Tom J Martinez PhotoBlog

"Things That Go Bump In The Night" - Happy Halloween

2011-10-17T02:19:00.002-05:00

With a nip in the Autumn air, its the season for Halloween, so I have uploaded some things that go "bump" in the night. Otherwise know as nebulae, these remarkable wisps of gas and dust reminds me of the ghosts and goblins of the season. Taken last month, all of these deep sky objects are up sometime during the night.

Click on the image for a larger view

The image above is known as "The Wizard Nebula" in the constellation Cepheus. I don't see a wizard. Maybe you have better luck at seeing one. It could be that it looks like a wizard when seen visually through a telescope, but I kinda doubt it, because it's pretty faint. The camera picks up a lot more faint nebulosity than our human eyes can ever hope to do. Instead of a wizard, my mind does see a one-eyed black goblin. It's at the lower right of the image. Of course, this is just a dark, dusty region out in space. I can not find an offical name for the "dark nebula", but the Wizard is called Sh2-142, from a 1959 second version of a catalog by Stewart Sharpless. The star cluster involved with this nebula is NGC7380, from Dreyer's New General Catalog of 7,840 objects.

The image was shot with my 190mm f/5.3 Maksutov/Newtonian. I took 12 10-minute shots for a total of 2 hours worth of data.

Click on the image for a large view

The deep sky object at the center of this image is the "Cave Nebula", officially known as Sh2-155, is also in the constellation Cepheus. Presumably the dark nebula on the right side of the bright nebula reminds one of the opening to a cave. I, however, see it as the head of a fire breathing dragon with it's body extending to the right. Do you see the red flames coming out of its mouth? Or maybe it's a cloud of bats. What do you think?

The image was shot with my 300mm f/4 Canon lens, and my Q453 CCD camera. I took nine 20-minute shots for a total of 3 hours worth of data.

Click on the image for a larger view

I have annotated some of the other deep sky objects in the field and I have outlined the dragon.

Click on the image for a large view

Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.

William Shakespeare

Shakespeare would have loved this image of the "Witch Head Nebula". There is no trouble seeing this Halloween character. She seems to be contemplating the bright light at the upper right, which is actually Rigel, the bright blue supergiant star in the constellation Orion. The Witch Head, lying in the Eridanus constellation, is a supernova remnant, the left over pieces of a star explosion. Dust particles in the cloud reflect the blue light from Rigel. The whole area is composed of molecular hydrogen and can be seen as the reddish areas surrounding the Witch Head.

The image was shot with my 300mm f/4 Canon lens, and my Q453 CCD camera. I took eight 20-minute shots for a total of 2 hours and 40 minutes worth of data.

The Dark Horse and The Pipe Nebula

2011-09-24T01:37:00.001-05:00

Click HERE to see it at its highest resolution

Astronomers have given the dark areas in the above image two familiar names: "Dark Horse Nebula" and "Pipe Nebula". The first one is a side view of a "Dark Horse" with the darkest part being the rump and back leg with the fainter head and forelegs to the right. Can you see that it has one foreleg raised as if it is prancing among the stars? The Pipe Nebula consists of the rump of the horse as the bowl of the pipe and the rear leg makes up the pipe stem. Click HERE to see it in high resolution.

The image below is an annotated version outlining the horse and many labels of various "dark nebulae" in and around the horse. Click HERE to see it in high resolution. The labels starting with the letter "B" are from the Edward E. Barnard catalog of dark nebulae. Most of the NGC numbered objects are globular clusters (NGC stands for New General Catalog). I have also outlined some very faint red emission nebulae. It is best to view it at high resolution on a large monitor as this is the full resolution of my CCD camera.

Click HERE to see it at its highest resolution

The image was taken with my 70-200mm f/2.8 Canon zoom lens set at 70mm and f/5. A total of 8 images were taken with each image being 15 minutes of exposure.

Green Comet and Globular Cluster

2011-09-12T00:36:00.000-05:00

Click on the image for a larger view

The image above is of Comet Garradd as it went by the globular cluster M71 in the constellation Sagitta back on August 26, 2011. This is the brightest comet in the sky right now, easily visible with a pair of binoculars, but with a couple of provisions. You need to view it away from the city lights and you need to know exactly where to look. Because comets are constantly on the move, you will need a star chart for the evening that you go out into the countryside. Click here to get some printable star charts for the next 6 months (courtesy of Sky and Telescope magazine) as it heads closer to the sun. Comet Garradd will be visible for quite a long time, so there should be no excuse of not having enough time to see it.

Are you wondering why the comet is green? One of the few green objects in the night sky, the color is caused by the Sun's ultraviolet light striking the cyanogen gas surrounding the star-like nucleus of the comet making it glow. The tail is composed of gas and dust, pushed away from the nucleus, by the pressure of light particles from the sun.

The globular cluster, M71, looks to be fairly close to the comet, but not really. At the time of the picture, the comet was about 130 million miles away from Earth. M71 is 13,000 light years away. To make it easier to compare the difference in distances, lets convert the comets distance in miles to light years. Light travels 186,000 miles per second. Dividing 130 million by 186,000 gives about 700 seconds. Now you can really see the difference: Light takes about 11.6 minutes to get from the comet to our eyes, but from where M71 is located, it takes light 13,000 years to travel from where it is located.

Technical Data:

Date Taken: Aug 26, 2011
Location: ASKC Dark Sky Site
Telescope: 190mm, f/5.3 Maksutov Newtonian
Camera: Q453 CCD (similar to QHY8)
Exposure: 30 minutes (consisting of 15 - 2 minute shots)
Calibration: 20 Bias, 20 Flats, 1 Dark
AutoGuider: Q-Guider with 50mm Finderscope
Mount: Parallax Instruments HD 150C
Capture Software: Nebulosity
Calibration Software: Nebulosity
Final Processing Software: Photoshop CS3

Supernova Erupts in the Pinwheel Galaxy

2011-09-02T12:26:00.001-05:00

Click on the Image for a large view

On August 24, the Palomar Observatory discovered a supernova in M101, the Pinwheel Galaxy. The supernova has been getting brighter every day since its discovery. I took this picture on the evening of August 30. The star is brighter than the nucleus of the galaxy, which is composed of millions of stars. M101 is a large face-on spiral near the Big Dipper with an apparent size of the Moon. It can just barely be seen with a pair of binoculars from a very dark sky, but now the supernova will be brighter than the galaxy, at least until the explosion dies away in a few days.

Click on the image below to show you a labeled picture pointing out the location of the supernova and a few supergiant star forming areas in the galaxy. Three galaxies near M101 are also labeled. They are NGC5471, NGC5473 and one that almost looks like a star, PGC49919. They look smaller than M101 only because they are much further away from us. M101 is 23 million light years away and 170,000 light years across. This supernova, designated 2011fe, is being studied by the scientific community. The early detection, combined with the relative closeness of M101, makes this a spectacular find for professional researchers. Here's a light curve of magnitude measurements (visual, R, V, and B) that the America Association Variable Star Observers has received.

The Needle Galaxy - NGC4565

2011-08-12T02:45:00.001-05:00

Click on the Image for a Larger View

Commonly known as the "Needle Galaxy" because of its narrow edge-on appearance, this spiral galaxy is formerly labeled NGC4565 in the constellation Coma Bernices. Another way to imagine it: Think of a dinner plate with a glob of mashed potatoes in the middle of it, then look at this plate from the edge. The mashed potatoes is the bulge of stars at the center of the disk. The plate is the rest of the galaxy consisting of blueish areas of star formation and massive lanes of dark dust and gas circling the disk. The "Needle" spans 100,000 light years in diameter and is 30 million light years from Earth. One of the prettiest edge-on galaxies in the night sky.

Many other galaxies, much further away and therefore fainter and smaller are strewn throughout the image. I have labeled some of the brighter ones in the image below. If you can't see these galaxies, then your monitor is too dark.

Click on the Image for a Larger View

Technical Data:

Date Taken: 04-02-2011
Location: ASKC Dark Sky Site
Telescope: 190mm, f/5.3 Maksutov Newtonian by Orion
Camera: Q453 CCD, 3032(h) X 2016(v) pixels
Exposure: 1 hour (consisting of 4 - 15 minute shots)
Calibration Exposures: 20 Bias, 0 Flats, 1 Dark used to make a "Bad Pixel Map"
AutoGuider: Q-Guider with 50mm Finderscope
Mount: Parallax Instruments HD 150C
Capture Software: Nebulosity
Calibration Software: DeepSkyStacker
Final Processing Sofware: Photoshop CS3

Milky Way

2011-07-10T03:31:00.000-05:00

Click on Image for a Larger View

This is our home galaxy, which we call the Milky Way. The 10mm lens I used gives a 107-degree diagonal view. From the horizon to just past overhead. The whole thing extends across the whole sky and circles underneath our feet in one huge ring. We see the part under our feet in the Winter sky.

Only from a dark site, away from the light pollution of our cities, can you see it in all its glory. But even when you can see the Milky Way from a dark site, you won't see it quite this way. Our eyes see with a bit more subtlety. Only in photographs do we see it with this much color and contrast. The clouds of stars, nebulae and dark dusty areas are very easy to see.

The above image took almost 3 hours to take. I piggybacked my Canon Xti with my 10-22mm lens (set to 10mm at f/5) on top of my telescope and took 22 eight minute pictures. I combined, aligned and stacked them in DeepSkyStacker then processed it in Photoshop.

I have outlined the major constellation in the annotated image below.

Click on the Image for a Larger View

How To Take Star Trails Around The North Star

2011-07-06T12:47:00.000-05:00

Click on the Image for a Larger View

Star trails are easy to take with your digital camera, but before I tell you how I created the above image, a few things about the picture. The image is a 5.5 hour long exposure of the northern sky centered at the "north celestial pole" of the Earth. As we rotate with the Earth during the night, the stars seemingly rotate counter-clockwise. They rotate in smaller circles around a point near the "North Star". This point is the axis of the Earth extended to the sky and is called the north celestial pole. Also notice that the North Star is not exactly at this point. The red glow centered above the tree line is the light pollution glow from Kansas City, about 50 miles away. The brighter white glow on the left is from the La Cygne power plant, about 5 miles distance.

The image is NOT one long exposure, but a combination of eighty one, 4 minute shots. I started the first exposure at 10:54 p.m. and the last exposure ended 5 hours, 30 minutes later, just after atronomical twilight at 4:24 a.m. All taken with my 10-22mm wide-angle lens set to 10mm on my Canon XTi digital.

