to bet against the forecast.
You don’t get good pictures if you aren’t setup to take them. The moon in late May was low in the south. It was too low to reach from the observatory, plus the camera in there is too sensitive and won’t run a fast enough exposure to avoid an overexposure. The windbreak on the outside pier was too high to catch the moon that low in the south. Plus the moon was setting as it reached full eclipse, so it was low and getting lower. I set up my 80mm telescope with a mount on a tripod in the driveway where I could see all the way to the horizon.
Galaxy Season (and why is the night dark?)
M86 and Galaxies
Spring is galaxy season. The Milky Way winds low around the horizon leaving the thin part of the galaxy overhead making the best time to look up and out through our galaxy to other galaxies millions of light years away. The larger galaxies in this image range from 15 million to 40 million light years away. Our galaxy is estimated to be between 150,000 to 200,000 light-years in diameter making these galaxies well beyond the stars and objects inside the neighborhood of our Milky Way.
The two brightest, fuzzy objects in the right center of the screen are the elliptical galaxies M86 and M84. The two galaxies in the upper left are known as “The Eyes.”
Speaking of eyes, in 1823 Wilhelm Olbers used his to look up at night and wondered why it is dark at all.
Portal to the Cosmos
The following is an excerpt from my upcoming book, Dark Sky, A Portal into Mind and Meaning.
The observatory is fifty feet to the south of the two story house. An eight-foot round dome sits on top of a square ten feet by ten feet building. The walls are stuccoed the same color as the house. The roof is sealed with a color the same as the house roof. The door and trim is near the trim colors of the house although a bit more grey. To the west of the dome twenty feet away is a prow shaped wind barrier made of cement seven feet high protecting a fourteen inch diameter cement telescope pier. All the cement is the same color as the cement foundation of the house which is satisfyingly close to the color of the red rocks and dirt it rests upon. They are simple constructions but somehow at the same time they are complexly attractive icons presenting a standing invitation.
I have called the observatory a “portal to the heavens” and that description is often enthusiastically accepted. From friends to the public, people express eagerness to see it. A couple of times I have been photographed and interviewed by Utah’s newspapers and was featured in a short film.
I wonder what exactly that attraction is. What do people expect to see? What do they want from it? Why do they ask me to come and see it? The location has to be part of it. Just outside of Capitol Reef National Park the area was originally considered to be part of the Park. In almost any other place it would be a monument or a park. Surrounded by red rock cliffs and high alpine plateaus in a rural area where dark skies at night still rule, a lot of people want to come here anyway. Getting away from the city and into the country with a chance to see the stars and Milky Way is a natural attraction, something I think that is similar to an instinct. It is, after all, what we were presented for the vast majority of our human history. Until just a hundred years ago there were no electric lights anywhere to light up the night sky and hide the stars.
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