Blue Horse Nebula in Scorpius, June 2021
Blue Horse Nebula, IC 4601
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Category Archives: Astrophotos
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
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.
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.
Continue readingNorthern Trifid Nebula, NGC 1579
The observatory threw every thing wrong that could go wrong at me and I have not been able to get an image since early November. The first sets of color captures combined in such a horrible way that it made me wonder if I knew which filter was which in the filter wheel. That is a tricky thing to figure out remotely. Turns out I had it right and the inability to make a workable RGB image remains unexplained. I even had a long online chat with the software developer of CCDStack. He had some usual good ideas that were subtle and subtler but no basic explanation of where things went off the rails. So, as is always a good idea, I just started over. I used 360 second 2X2 RGB frames with new calibration subs and masters. The LUM frames were not great but were workable with 10 minute unbinned subs, all unguided. The usable frames came to a total of 13.3 hours of exposure. I also re-ran, a couple of times, the mount tracking protocols including a 100 star T-Point calibration and a new PEC correction. Even if you don’t understand what all this means you get the point that running this thing is technical and demanding for the mere layman such as me.
Continue readingConvergence and Chasm
Kirsten and I are in the banjo (a pop-up camper) heading to the Simpson Springs campground on the Pony Express road in the desert west of Salt Lake City. We need to get out and are eager to celebrate Solstice. As a double bonus, Saturn and Jupiter are going to be as visually close tonight as they have been for 400 years and will be again for another 400. Simpson Springs is remote and is typically empty. But the last time we went out this recent early summer, as this pandemic got going, the place was jammed. The whole west desert was crowded and covered in accumulating dust plumes from multitudes of RV’s and swarms of off road vehicles. As we settle in on the good dirt road heading west today we can’t see any other traffic and are hopeful the manic crowd does not have the same idea as us this time.
Continue readingNGC 7822 in Cepheus – Old Men and the Sky
Cepheus is looking bad in the depiction Stellarium uses in their Western constellation art. The picture shows an old man sitting around in his bathrobe. It could be me in this pandemic if I had more hair. I would be offended if I were him. That depiction is way too close to the truth, too exposing, not nearly romantic enough. It is the women in his life making the big splash. He is just a geezer hanging out in lazy togs for everyone to see, reminding people innocently passing by, if they will listen, that he prefers to be called King. There you are old dad, taking up space in the sky, trying to think somehow you might be important. An old man’s lament.
East Veil Nebula
I switched the observatory camera from the original CCD SBIG ST-10XME to my modified CMOS Canon 500D/T1i. Replacing the observatory camera was more work, of course, than envisioned. The Canon sensor is set back compared to the SBIG’s and there was not enough range for the TEC-140 telescope to get focused. Jeff Dickerman, the super helpful president at Optec, made me a new adapter to go with another receiver that shortened the camera train enough to get easily into focus. I then rediscovered (I had forgotten but found my own online forum entry!) that CCDAutoPIlot had to turn off the feature on TheSkyX that would record both RAW and FITS files and records only the FITS files. It turns out the DeepSkyStacker can work with FITS and convert the RAW files that create them in color. But I had over time come up with a dark library in RAW frames for the Canon so I could temperature match with the light frames. I don’t have such with FITS files. But if I want to use the observatory automation of CCDAutoPilot, which I do, I will need a new FITS library at a range of temperatures to do it right.
Then I had trouble with setting exposure with CCDAutoPilot on the Canon images. I’m telling a lot of technical info here, but it took a lot of wrestling directly with complex technology to get through all the unforeseen obstacles. The Canon CMOS sensor uses a 2X2 Bayer matrix to record color. Two cells of the matrix are green, the other two are red and blue each. CCD’s, like my SBIG camera,have individual sensors not organized in a matrix. In something to do with the CMOS Bayer matrix, CCDAutoPilot only sees one cell as exposed, and it was saturated, while the other three were only about one-fifth exposed. It averages them in a meaningless way and it seems hit or miss if CCDAutoPilot can get the exposure close enough to get flats. Sometimes it gives up, sometime it settles on something. Focusing is tough too, as is plate solving. CCDAutoPilot did not have a solution as you can see on their forum here, but John Smith, the creator of the software, encouraged me to investigate on my own further. You are getting in pretty deep when the software designer basically gives up and says good luck.
Weirdly, after all that, I did come up with the image below.