A little bit of forethought is required to take a shot like this. You can take one long shot, but if you do, you are more likely to get a very bright, over exposed picture. It is better to take shorter exposures and combine them later. This is what I did:

Before dark, I put the camera on a tripod. I replaced the camera's battery with its AC-power adapter (I didn't want the battery to run out of power in the middle of the shots).
I set the lens at its widest view, 10mm. I then auto-focused the lens on the distant horizon. I turned off the auto-focus switch (you don't want to use the auto-focus feature because the stars are too dim for the lens to focus on). Being careful not to bump the focus setting. I then set the shooting mode to M (Manual) and dialed the shutter speed to Bulb.
Once it got dark, I composed the picture by taking a few test shots. I settled on individual 4 minute shots, with the lens set at f/4 and the camera at ISO 400. A little bit of math told me that I would need about 75 shots for the 5 hours of darkness. I used a "timer remote controller", setting the remote to take 99 shots, each shot set at 4 minutes with a 2 second interval between shots to allow each image to be saved to the memory card. I pressed the Start button on the timer and walked away.

There is one thing that can ruin a shot like this, and that is dew. If the night is humid, the lens will fog over with dew. I get rid of dew by attaching a dew heater around the lens. The heater is usually run with power from a battery. Even a simple 9-volt battery will work. I make my own dew heating straps using resistors. The other thing that I have done is to blow away the dew every once in a while with a hair blower. That being said, I did not have a dew problems. There was just enough of a breeze to keep it at bay.

Now comes the easy part, combining all eighty one pictures. How can that be easy, you might be saying? It is easy because someone has created a program that does it all automatically. Achim Schaller, from Germany, created the program and it is "Free". Here is the website: http://www.startrails.de/html/software.html All you do is load the images, press a button, and in a few minutes it is done. It's supposed to create a video also, but I couldn't get it to work.

Click on the Image for a Larger View

Above are the first and last frames from the eighty one images. You can see how much the sky has rotated in 5.5 hours

Colorful Nebulae around the Antares and Ophiuchus Region

2011-06-22T19:16:00.002-05:00

Click on Image for Larger View

This is one of the most colorful regions in the Milky Way. Visually, even with the largest telescope, you won't see it anything like this. It takes long exposure photographs to bring out the beautiful colors, and is why I like to take pictures of the night sky.
Known as the Rho-Ophiuchus Nebula Complex, it consists of blue reflection nebulae, red emission nebulae, dusty, dark nebulae and a rare yellow-orange reflection nebula surrounding the Red Giant star Antares at the lower-left of the image. The triple star Rho and the blue reflection nebula surrounding it is located in the middle-lower section of the image. The colors of these nebulae are fascinating, but what is really amazing to me are the "Dark Nebulae". These filaments of dark-brown regions consist of light years of dust. So much dust they block the Milky Way starlight in the background. Dark Nebulae were discovered by the pioneering astrophotographer Edward E. Barnard in the late 1800s. He created a catalog of 349 dark nebulae. Each has a number with the letter B in front of it.
Other objects in the image include Globular Clusters. M4 is largest and easiest to see. It is the big ball of stars located below Antares. Very much smaller is NGC6144, just to the right and a little below Antares. Three others, even smaller globulars are in the image, but look like large stars (To see where they are, take a look at the annotated image below).

Technical Data:

Date Taken: 06-04-2011
Location: ASKC Dark Sky Site
Lens: Canon 28-200mm f/2.8 L IS (set to 100mm at f/4)
Camera: Q453 CCD, 3032(h) x 2016(v) ~ 6.11M pixels
Field of View: 13.6 degrees X 9.0 degrees
Calibration Exposures: 20 Bias, 0 Flats, 1 Dark used to make a "Bad Pixel Map"
Exposure: 2 hours (consisting of 8 - 15 minute shots)
Calibration Exposures: 20 Bias, 0 Flats, 1 Dark used to make a "Bad Pixel Map"
AutoGuider: Q-Guider with 50mm finder
Mount: Parallax Instruments HD 150C
Capture Softwar: Nebulosity
Calibration Software: DeepSkyStacker
Final Processing Software: Photoshop CS3

ISS Passing Overhead

2011-06-15T02:51:00.000-05:00

Last evening I set up my Canon XTi with a new 10-22mm f/3.5 lens to capture the International Space Station as it crossed almost directly overhead here in the Kansas City area. The Moon was shining brightly and it was not quite dark, so there was quite a bit of nice blue color in the sky as well as some fast moving clouds. Click on this link for the YouTube video I created:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUSpCrUZp4I

Feeding Frenzy of Feathered Friends

2011-05-10T16:09:00.000-05:00

Click on Image for a Larger View

Do you know what bird this is? Hint - It's probably one of the most abundunt of all the birds in the world, so much so that it's become somewhat of a pest. It was introduced to North America when 50 pairs were brought over from Europe and released in Brooklyn, New York in 1852. They have spread into the far north of Canada and into Central America.

This is the female House Sparrow feeding it's babies right outside my back door. There are four babies in total. Gloria and I have much fun watching them stick their little heads out of their nest begging to be fed.

Click HERE to see a picture I took last year of a male House Sparrow mating with the female.

More Birds of Prey

2011-05-03T23:37:00.001-05:00

Click on Image for a Larger View

Thanks for all the nice e-mails I received on what type of hawk is in the picture of my previous installment. These guys can really be tough to figure out. They tend to look very similar, so we have to look at the details. So, more images would be nice, right? I took 61 pictures of these visitors (there were two birds, one of them staying up in a tree). So, as I went through the rest of the pictures I found the one you see at the top. The hawk in the previous image is now slightly below the new hawk you see here. As you can see, the main difference is the bars on the breast versus the streaks on the other. I was suspicious that the lower bird was an Immature Red-shouldered Hawk, so when I saw the image of the other bird, it confirmed it. The bars on this bird are on an adult Red-shouldered Hawk.

Take a look at these really nice images of Red-shouldered Hawks taken by Raul Quinones and you'll see the resemblance is very good: Red-shouldered Hawk by Raul Quinones

Bird of Prey

2011-05-02T02:59:00.000-05:00

Click on Image for a Larger View

I spotted this beautiful bird of prey perching on my satellite dish, scanning my backyard for a juicy rodent I'm sure. I quickly grabbed my Canon camera, put my 300mm lens on it and took this picture. I'm pleasantly surprised at the nice quality of the image, considering I was shooting the lens hand held, through a plate glass door and leaves from a foreground bush. I did help to keep it steady by turning the image stabilizer on and shooting at 1/2000 of a second. I also leaned the front of the lens against the plate glass. A few mintes later, it flew to a nearby tree, but then flew back down to the lawn. I think he was looking for moles, because I know I have lots of mole hills in my yard.

I think I know what type of hawk this guy is, but I'm not sure. Let me know what you think it is.

The Owl and the Cigar

2011-04-17T03:47:00.001-05:00

Click on the Images for Larger View

At the upper left of this image is the spiral galaxy M108 and at the lower right is the planetary nebula, M97, also known as the "Owl Nebula". Both of these object are in the constellation Ursa Major, now seen high in the sky during this Spring season.

Looking like a big, fat cigar, M108 is a spiral galaxy viewed edge on. Unlike most spirals, there is no bright central bulge seen here, apparently because the there is so much dusty matter hiding it from our view. These dusty knots are easily seen in the enlarged image.

The two dark spots make this nebula look like a spooky owl. Classified as a planetary nebula, it is no planet, but a star toward the end of its life. The star in the center of the nebula is literally blowing its outer layers into space creating an ever enlarging bubble.

Even though it may seem like these two objects are relatively close to each other, it is far from it. The Owl Nebula is 3,000 light years from us and well within our Milky Way galaxy, but M 108 is about 45 million light years away, 15 thousand time further away than the Owl. If you look real close at the enlarged image and your monitor is not adjusted too dark, you'll see a very small galaxy to the lower right of the Owl (right next to a star). Just to the left of the Owl are a few even fainter galaxies all at enormous distances from us.

In this graphic of Ursa Major, there is a small rectangle just below the bowl of the Dipper. This is the area taken up by the top picture.

The almost two hour exposure of the image is a combination of 11 ten minute shots taken with my 190mm Mak/Newt f/5.3 telescope.

Eagle Nest with Babies

2011-04-03T13:28:00.001-05:00

Click on Image for a Larger View

These are captured frames from a streaming video of a pair of bald eagles in the process of raising three babies. On this date 4-3-2011, two of the three eggs have hatched. The images below show one of the eagles feeding the oldest baby, born on 4-2-2011 scraps of rabbit meat. The other baby born today, can't quite take food scraps yet. Take a look at this marvelous live video feed from the nest in Decorah, Iowa at this link:
Decorah Eagles

Jupiter and Mercury Conjunction

2011-03-16T03:57:00.001-05:00

Click on image for a larger view

The word "conjunction" may bring back memories of english class, but it's a totally different meaning in astronomy. In this case it means the meeting of two or more celestial objects in the sky. In this case, Jupiter and Mercury were just about 2 degrees apart on the evening of March 15, 2011. Watch them in the western sky for the next few evenings and you'll see Jupiter drop lower in the sky and Mercury rise higher.

This image was taken with my Driod X cell phone.

Even though these planets seem to be very close together, they are actually billions of miles apart. Mercury is a little over 93 million miles away, but Jupiter it about 550 million miles. If you were to view the Sun and these planets from out in space they would look like the graphic below.

Click on the image for a larger view

Winter Scenes with my new Droid X cell phone

2011-03-14T20:14:00.000-05:00

Click on each Image for a Larger Image

We got about 4 or 5 inches of snow overnight, giving me a chance to try out my new camera.

The Winter scenes above were taken with the camera on my new Droid X cell phone. The camera installed on the latest phones are pretty remarkable. Clicking on the images above will give you an image that is 1600 X 902 pixels. This is only about half of what the 8 MPs camera actually gets, which is 3264 X 1840. The quality of the images is amazingly good, considering the lens is only about 1/16" in diameter. This lens does double duty, since it is also used for HD video that can be watched on a big screen HD TV (something I need to try as soon as I get an HD cable that connects the phone and the TV).

This in no way takes the place of my Canon camera and lenses. I have quite a bit more control with my Canon equipment than I do with my Droid X, but for a point and shoot camera, I can be sure to get a high quality image when I don't have my Canon with me. I just have to be aware of its limitations, but for a phone, it can take some really nice pictures at a moments notice.

It's A Wonderful Life - Stephan's Quintet

2011-02-24T16:41:00.002-06:00

Click on the image for a larger view

What galaxy photo do you think has been seen by more people than any other? Your first thought might be that it could be the Andromeda galaxy, but I'm thinking it might be a group of galaxies instead. In one of the most watched movies of all time, the 1946 movie "It's A Wonderful Life", there is a short scene at the beginning of the movie where God an two angles are talking. God and one angel are represented by galaxies and a star represents a third angel. These galaxies, called the Stephan's Quintet and are the subject of my latest astro photo above. I snatched the second image from the movie on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_lR6HEdOb8

My image, taken last Fall, is a three hour exposure using my 7.5" Mak/Newtonian, 1000mm focal length telescope. Stephan's Quintet is the group of 5 galaxies at lower left. At the upper right is the beautiful spiral NGC 7331.

NGC7331 is the largest member of a cluster of galaxies, some of which you see above and below the galaxy. At 49 million light years away, NGC 7331 is similar in size to our own Milky Way galaxy. The other galaxies are further away a varying distances. A unusual thing is going on with this galaxy. Astronomers have determined that the central bulge of stars in NGC7331 are rotating opposite that of the rest of the galaxy. This was probably caused by infalling material, probably from smaller galaxies millions of years ago.

Stephan's Quintet was discovered by Edouard Stephan in 1877, however, only four of the five are actually part of the group. The largest galaxy in the grouping only seems to be close, since it is 7 times closer to us (40 million light years), while the other four galaxies are 290 million light years away. Click on the above image to bring up a larger image and notice that they are not normal spirals, but are distorted and have long arcing arms. This is because the galaxies are violently colliding with each other. Over millions of years, they will merge into one large elliptical galaxy. To see a really nice Hubble Telescope image and more interesting information go to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Stephan%27s_Quintet_Hubble_2009.full.jpg

How To Take Pictures Of Waterfalls

2011-01-27T15:11:00.001-06:00

Click On The Image For A Larger View

Waterfalls are a magical show of sight and sound. Capturing these tumbling cascades of rushing water with your camera is not hard, but taking one that you will treasure requires some forethought and planning. This particular waterfall, called Soco Falls, was taken just east of Cherokee, North Carolina not far from the Blue Ridge Parkway and the Smokey Mountains. It is located on a winding road with a very small parking area near the road. A 5-minute hike down to a wooden platform on the steep hillside gives you a nice view of the falls. Click here for directions to the falls.

I took a few pictures but the lighting was not good. The falls were lit by a high afternoon sun, with dark shadows and bright highlights. I wanted more subdued light so I came back late in the evening, when the sun was no longer shining directly on the scene. Instead of shooting from the wooden platform looking down on the falls I decided to hike down near the creek below the falls. Carrying a camera and a tripod was not easy on the slippery path of rocks and mud (later I found out that a few people have fallen to their death at these falls).

With my camera on a tripod, I set my zoom lens to its widest view, 18mm. To get the silky-water look you need a fairly long exposure, so I set my camera to aperture priority mode. Aperture priority lets you set the f/stop (its aperture) manually while the camera sets the shutter speed automatically. The larger the f/stop number you use, the longer the shutter speed has to be to get the same amount of light into the camera's sensor. The setting for this picture was f/22 with a shutter speed of 8 seconds and an ISO 200. The other thing that you need is a shutter release cable otherwise just you touching the camera's shutter button will blur the image.

Long exposures to capture the moving water is almost impossible in bright sunlight, so wait for more subdued lighting. Cloudy, even rainy days are perfect. Stop down the lens for long exposures to get the silky-water look. And finally, taken lots of pictures from many viewpoints. One is bound to be just the one you are looking for.

How To Take Pictures of Lightning

2011-01-12T00:06:00.001-06:00

Click on image for a larger view

Not a Winter scene for this cold first month of a new year, but a Summer scene I took back in 2007. This was taken from the Astronomical Society of Kansas City's dark sky site south of K.C. Instead of viewing stars on this particular night, we were viewing one of natures marvelous light shows instead. The lightning was far away from us. The smoke you see near the horizon is coming from a power plant about 12 miles away, so the lightning is striking some distance beyond that.

Taking pictures of lightning is fairly easy. First and foremost, take them from a good distance away and not in the middle of the storm itself. Needless to say, lightning strikes are extremely dangerous. Instructions for Digital Single Lens Reflex cameras are shown here, but non-slrs can also be used, you'll just have to read your camera instruction book to learn how to set it in manual mode. And of course learning how to use your camera's various modes is always a good thing.

You'll need to have a camera that allows you to set it manually. Most of the time auto exposures and auto focus do not work in this type of situation, so you'll need to set your camera to manual mode. Once in manual mode set it to "Bulb". This setting allows you to hold the shutter open and take long exposures.
You will also need a shutter release cable to allow you to open the camera's shutter without physically touching the camera. Touching the camera during a long exposure will of course jiggle it ruining the image.
A tripod is a must, since hand holding the camera during a long exposure will also ruin the picture.
Getting a good focus is a little bit tricky, but easy if you know how. You first need to auto focus the camera on a distant object. This could be a distant street light or something bright enough so that the camera can focus. The camera will not focus on darkness or very dim light, so if you leave auto focus on while trying to image the lightning, the auto focus will not have time enough to lock on a brief lightning flash, so it's best to focus on something bright, then turn auto focus off. The camera will now be in focus so long as you dont touch the camera's focus ring or zoom.
Set the ISO speed to about 400 or so.
Once the camera is set, put it to where the lightning is flashing the most, open the shutter with the cable release and wait for it to flash. Once you see a flash or two, close the shutter. Take a look at the camera's LCD screen to see how it turned out, then quickly open the shutter again.

You can get more than one lightning strike on the same image, like I did in the above image, but be aware that sometimes too many will wash out the image. It's all trial and error, so just keep shooting. It's just like fishing. Once in a while you'll get a big one.

Lunar Eclipse on the Winter Solstice

2010-12-21T05:51:00.000-06:00

Click on image for larger view

I hope you took a peek at a rare event going on over our heads on December 21. A Lunar Eclipse is not rare, but the fact that it happened on the Winter Solstice is. The last time there was a Lunar Eclipse on the first day of Winter was 372 years ago, and it won't happen again until 2094. The picture above was taken a few minutes after the Moon started moving into the Earth's shadow.

Click on image for a larger view

It was cloudy all day but soon after the event started the clouds started to dissipate and cleared enough to get the above picture. Note the red color caused by sunlight first passing through the Earth's stratosphere then reflecting off the Moon. At the upper right there is a turquoise fringe. This is sunlight first passing through the Earth's ozone layer.

Click on image for a larger view
As it started to emerge from the Earth's shadow the clouds started coming back giving a "diamond ring" glow to this wonder of nature.

All pictures were taken with my 300mm f/4 and Canon XTi on a tripod.

Bubble Nebula and M 52

2010-12-15T02:20:00.000-06:00

Click on image for a larger view

The Bubble Nebula, lower left, and the Star Cluster M 52, at upper right, create a beautiful contrasting duet of deep sky objects in the constellation Cassiopeia.

M 52 can be seen as a fuzzy patch in a pair of binoculars, but it takes a telescope to resolve about 200 stars in Cassiopeia's rich starry field.

Click on image for a larger view

The Bubble Nebula (NGC 7635) looks like a tiny soap bubble, but this bubble is six light years in diameter. It definitely takes a telescope to detect it. The bright star, upper right of the bubble's center, is 40 times the mass of our sun. High energetic winds from this star blow the surrounding gas into a glowing shell. In time, the star will explode into a supernova, pierce the bubble and scatter it and its surrounding further out into space. Something we may be able to see even without a telescope.

M33 - Spiral Galaxy in Triangulum

2010-12-05T23:54:00.001-06:00

Click on the image for a larger view

My previous post was of a spiral galaxy (NGC 891) seen edge on. Here is a spiral galaxy seen face on. This galaxy is much closer to us, therefore almost filling the field of view of my 1000mm telescope. Formally known as Messier 33 (M33), it is also call the Pinwheel galaxy due to its fantastic spiral shape. If you know exactly where to look in the sky, you are away from the light pollution of a city and have good eyesight, you can just see it as a fuzzy patch of light without optical aid. At 3 million light years away, it is one of the furthest objects you can see without a telescope.

Make sure to click on the image so that you can take a look at all the intricate detail scattered across the galaxy. Because this is a very active star forming galaxy, you can see small pink areas that are hydrogen emission nebulae (star factories), large star clusters and many lanes of dust circling this incredible scene.

NGC 891 - Edge On Galaxy

2010-11-26T01:42:00.001-06:00

Click on the image for a larger view

This galaxy, NGC 891 in Andromeda, is one of the most beautiful examples of a spiral galaxy seen exactly edgewise. The above image shows the entire field of view photographed through my 1000mm focal length telescope. The image is a combination of five exposures, fifteen minutes each.

Click on the image for larger view

In this close up, you can see the complex system of dark clouds extending across the entire galaxy. These are clouds of gas and dust spraying out like filaments away from the galactic plane. The galaxy is a member of the Local Supercluster of galaxies and is about 30 million light years away. This is not an easy object to view through a small telescope, only seen as a smear of light, but in a large scope it is a grand sight.

The field is strewn with lots of smaller and more distant galaxies. I have taken three sections from the full image and enlarged them 100%. Click on each image for a larger view.

Horsehead Region

2010-10-30T00:51:00.002-05:00

Click on image for a larger view

Every time I look at the famous Horsehead Nebula it brings to mind a giant, cosmic chess game. Only this chess piece is 1600 light years away. Probably the most famous "Dark Nebula" in the heavens, it was first recorded on a photographic plate in 1888. Dark areas such as this were thought to be holes, or clearings, in space where we could see deeper, or just areas devoid of stars. Edward E. Barnard photographed and cataloged 370 of these objects, then showed that they were actually clouds of gas and dust that blocked the more distant stars in the background. The Horsehead is designated as "B33" in his catalog.

We see it as a towering, dense cloud in front of the red emission nebula (IC434) glowing behind it. This strip of glowing hydrogen marks the edge of a huge dust cloud which extends below the Horsehead.

Below and slightly left of the Horsehead is a "reflection nebula" known as NGC2023. At the bottom edge of the image is another one called IC435.

The brightest star on the left of the image is Alnitak, the eastern most star in Orion's belt. At 850 light years, it is half the distance to the Horsehead.

Directly below Alnitak, also about 800 light years away, is the huge emission nebula known as the Flame Nebula. It is only one million years old, which, in cosmic terms is rather young. More than half of the stars in the nebula have accretion disks. Such disks of matter may be sites of planet formation and could eventually form into solar systems like ours.

Click on image for a larger view

The closeup image above clearly shows how the Horsehead stands in front of the glowing background. Embryonic stars are forming inside the brighter areas of the horses neck. Many, many generations into the future, the whole area will have collapsed into many clusters of stars. Which shows that even large pieces can be captured in this cosmic chess game of the sky.

Helix Nebula

2010-10-24T02:32:00.000-05:00

Click on Image for a larger view

Keeping with the theme of stars and the incredible things that they do, here is a photo I took earlier this month of a deep sky nebula known as the "Helix". The star at the center of the Helix is the creator of this beautiful spiral shape. During the red giant phase of this dying star, it expelled it's outer layers into space. Hot stellar winds energize the layers of star stuff and makes them glow. Also known as a planetary nebula, early astronomers thought they were giant planets when viewed through their small telescopes. But even though we now know what they are, they are still called planetary nebulae.

The ejected material from planetaries and supernovae is of interest for one very important reason. Our own star, the Sun, it's planets and life on Earth, were once this star stuff meandering through space, which over millions of years, coalesced into our solar system, and us.

Click on Image for a larger view

The image above was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. Along the inner edge of the Helix is detail not seen in my photo. Finger like cometary knots composed of shells of gas ejected by the central star are being stripped away by the star's hot ultraviolet radiation.

The difference in the resolution of the two images are caused by a couple of things. My telescope's mirror is only 7.5" in diameter. The Hubble Space Telescope's mirror is 7', 10" in diameter. My scope is like a 1000mm telephoto lens. The HST is like a 57,600mm lens, magnifying an image 57.6 times more than my scope.. But one more important thing is that I am shooting through a "puddle" of moving air making my image slightly fuzzy. The HST is 347 miles in space, high above all that image destroying air. So it can take incredible images such as this.

Technical Data:

Same as previous image, except I took Nine, 15 minute shots, totaling 2 hours and 15 minutes.

Crab Nebula -Supernova Remnant

2010-10-18T00:57:00.001-05:00

Click on image for a larger view

My previous post was about a star that is shedding pieces of itself out into space. The above picture is of another star, but in this case the star literally blew itself apart. What you see is the remnants of a supernova. Very large stars do this at the time when they start to run out of fuel when gravity takes over imploding the leftover material, then exploding soon after.

Astronomers have determined that the star exploded in 1054 A.D. and was recorded by Chinese and Arab astronomers. The star they saw was so bright, it was visible in the daytime sky. Almost 700 years later, John Bevis was the first person to observe the expanding remnants through a telescope. It was rediscovered in 1758 by Charles Messier, a comet hunter, where he placed it as the number 1 non-comet object in his catalog. The Earle of Rosse observed it in 1840, made a drawing of it in the shape of a crab, therefore also known as the Crab Nebula.

Part of the star that exploded is still at the center of the nebula. It is now a pulsar, which is a spinning neutron star, only 12 miles across. It spins at 30.2 times a second and emits pulses of radiation. Photographs taken over the years showed that it is expanding over 900 miles per second. It is now 11 light years across and is located about 6500 light years from us.

Technical Data is the same as the previous post.

Windy Star Erodes IC 59 and IC 63

2010-10-15T02:14:00.000-05:00

Click on Image for a larger view

You wouldn't think it would be windy in the vacuum of outer space, but it is, just a different kind of wind. Here on earth wind is caused by air flowing from a high pressure area to a low pressure area and we feel the air molecules moving by us. In space, wind is caused by stars.

In the above picture, Gamma Cassiopeia, the bright star in the center is an eruptive variable star that sheds massive outflows of itself into space. These stellar winds interact with clouds of gas and dust, such as the two (IC 59 and IC 63) you see to the right of Gamma. The stellar winds are eroding this clouds and in time the clouds will disappear.

Technical Data:
Composite of eight 15-minute exposures
Camera: CCD-Labs Q453
Telescope: Orion 190mm f/5.3 Maksutov/Newtonian
Mount: Parallax Instruments 150C
Date: 10-03-2010
Location: ASKC Dark Sky Site near Butler, Missouri, USA
Captured with "Nebulosity" software; processed in "DeepSkyStacker", and finished in Photoshop CS3.

Comet Hartley Movie

2010-10-14T01:32:00.000-05:00

Click on Image for a larger view

A fairly bright comet, 103P/Hartley 2, is now heading toward the Sun and passing by the earth. I photographed this comet last week, Oct 9/10 through my 1000mm telescope. The above image is a combination of 50 exposures with each shot lasting 4 minutes. I started the exposure run at 11:12 p.m. and ended the 50th shot at 2:39 a.m. The comet was moving fairly fast and went past the bright star at the top of the image at the time of the last shot. With special software (DeepSkyStacker) I was able to combine all 50 images on top of the first image. Without DeepSkyStacker a normal stack of the images would have created a long streak across the frame.

I have also created a short 50 second movie showing the comet as it trucked on by. Click here to download the file Comet-Hartley.exe to watch the self running movie.

Comet Hartley Movie

Yellowstone Grizzlies

2010-10-01T00:55:00.002-05:00

Click on images for a larger view

Two Summers ago, Gloria and I spent two weeks in Yellowstone National Park. Early the first morning, we were visiting the first of many geysers and hot springs scattered throughout the park. Click on picture above and look closely at the boardwalk. Gloria just walked by fresh bear tracks.

Here is a close up of the bear tracks probably made sometime before we arrived. We were the only ones in the area. Needless to say, I felt the hair on the back of my neck rise a bit and thankful to see other people arrive.

Yellowstone is bear country, mostly grizzly bears. We saw them practically every day we were there. The grizzly above was mainly interested in rooting for muchies in the ground and paid no attention to me, although I'm sure she was aware I and many sightseers were there.

This is a mother bear walking up a hill with her cub not too far behind. This is the one and only time she actually paid attention to me. She stopped for a bit and just stared, then kept going on her way.

This is the grizzly cub, almost half the size of the mother, but probably as large as an adult human.

One day the pair was rooting around in Hayden Valley. Here the mother crossed a small watery depression.

But the cub wasn't too sure he wanted to cross so he just sat for a while.

He finally decided to test it out since his mother didn't seem to be coming back.

Gotta hurry and catch up!

Here you can see the difference in size between the two.

At one point the mother sat down creating an invitation for some mother's milk.

The time I spent at Yellowstone is one of the fondest memories of my life. Watching these bears up close made it even more special. It was amazing to see many families drive into Yellowstone one day and leave the next. They missed the whole experience of America's first national park. I spent two weeks and still didn't see everything.

Sleeping Bears

2010-09-26T19:18:00.000-05:00

Click on Images for a Larger View

Earlier this year, Gloria and I traveled through the Great Smokey Mountains. Their are many scenic stops along U.S. 441, the main road across the mountains. At one of these stops I saw about four people looking into the forest. Kidding, I asked if they were looking at a bear? They nodded yes and pointed to a mother and baby sound asleep high up in a large tree. I quickly grabbed my camera with my 70-200mm lens. The baby bear you see above seems to be looking at the camera, but it is sound asleep in the crook of the tree.

After a few minutes, the mother bear woke up and looked right at me. She didn't seem too concerned. We weren't too concerned either, because even though we were fairly close to the bears, we were standing at the edge of a steep hill. At the bottom of the hill, was the the large tree and the bears where pretty high up, almost at eye level.

The mother actually went back to sleep, but soon after that the baby woke up and saw us. It must have made it nervous because it started to quickly climb down the tree.

The mother bear quickly woke up and followed the baby down the tree and dissappered into the brush. Not knowing where they went, I quickly put my equipment away. Sometimes serendipity and pure luck work together in amazing close encounters.

The Other Side of the Veil Nebula

2010-08-27T00:16:00.001-05:00

Click on the image for a large view

As you read in my last post, the "Witches Broom" is one part of a very large supernova remnant. To the east of the Witches Broom, 3 degrees away, is the other half of this beautiful complex of gas expelled from an exploded star. The remaining pieces of the star formed a shell of material similar to a bubble. Just like a bubble, we can see right through the middle. The shock wave that created the shell is expanding the filamentary matter out, away from where the star was located. Only along the edges of the shell, where we see it edge on, can we see the fine branches of seemingly intertwining nebulosity. The colors come from the presence of oxygen, sulfer and hydrogen made to glow from the energy of starlight.

There is another part of this wonderful nebula in between these two images called Pickering's (Fleming's) Wisp. It is much fainter, but I am hoping to photograph it during the next new moon phase in a week or so.

The beautiful, delicate lacework is a wonderful sight in large telescopes. Since the nebula is so large, one has to move the telescope along the wispy tendrils of gas to catch it all in the eyepiece.

The Witches Broom

2010-08-15T17:24:00.001-05:00

Click on image for a larger view

Just got back from one hell of a hot camping trip. I spent eight days in 100 degree weather with a few amateur astronomer friends at the Astronomical Society of Kansas City's Dark Sky Site (near Butler, MO). Thankfully, night time temperatures were in the 70's and night time is why I was there. Six out of those eight nights were clear and therefore I got a chance to image several deep sky objects with my telescope. The image above is one of those objects.

The Veil Nebula image is only part of a much larger complex of nebulosity also known as the Cygnus Loop. This part is on the west side of the "loop", so it is also called the "Western Veil". A much more descriptive name is the "Witches Broom". It's true identity, however, is the leftover remnants of a supernova explosion. some 5000 to 8000 years ago. The remnants have since expanded to a circular area some 3 degrees in diameter. An area this big would fit 6 full moons across. Even though it covers an area so big in the sky, it is rather faint and requires optical aid to see it. The bigger the telescope, the brighter it gets. Even getting images of this object is not easy. I haven't been happy with previous images, but this time using my 7.5" Mak-Newt telescope, I took 10 images, each image 15 minutes long, for a total of 2.5 hours combined, calibrated those images with "Bias, Flat and Dark" images, then spent a few hours bringing out the details with Photoshop. Not a simple "click", but hours of work for one image.

Technical Details:

* Telescope: 190mm (7.5") Orion Maksutov-Newtonian

* Focal Length: 1007mm

* Focal Ratio: f/5.3

* Mount: Celestron CGE

* Exposures:

> 10 Lights, 15 minutes long

> 20 Biases

> 20 Flats

> 1 Dark

* Calibration: Removed bad pixels on Lights using the single Dark with "Nebulosity" software

* Processing: Aligned and Stacked using "DeepskyStacker" software

* Finished: Photoshop CS3

Baby Stars

2010-07-31T16:49:00.000-05:00

Click on Image for a larger view

On the right side of the above picture is the famous "Double Cluster", one of the all-time favorites for amateur astronomers. If you know where to look in the constellation Perseus, its a hazy patch of light to your unaided eyes, and in a pair of binoculars each cluster is resolved into a tight knot of stars against a starry backdrop. For small telescopes, it is one of the finest clusters in the heavens, with many stars of contrasting colors. Its existence was noted by Hipparchus and Ptolemy around 150 BC, but to them it was a nebula and its true nature had to wait until the invention of the telescope.

At the upper left of the image is another cluster of stars called Stock 2, but these are much more open, spread out and not as bright. Through a pair of binoculars, Stock 2 looks like a headless stick man. With your imagination running wild, you can even imagine one of his up raised arms holding a leash of curving stars that go down to the double "puffs" of a poodle. Binoculars do not show as many stars as this photograph so seeing the stick man and the poodle will require you to go out and look for yourself. To see it look about 15 degrees above the Northeast horizon soon after it gets dark. By Midnight, it is about 25 degrees high.

Click on Image for a larger view

The Double Star Cluster look like they are neighbors, but the distance to this great swarm of stars is not identical. The lower cluster, also known as NGC 884, is further away at 7600 light years. The upper cluster, NGC 889, is 6800 light years. 884 is also the older of the two. However, when we consider the age of stars, these clusters are one of the youngest in our Milky Way galaxy, 3.2 million years old for 889 and 5.6 million years old for 889. Millions of years may seem like a long time for us humans, but in astronomical terms, its very young. Our own Sun is about 2.5 billion years old. At the other extreme, are globular clusters, which are more than 10 billion years old.

Another interesting fact about these "baby stars". If you were on a planet orbiting one of these stars and you looked toward our Sun, you would be hard pressed to see it. This is because the brightest stars in these clusters are all great blazing supergiants of amazing brilliance compared to the Sun. The brightest stars are 60,000 times brighter then the Sun. Not only that, they are unimaginably large. Placing of these supergiant stars in place of the Sun, it's diameter would go out beyound Earth's orbit. Of interest is the presence of M-type red supergiant stars. Some of these are located in the image below.

Click on the Image for a larger view

One more interesting fact. The Perseid meteor shower, which this year peaks during the evening of Aug 12 and morning hours of Aug 13, is near the radiant point of this shower.
n other words, these "shooting stars" appear to come from this part of the night sky.

Storm Panorama

2010-07-11T16:05:00.002-05:00

Click on Image to see a larger view and scroll to see the whole image

Traveling west across Kansas to Colorado we came across a huge thunderstorm. It looked like three storms racing across the wide open spaces. We drove on I-70 right between two sheets of rain and extreme winds. The sun low behind the storm adds background light adding nice color to the scene. The panorama is made from six individual images.

Whirlpool Galaxy

2010-05-24T16:38:00.000-05:00

Click on Image for a larger view

One of most popular galaxies for amateur astronomers is the Whirlpool Galaxy, a grand spiral in the consetllation Canes Venatici. Even though it is 23 million light years away, it can be seen as a fuzzy spot of light in a pair of binoculars, although you will need dark skies away from the city lights and know exactly where to look. In a telescope, the spiral structure starts to be seen along with a smaller galaxy seemingly attached to one of the spiral arms of the larger galaxy.

Click on Image for a larger view

But only through long exposure photographs can we see detail that is too faint for our eyes. The top image is a view of the whole area covered by my 1000mm focal length telescope. Back in March, 2009, I took an image of this galaxy with my 300mm telephoto lens. Compare this view with the much wider view of that lens by clicking on this link: http://tomjmartinez.blogspot.com/2009/03/galaxies-near-far-and-really-far.html

The bottom image is a close-up view showing the interaction taking place between the two galaxies. Radio astronomers have been able to show that the smaller galaxy has merged with the larger one at least twice before. The faint extensions seen around the galaxies are caused by material from both galaxies being flung out by the gravitational forces during the interactions.

The image is a combination of five 10-minute exposures with my 190mm f/5.3 telescope.

Great Balls of Fire

2010-05-20T14:59:00.002-05:00

Click on Image for a larger view

Not the Jerry Lee Lewis rock 'n' roll rendition, but it really is a great ball of stars. Some 500,000 stars, this is a Globular Cluster named M3. This is because it is the 3rd object in a catalog of 110 objects created by Charles Messier in the late 18th century. Like bees around a hive, these stars orbit around each other. 50% of the mass is within the central 22 light years, but there are stars rotating the main mass out to about 750 light years. As we look at this cluster from a distance of some 34,000 light years, it seems that stars are touching each other, but they are not. They are still very far apart, but if the Earth were inside M3, our sky would be very bright with no night sky.

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Imaging Telescope: Orion Mak-Newt, 190mm, f/5.3, 1000mm focal length mounted on a Celestron CGE mount.

Guide Camera and Guidescope: CCD-Labs Q-Guider on a 50mm finderscope.

Acquisition Camera: CCD-Labs Q-453.

Exposures: Ten frames, 1 minute each.

Calibration Software: DeepSkyStacker was used to stacked 20 Bias frames and 20 flat frames, then the 10 light frames were calibrated.

Final Process: Photoshop CS3

Venus and Moon

2010-05-17T00:34:00.000-05:00

Click on Image for a larger view

The crescent Moon and Venus put on a fine show from my daughter's front yard in Castle Rock, Colorado this evening (05-16-2010).

Two second exposure on my tripod mounted Canon digital XTi at ISO 800 with my 18-55mm lens set at 31mm and f/5.6.

Galaxies In The Spring Sky

2010-05-10T14:00:00.000-05:00

Click on Images for a larger view

Here is the first Deep Sky image taken with the new telescope mentioned in an earlier post. Taken from my front yard in Cleveland, MO, this is a Triplet of Galaxies in the constellation Leo. Individually they are M65 (top right), M66 (bottom right) and NGC 3628 (left). All grand spiral disks made up of stars, gas and dust, but look dissimilar because they are tilted at different angles from our view. Below are close up views of each galaxy. Notice that the outer parts of the disks in M66 and NGC 3628 are distorted. This is due to the gravitational interaction of each galaxy on each other.

Spring Is In The Air

2010-04-29T02:59:00.007-05:00

Click on any image for a larger view

You know Spring is definitely here when you see birds mating. This House Sparrows do what comes natural when it starts to warm up. Did you know that the House Sparrow was introduced to New York in 1850 and by 1910 had spread to California. They are so prevalent that they have become pests, taking over a native bird's nest. They have been known to aggressively destroy Bluebird eggs.
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Another pest of sorts, is the Dandelion, here seen as a yellow flower and what the flower turns into, a sphere of parachute seeds that fly with the wind to grow somewhere else.

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Every Spring I look forward to seeing certain plants bloom. This one, called the Bleeding Heart, did especially well this year. Named after the pink, heart-shaped flower, from which a little "drop of blood" dangles at the bottom. They only bloom for a short time, so I enjoy them every day that I can.

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While walking the trails at the Overland Park Arboretum and Botanical Gardens, we came across this deer. He seemed just as surprised as we were.

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Today, the wind was perfect for "whirlybirds". These are the seeds of the Maple, which twirl like little helicopters down to the ground.

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This is a daisy Gloria picked up. It has a long latin name: Osteospermum, but it's also called an African Daisy.

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One of my favorite trees is the Dogwood. It bursts with flowers every Spring. I love the creamy white petals yellow cluster of what is probably seeds. It sure would be nice if it bloomed all year, but then we wouldn't look forward to the next Spring season would we.

Crescent Moon

2010-04-20T04:10:00.002-05:00

Click on Image for a larger view

Spring is here and I've been too busy enjoying the outdoors to put up new photos, even though I've been taking a few. However, I had to put up this picture of the Crescent Moon because it's the first image taken through a new telescope. The scope is a Maksutov-Newtonian made by Orion. It's 1000mm in focal length, with 7.5 -inch (190mm) diameter mirror making it a 5.5 f/ratio. Look for more images taken with scope in the near future.

First Day of Spring Snow Storm

2010-03-21T02:37:00.001-05:00

Click on each Image for a larger view

Winter is back! Yea! I love it! Unfortunately not many others agree. Gloria and I drove around the countryside and found these Winter landscapes. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did taking them.

Mocking Bird

2010-03-19T11:53:00.000-05:00

Click on the images for a larger view

A couple of Mocking Birds have been visiting our suet feeders all Winter. It finally got warm enough to set up my 300mm lens and camera on a tripod and wait. They will spook at the slightest movement. They love oranges, and I have some set out for them, but this time they wanted suet. For short slide show of one eating oranges click here:
http://tomjmartinez.com/Mockingbird_and_Baltimore_Oriole/

My Mini Model

2010-03-07T02:29:00.000-06:00

Click on images for a larger view

Going over some older images from three years ago I came across these of my grand daughter, Julia. While walking around a park on this beautiful day in Florida, she started modeling for the camera. I believe one day this young lady will become an actress, even if only in a school play, for she loves to put on skits for family gatherings, writing and performing her own plays.

Winter's Jewelry

2010-03-01T03:43:00.002-06:00

http://tomjmartinez.com/winter_jewlry/index.html

About a week ago, we had some freezing rain in the area. Luckily the sun poked out of the clouds for a bit so I went out looking for Winter's jewelry in my backyard. Click on the link above for a short slide show.

Winter Barn

2010-02-06T02:59:00.000-06:00

Click on image for a larger view

I woke up this morning to about four inches of snow, so Gloria and I got in the Yukon, kicked it into 4-wheel drive and went looking for pictures. This old barn down a country road was a perfect setting for a nice Winter landscape.

Was the Lunar Halo Legend Correct?

2010-01-31T03:03:00.002-06:00

Click on Image for a large view

Two days after the Lunar Halo in the previous post, we had about one inch of snow. According to the legend, count the stars inside the halo and a storm comes that many days after. I counted 3 stars. Well, I'll give it one day, but what about the people who saw the halo and didn't get any snow at all. Anyone living north of I-70 in the Kansas City area didn't get any snow and I know for a fact lots of people up there saw the halo. What happens when you see a halo like the one you see above. It was taken February 23, 2007. I count roughly 27 or so stars inside the halo. I checked the weather for 27 days after that date and found these days with precipitation:

Feb 24 .57"

Feb 25 .03"

Feb 28 1.73"

Feb 29 .09"

Mar 09 .16"

Mar 11 .01"

Mar 12 .01"

Mar 20 .31"

Mar 21 .01"

There was moisture on nine days and the most precipitation occurred one, two, three and twenty six days after the halo.

I don't think the number of stars method works, but I also don't think a storm is a sure thing soon after a halo either.

Ring Around The Moon

2010-01-27T03:09:00.000-06:00

Click on Image for a large view

Keeping with the theme of halos in the sky, this time a beautiful halo appeared around the Moon tonight. Just like the halos around the Sun, it is caused by ice crystals in the high altitude cirrus clouds. These type of clouds normally precede a warm front by one or two days. Warm fronts means storms. A common belief is that the number of stars within a Moon halo indicate the number of days before bad weather. I see two or three stars in the image. I don't think the "number of stars legend" is true, but warm fronts and cold fronts usually do precede storms. Right now here in the Kansas City area we have a warm front to the west of us creating the cirrus clouds, but according to the weather forecasts, storms will slip right by us to the south. I guess in a few days we'll see who is right, the weather forecasters or the urban legend.

More Atmospheric Phenomenon

2010-01-09T22:01:00.001-06:00

Click on image for a larger view

Good friend Scott Kranz sent me this wonderful picture of a very nice Halo, Sundog and Tangent Arc. The halo is usually a complete circle around the Sun. The sundog is connected to the halo on the right side (just above the roof) and the tangent arc is at the top of the halo. The tangent arc is "gull wing" shaped and everything is created by the play of sunlight on ice crystals. Along with the atmospheric phenomenon, Scott captured some really nice high cirrus clouds shaped into arcs by the wind. He took the picture a couple of weeks ago while vacationing with his family at Disney World in Florida. To see a computer simulation of the various halos and arcs go here: http://www.atoptics.co.uk/halosim.htm then browse the fantastic images throughout this website.

Diamond Dust Sundogs

2010-01-08T01:42:00.000-06:00

Click on image for a larger view

Coming home from grocery shopping last evening I spotted sundogs on each side of the setting sun. Also called "mock suns" the scientific name is parahelia. Sundogs appear as colored patches of light 22 degrees on each side of the sun and are formed by ice crystals in very cold high cirrus clouds or from "diamond dust" crystals drifting in the air at low levels. This was probably diamond dust because the wind was blowing the fine particles of snow into the air. The temperature was about 7 degrees Farenheit.

Also notice the dark beam shooting out of the left side of sun. This is another atomospheric phenomenon called a crepuscualr ray, which is just a shadow of the cloud near the sun's position.

Click on image for a larger view

About a month ago, my nephew, Ambrose Solis, captured this bright sundog with his camera phone in Colorado. This one was definitely caused by ice crystals in the high cirrus clouds.

Sometimes sundogs are accompanied by various arcs and halos, also caused by ice crystals. Be on the look out for sky phenomon such as these. They even occur in the Summer time and can easily be photographed with the simplest camera.

Winter Landscapes

2010-01-01T10:31:00.000-06:00

Click on images for a larger view

Happy New Year everyone! I never would have thought 2010 would have come this quick, but here it is. I got up early this morning, unusual for me, and thought I'd put up a few of my Winter images. Even though there is plenty of snow outside, these are from the past because I have been really lazy and haven't picked up my camera for quite a while. I'll have to change that.

The top image is from my backyard deck where we enjoy the company of many birds. This was taken with my first digital camera, a Nikon Coolpix, back in 2004. I still have this wonderful camera. It brought me into the world of instant picture gratification.

The second picture is also with the Coolpix and in my backyard back in 2004. The limbs flow across the picture like it wants to fly to a warmer climate.

With my then new Canon 300, the Kansas City area had a huge ice storm. This wonderful winter wonderland was in Loose Park, a place I love to visit with my camera. I had the honor of it being published in the Kansas City Star newspaper.

Merry Christmas

2009-12-22T17:23:00.003-06:00

My good friend of many years, Bob Miranda from Colorado, sent me this picture of his Christmas tree. According to Bob, he did not expect this effect. I saw it and even though it is unusual, I thought it depicted a rather happy and colorful scene. So consider this my electronic Christmas card. I wish you all only the very best.

Red Giant become a video star

2009-11-09T02:29:00.004-06:00

Below is a video showing the planets and a few stars to scale. One of the last stars in the video is Herschel's Garnet Star mentioned in the post below. The star is also known as Mu Cephei. Mu Cephei is so huge that if the Sun were to exchange places with it, the Earth would be inside the star. This red supergiant would also swallow up Mars and Jupiter and almost reach out to the orbit of Saturn.

Red Giant meets Red Nebula

2009-11-09T01:05:00.004-06:00

Click on each image for a large view

IC1396 is cataloged as a star cluster embedded in a nebula. Right in the middle of the nebula, the star cluster is easy to see in binoculars, but in this long exposure photograph it is overpowered by the nebula. This is a very large nebula, about 2.5 degrees across (5 full moons would span across it), but it is very far way (2,450 light-years) and very hard to see visually.
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The bright star at the top is one of the largest known red supergiants in the Milky Way. William Herschel described it as "a very fine deep garnet color" and is therefore commonly know as "Herschel's Garnet Star". So why is it yellow and not red in the picture? The main reason is that in long exposure images bright stars tend to get overexposed and loose their color. In this case yellow was the result. Astronomers who view this star through large telescoes see it more orange that red.

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The bottom image was a very nice surprise! I wanted to create an image with legends pointing to the various known objects in the nebula, so I turned into in a black-and-white image. When I did this I tried using a red filter. The result was a much brighter nebula that constrasted nicely with all the dark dusty regions (5 of them are Barnard Dark Nebulae). On the right side is a dark globule known as the "Elephant's Trunk" and vdB142.

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Technical Photo Info

Camera: Q453 CCD

Lens: 300mm f/4 L IS

Apeture Setting: f/4

Exposures: 9 X 10 minutes (90 minutes)

Darks: 2 darks to create dark pixel map

Flats: 0

Biases: 20

Mount: Celestron CGE

Guide Camera: CCD-Labe Q-Guider

Guidescope: 400mm Tasco refractor

Calibrated, Aligned and Stacked in Nebulosity

Final processing in Photoshop

Not So Clear Sky Imaging

2009-11-03T21:02:00.003-06:00

Click on image for a larger view

What to do, what to do? My imaging equipment is all set up for the night, but here comes the clouds. High cirrus are sailing across what was a clear and cloudless sky while I was setting up. I really want to try out my new lens on the sky, so I decide to try a few shots anyway. I take six shots, ten minutes each. By the time the last exposure is done, the sky is pretty well covered with clouds. As they come into my laptop I see that each image has halos around each star, with the last image having the largest halos. As I shut down the computer, I'm thinking that will be the last see of those pictures.

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That was two months ago. Today I saw an image by Rogelio Bernal Andreo on the Astronomy Picture of the Day website that had practically the same framing and image scale of what I took that night. My my, what a picture it is. Here is the link to his picture: http://tinyurl.com/yj3txu2 After seeing this I decided to process my images to see what I had (a single image doesn't show much, only when they are aligned, combined and processed does the detail come out). My picture doesn't go as deep as Mr. Adnreo, for a lot of reasons, but I am happy the way it came out. The glow around the stars give the picture a mystical quality, and the Califonia Nebula and the Plieades Star Cluster still show through. The dusty dark nebulae throughout this part of the sky is also evident. The dark nebulae are labeled in the second image above, but as you can see, they are actually spread all over the area.

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Technical Photo Info

Camera: Q454 CCD

Lens: Canon 70-200mm f/2.8 L IS

Focal Length Setting: 70mm

Apeture Setting: f/4

Exposures: 6 X 10 minutes

Darks: 2 darks to create a dark pixel map

Flats: 0

Biases: 0

Mount: Celestron CGE

Guide Camera: CCD-Labs Q-Guider

Guidscope: 400mm Tasco refractor

Calibrated, Aligned and Stacked in Nebulosity

Final processing in Photoshop

Saturn, Venus, Mercury & Moon Conjunction

2009-10-23T19:24:00.004-05:00

Click on picture for larger view

Planet conjunctions are some of the prettiest scenes in the morning sky. When a thin crescent Moon is in there, it is even more beautiful. About 6:30 a.m., Friday morning October 16, I looked out of my RV window and saw the above scene. I jumped out of bed, grabbed my camera, slapped it on my tripod, put a jacket over my pajamas and stepped outside and started shooting various exposures before twilight washed it out. These type of events last for only a few minutes, where the color and lighting is just right. Before that magic moment, the sky is too dark and afterwards the sky is too bright. This conjunction has Saturn at the top, Venus below it and Mercury near the horizon, and of course the Moon.

Click on the image for a larger view

Not all conjunctions appear in the morning sky. The next conjunction with the Moon in the scene is on December 20, 2009 evening sky, about 6:45 p.m. In this scene, the planets are Jupiter and Mercury. On this date, Venus and Saturn are still only visible in the morning sky, with Venus being only 5 degrees from the Sun and probably too close to see. How do I know this information? Well, I use a planetarium program called Starry Night Pro. It's very easy to find conjunctions like these. I lock the view on the Moon, then go forward day by day and watch for the Moon to be near planets, bright stars, etc. I then mark my calendar and wait for that date and hope for a clear sky.

Mellow Yellow - Aspen Fall Colors in the Rocky Mountains

2009-10-07T00:50:00.006-05:00

Click on picture to see a larger image

Mountain Valley Panoramic in Rocky Mountain National Park

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For a slide show of the Aspens in the Rockies click here:

http://tomjmartinez.com/mellowyellow/index.html

Once in the show, click the f11 key for a better view

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I spent a few days visiting my daughter and family in Colorado. Her family moved to Castle Rock, CO from Florida. Quite a change in climate and altitude. She had a housewarming party for all the relatives in Colorado and got a chance to visit with a few I had not seen in many years.

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The Aspens were changing color at higher elevations, so my wife Gloria, daughter Pam, four year old grandson, Tyler and I spend a wonderful day driving around looking for scenes of golden light to photograph. In the morning, we drove through Denver up to Loveland, the west up the Thompson Canyon to Estes Park. We had no time to stop and enjoy the towering canyon, nor buys Estes Park, except for a bit of lunch. Using Pam's State Park pass (saving me $20), we drove into the Rocky Mountain National Park. The Ranger at the entrance told us that the road to Bear Lake, where most of the Aspens are located, was congested with traffic, so instead we drove up Trail Ridge road. We found a few Aspens here, but not what I was looking for, so we backtracked to Estes Park, then drove south down highway 7, 72 and 119. Along this route we stopped at many places for some colorful views of the golden trees along the mountain sides, streams and valleys. Click on the above link to see a slide show.

The North American Nebula and Pelican Nebula

2009-09-22T15:55:00.002-05:00

Click on picture for large view

Now directly overhead in my part of the world (Kansas City area), the North American Nebula and the Pelican Nebula are very rich areas of gas and dust in the Milky Way. The very dark area, right in the middle of the picture, is actually thick dust and gas in front of the nebulae, but it easily marks the similarity to Florida and the Gulf of Mexico. The nebula that looks like a pelican holding a fish in its beak is to the right of the North American Nebula. The bright star at upper right is Deneb, the brightest star in the constellation Cygnus, the swan. This is a very large area of sky. Four full moons would fit in the North American Nebula. From a dark sky site, away from the light pollution of the city, you can see it without optical aid, looking like a brighter region of the Milky Way. Binoculars improve the view, but a telescope has too much magnification not allowing you to make out the over all shape. It is best seen in wide view photographs.

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Techinical Photo Info:

Camera: Q453 CCD

Lens: Canon 70-200mm f/2.8 L IS

Focal Length setting: 200mm

Aperture setting: f/4

Exposure: 7 X 10 minutes totaling 70 minutes

Darks: 2 darks to create a dark pixel map

Flats: 20

Biases: 0

Mount: Celestron CGE

Guide Camera: Q-Guider by CCD-Labs

Aligned and Stacked in Nebulosity with final processing in Photoshop

Gone To The Dark Side

2009-09-15T01:10:00.004-05:00

Click on the Images for a large view

Most of the time, astrophotographers try to image dim objects, trying to make them brighter so that they are easier to see. However, there is one type of object in the night sky that emits no light. Because they emit no light, they appear as dark regions among the starry sky. At the upper right of the top picture is the famous Plieades Star Cluster, with its glowing reflection nebulae. The rest of the picture has many areas with very few stars. These are the so called "Dark Nebulae". At one time astronomers thought these were holes in the sky, letting us see space beyond the stars. We now know that instead of holes, what we are seeing is dark clouds of dust and gas so dense that they block the light of the stars behind them. If you can't see the dark nebulae, you need to adjust your monitors brightness setting.

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The first person to prove this fact was Edward Emerson Barnard in the early part of the last century. E.E. Barnard was a self taught astronomer, who was the first person to use the newly invented camera on the night sky. He obtained thousands of photographic images of the Milky Way, then selected the 50 best for publication in his "Atlas of Selected Regions of the Milky Way". He approved each photograph for each and every book, therefore there were only about 700 books published. Each picture in the book is an actual photograph, not a printing press facsimile. So this is a rare and much sought after book.

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Along with the photographs, in a seperate volume, there are charts with all the dark nebulae numbered by Barnard. There are 370, with each number starting with the letter B. In the above image, I have captured 15 of these nebulae. Click on the bottom chart to see each numbered object.

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If you would like to see images from the Atlas, they are on the internet. The Georgia Institute of Technology Library and Informatin Center scanned the book and placed them here: http://www.library.gatech.edu/barnard/

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Technical Photo Info

Camera: Canon XTi

Lens: Canon 70-200mm f/2.8 L IS

Focal Length setting: 70mm

Apeture setting: f/4

Exposure: 11 X 8 minutes totaling 88 minutes

Darks: 20

Flats: 20

Biases: 20

Mount: Celestron CGE

Guide Camera: Q-Guider by CCD-Labs

Aligned and Stacked in DeepSkyStacker with final processing in Photoshop

What is it? An apple core, dumbbell, football or a planet?

2009-09-03T01:02:00.005-05:00

Click on image for a larger view

345 years ago, while looking for comets, Charles Messier discovered this nebula in the sky and numbered it the 27th object in his list of objects that were not comets. He called it an "oval nebula". Sixty four years later, in 1828, another astronomer, John Herschel, wrote that it was shaped like a dumbbell, and it has been called that ever since. Looking through a telescope, I always have the impression that it looks like an apple core. With long exposure photography, dimmer areas become visible turning it into a football. These type of deep sky objects are also known as planetaries. Definitely not planets, in the 18th century astronomers coined them planetaries because they looked very similar to the gas giant planets, mostly round and diffuse. Unfortunately, that name has also stuck.

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A planetary nebula is something that humanity will see up close and personal some time in the distant future. At that point in time, about 5 billion years, it will destroy the Earth and everything on it. What you see in the Dumbbell Nebula is the death throes of a star similar to our Sun. This dying star, which you can see at the center of the nebula, had previously grown into a Red Giant, and is now pulsating and shedding off it's outer layers into space. The extremely hot central star radiates ultraviolet light into these outer layers making it glow.

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Technical Photo Info

Camera: Q453 CCD by CCD-Labs

Telescope: 10" f/5.5 Newtonian with a Coma Corrector in the optical path

Mount: Celestron CGE

Guidescope: 60mm Dia., 400mm Focal Length

Guide Camera: Q-Guider by CCD-Labs

Exposure Length: 7 X 10 min exposures for a total of 70 minutes

Darks: 1 Dark to create a Dark Pixel Map to get rid of hot pixels

Flats: None

Biases: None

Aligned and Stacked in Nebulosity with final processing in Photoshop

Another Iridium Flare

2009-08-28T18:07:00.003-05:00

Click on Image for a larger view

I spent 5 days camping in my RV with some friends of the Astronomical Society of Kansas City at our Dark Sky Site. Located about 75 miles from Kansas City, it is far enough away from the city lights to give us amateur astronomers some really dark skies. Unbelieveably, all 5 days were clear. On one of those nights, fellow ASKC member, Eric Bogatin, said that a bright Iridium statellite was going to show up high in the eastern sky. I quickly set up my camera on a tripod and took the image you see above. When the flare was starting to brighten up, another member, Gary Pittman, pointed out where it was with his laser pointer. These laser pointers are so bright, they easily show up. The other short streak of light on the left side of the image is an airplane. For more info about Iridium flares, see my blog for Aug. 2, 2009, Iridium Flare and Extreme Numbers.

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One of those 5 clear nights was on the foggy side, but that night was a super night for looking at details on Jupiter. Normally it is hard to see fine detail on Jupiter because of the turbulence in the atmosphere. All that turbulent air is also magnified by the telescope, stealing fine detail in the eyepiece. But, that foggy Saturday night, the air was perfectly still. Looking at Jupiter through a 20-inch telescope on a night like that is truely incredible. There was so much color and detail it was hard to take it all in. Jupiter's moons were seen as tiny little marbles instead of the twinkly stars I'm so used to. That night, I had three 20-inch telescopes to see it with, and their owners, Mike Sterling, Scott Kranz and Mike Meyers, were more than willing to share the fantastic view. Thanks guys for sharing the scopes. These type of night come only once in a very long time. I've only seen three nights like that in all of my 30 years of observing.

Fishing for Persieds

2009-08-13T01:16:00.003-05:00

Click on images for larger view

I went fishing for Perseids Tuesday night and Wednesday morning during the peak of the Perseid Meteor shower. I cast my line out 1088 times between 10 p.m and 4:38 a.m., a little over 6 hours and caught only one little flash as it went behind the trees. My fishing pole was my Canon digital XTi mounted on a tripod. Even though, on average, there was at least one meteor per minute somewhere in the sky, my little part of the sky only had one meteor bright enough to get caught.

The top picture is the first image I took and the bottom picture is #340 out of 1088.

I believe most of you know that the bright stars in the top picture make up the Big Dipper, but take a look at the second star from the end of the dipper's handle. These double stars are Mizar and Alcor. This stars are a good test for "minimal" vision. If you have good eyesight, or a good pair of glasses, you should be able to see them as separate stars. Mizar, the brighter of the two is also a double star, but you need a telescope to see Mizar's fainter companion. Astronomers tell us that the two take at least 5000 years to make their orbit about each other. What is really interesting, is that each of these two stars also has a companion, making the system a "double-double". When you add Alcor, it creates a quintuple star system. Alcor takes 750,000 years to go around the quartet of stars that make up Mizar. I wonder what it would be like to live on a planet with 5 suns in your sky?

Iridium Flare and Extreme Numbers

2009-08-02T03:00:00.006-05:00

Click on image for a larger view

The image you see above is a 27 second exposure of the sky from my home in Cleveland, MO using my digital Canon XTi with the lens set at 18mm (the image is cropped a bit). The bright streak is an Iridium communication satellite that increased in brightness from being almost invisible to the brightest thing in the sky, other than the Moon. Traveling from left to right at roughly 17,000 mph, it increased in brightness and diminished back to near invisibility in those 27 seconds.

Non-astronomers reading this may be wondering how I knew this was going to happen. It is actuallly pretty easy. A large group Iridium satellites, traveling around polar orbits, are used to provide satellite phone and data coverage around the world. Three door-size antennas on each satellite are highly polished and occasionally, sunlight is reflected down to Earth creating a brilliant flare lasting a few seconds. Iridium Flare prediction software has been developed so that now all one has to do is log in to the website http://www.heavens-above.com/ , give them your location on the Earth (latitude and longitude), and you will get a set of predictions for thenext 24 hours, the next 7 days and even daytime flares for the next 7 days. Yes, you can actuallly see them in the daytime. I've even seen some accidentally while driving down the road. Here is the predication I received to get the above image. Date: 8-1-06, Time: 11:00:43, Intensity (Mag): -7, Altitude: 27 degrees, and Azimuth: 60 degrees (ENE). That's all you need.

Terminology: Time is the period when it is at its brightest.

Intensity (Mag) is how bright it will be in Magnitude. The brightest one can get is -9 Mag. The dimmest are when they are not reflecting a spot on the Earth and that is about +6 Magnitude (about as bright as the dimmest stars one can see in a dark sky. A -7 flare like in the image is bright eneough to be seen in the daytime.

Altitude is how high it is in degrees.Azimuth is the direction to face measured from due North. North is 0 degree azimuth, East is 90 degrees, South is 180, West is 270.

I do one more thing, which is not really necessary, but to precisely know where to look, I use a planetarium program on my computer. Giving it the above parameters, it will tell me what stars and constellations will be up at that time and I can see what stars it will be near so that I can center my camera to that position.

Now for some fun with BIG numbers. There is something very interesting in this image. The camera has captured objects in great depth. In the foreground you see trees that are a mere 30 feet away. The Iridium satellite is a bit farther, about 600 miles away. The stars are even further. The star, Alpheratz, the point in the cone shape constellation of Andromeda (see the picture below), is 600 light years away. In miles, that is 3,527,175,223,910,165 miles (3.5 quadrillion miles). But the camera has captured something much, much further away. This is M31, the Andromeda Galaxy (that fuzzy spot that is quite not starlike). It is 2.5 million light years from us (146,962,495,353,380,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles [146.9 nonillion miles]). Yes, nonillion is a word. It is a 1 with 30 zeros behind it.

To find M31, I first find the curved-cone shape of the brightest stars in the constellation Andromeda, then I use the three stars connected with yellow lines to point the rest of the way. You need to be away from the light pollution of the city to find it and in a moonless sky. The camera did it, however, even with the moon out.

Click on image for a larger view

Last Unknown Bug Identified

2009-07-21T00:15:00.002-05:00

It is interesting that I didn't get very many responses on the caterpillar image by Joe Porter below. So, I decided to just start looking at caterpillar pictures and found it in a few minutes of Googling. Click on this link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/avian_pursuits/2824484555/ to see the image of the Sycamore Tussock moth caterpillar.

Another Unknown Bug

2009-07-14T00:56:00.004-05:00

Click on the image for a large view

Another unknown bug, but first here is what I've found out about the last one.
The last post "What Is This?" is a post that more people responded to then anything else. Quite a few know what this bug is. It is called an Assassin Bug. An appropriate name, because it truely seeks out and assassinates other insects and even goes after animals larger than itself. What I thought looked like a tooth, is really a segmented tube for feeding, called a rostrum. They use the long rostrum to inject a lethal saliva that liquefies the insides of the prey, which are then sucked out. Some people thought it was a "Wheel" bug, but if you Google wheel bug, you'll see it looks similar, but, instead, the wheel bug has a circular wheel like protrusion on its back. One of the 7000 species of these bugs is the "Kissing" bug. This gruesome bug has been known to suck blood from the lips of sleeping humans or around the eyes. Even with all this going against them, they are considered benifical, because they control unwanted insects. Benifical or not, I'm not touching one of these guys. Check out this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iqhp69whyEE

Joe Porter sent this note and picture of another weird looking animal: This was the neatest little creature I have seen in a long time.. We were on a QRP radio outing weekend at Twin Bridges, Oklahoma and as one of my radio buddies started to get in his truck he spotted this little jewel on the door glass. It looked like a fancy caterpillar.

Does anyone know what this is?

What Insect Is This?

2009-07-11T02:37:00.005-05:00

Click on Image for larger view

What I thought was a spider, on closer inspection I realized it was not. I've never since this little guy before and looking through my insect book I couldn't find it, although I think it is one of the beetle species. Does anyone know what this is? It is about 1-inch long and walked around with it's tail up like you see. The inset picture at top right shows distinctive markings on its body. The inset picture at top left is a close-up of the inset below it. This shows what looks like a long "tooth" at the front of its head. Any ideas what this is?

Thunderhead Panoramic

2009-07-07T23:16:00.003-05:00

Click on image for larger view

While camping at the Astronomical Society of Kansas City's Dark Sky Site last month, a few of us were enjoying some corn on the cob when we noticed a huge cumulonimbus building in the south. I grabbed my camera and took a bunch of shots. The storm stretched from due south to directly east, so it was not possible to get the whole thing in one picture, so instead I took 4 images overlapped slightly, then using Photoshop I combined them into the panoramic you see here. The colors come from the sunset in the west. The top of the cloud is lit by direct sunlight and the bottom of the cloud is lit by the light of the sunset. Make sure and click on the above image to see the larger view. Also, smaller monitors will require you to scroll from side to side.

How To Take Pictures of Fireworks

2009-07-05T01:53:00.003-05:00

Click on images for a larger view

Here's pics from the great display at Lewis-Young Park, north of Louisburg, KS. If you would like to take pictures of fireworks, but don't know how, here is how you do it: You'll need a camera that allows you to take at least a few seconds exposure and to be able to set the focus to manual mode instead of auto-focus. You'll need to attach the camera to a tripod, or at least be able to place it on something to prevent the camera from moving (a beanbag on top of your car will work). A shutter release so that you can fire the camera without touching it is great also. The settings I will mention next are for my Canon XTi, but most digital SLRs will have the same settings. Even some of the better non-SLR digitals will have similar settings. Read your camera's manual to learn how to set all of the following.

Usually you want to adjust the lens to its widest focal length. The lens I used at it's widest is 18mm. You next want to focus the camera to infinity. Do this while it is still bright daylight. I auto-focus the camera on a distant landscape. I then turn off auto-focus with a switch on the lens. The reason you do this is that the camera will find it very tough to auto-focus in the dark, and even if it does find focus, you will miss many shots and the majority of them will be out of focus. Once auto-focus is switched off, do not touch the lens or adjust the zoom. Doing this will throw the lens out of focus. If it is already dark and you need to re-focus, focus on a distant streetlight or the Moon, if it up.

Now change the shutter speed dial to "M" (manual) and adjust the speed to "Bulb". Then make sure the f-stop value is set to the smallest number. In my case it is f/3.5. The ISO speed should be set to its lowest value. In my camera it is 100 ISO.

Now all you have to do is frame the camera and wait for the show to begin. You will find that getting fireworks is just a matter of timing and looking at your view screen to see what you got. Most of the time you only have to hold the shutter open for 2 to 4 seconds, depending on how bright the show is. It's easy to over-expose some of the brighter displays. It's all a matter of luck, but with these instructions, you should be able to get some good shots. I took about 140 images and got just a few that I liked, so don't be afraid to take a lot of images. With digital cameras, taking pictures doesn't really cost anything until you print them.

One thing to be prepared for is dew. Here in the Midwest, most nights are very dewy, so I sometimes wrap the lens barrel with a dew heater. I made the heater by soldering a bunch of resistors and covering them with wide velcro so they don't short out. The wires from the heater are attached to a 12-volt battery.

So you don't forget how to do this a year from now, write this stuff down and keep it with your camera.

Pass the potato salad!

2009-07-04T01:30:00.001-05:00

You have to love a nation that celebrates its independence every July 4, not with a parade of guns, tanks, and soldiers who file by the White House in a show of strength and muscle, but with family picnics where kids throw Frisbees, the potato salad gets iffy, and the flies die from happiness. You may think you have overeaten, but it is patriotism. ~Erma Bombeck

Oranges Are For The Birds

2009-04-16T00:08:00.002-05:00

As soon as it starts warming up in the Spring, Gloria and I cut a couple of oranges in half and place them on a some branches near our backyard deck. We do this to attract Orioles as they migrate through the Kansas City area. To our surprise, it attracted some Mockingbirds. They come by every day. I have been wanting to get some pictures of Mockingbirds, but it hasn't been easy. They fly away as soon as they seen any human movement. I got lucky this time, however. I set up my 300mm lens and camera on a tripod with it pointing out a slightly opened door. I waited for about 20 minutes and got about 50 images of which a few are posted here. A few images of a Baltimore Oriole are also included, these from the Spring of 2008. Here is the web address for the images:
http://tomjmartinez.com/Mockingbird_and_Baltimore_Oriole/

Winter-Spring Transition

2009-03-30T03:54:00.002-05:00

I love Springtime. I imagine it is the favorite time of year for most everyone. The freshness of everything growing makes me feel wonderful and alive. I have been taking pictures of the early flowering plants and a few birds. The nice snowstorm we had over the weekend made me get up early to look for some photographic opportunities. I have created a small slideshow of some of these pictures. Click on this link to see it:
http://tomjmartinez.com/winter_spring_slideshow/

Galaxies - Near, Far, and Really Far

2009-03-23T23:41:00.002-05:00

Click on the images for larger views

All of the pictures you see here were taken with the same lens, my Canon 300mm f/4 telephoto lens. They are all galaxies of various types and sizes. They also vary in incredible distances from us. The image above is the great Andromeda Galaxy (M31), our nearby twin sister. She is our nearest large neighbor, right next door to our own Milky Way galaxy. Someone (or Thing) is standing on one of M31's planets, looking at our galaxy right now and seeing a similar looking spiral of stars, dust and gas. M31 is quite a distance from us (2.5 million light years away), but it is so big, we can see it without optical aide as a fuzzy star in the constellation Andromeda. To see it, however, you need to be away from the light pollution of our cities and is best seen in our Fall and Winter sky. There are two companion galaxies rotating around M31, one fairly obvious on this side and one much smaller directly on the other side. Astronomers have studied it's motion, and it is on a collision course with the Milky Way. To see what this event will look like, see the image of the next galaxy below.

This the Whirlpool Galaxy, M51 and it's companion NGC5195. Click on the image to get a closer look and notice the the odd shape of the smaller galaxy. NGC5195 has collided with M51. What you are seeing it the stars of the galaxy pushed out and distorted like a water sprinkler. During the collision, the stars in the galaxies usually do not collide. This is because of the great distances between the stars, but gravitational attraction from the passing stars, dust, gas and dark matter, tugs and distorts the galaxies into new shapes. This image was taken with the same lens, but M51 is a smaller image because it is almost ten times further away (23 million light years). Lots of galaxies, even further away are picked up with the one hour exposure. The galaxy numbers you see are from various catalogs. If you know where to look and are away from the city lights, you can see it with a pair of binoculars, looking like a fuzzy star. It sits near the last star of the Big Dipper's handle like in the chart below.

Now we make a big jump. With the same lens (and same field of view), we are looking at galaxies that are about 60 million light years away, 24 times further away than the Andromeda Galaxy. These is a cluster of galaxies, known as the Virgo Cluster (most of them are in the constellation Virgo, now in the Springtime sky). We see quite a few galaxies in this image, but it is only a small part of the close to 2000 galaxies. This cluster is also part of an even larger Supercluster, of which our Milky Way, M31 and a few other galaxies (the Local Group) also belong to. Notice that a few of these galaxies look as big as M51, but this only shows you how huge these galaxies really are to take up the sames view and yet be almost 3 times further away than M51. I labeled the galaxies in the image below using star charting software.

It always amazes me how large the sky is above us. It is very hard to comprehend these great distances. It also amazes me that 99% of the people on the Earth never look up at the night sky.

Bald Eagle

2009-03-09T03:15:00.002-05:00

Click on image for a larger view

Yesterday, I was driving through Swope Park, right in the middle of Kansas City, MO, I was amazed to see this Bald Eagle. He was busy looking down into a pond, trying to make a meal out of a fish I'm sure. I'll have to make sure to look for one whenever I'm in the area.

The photo was taken with my 300mm f/4 IS L lens on my Canon Xti. The IS stands for Image Stabilization. It really helps improve the sharpness of my handheld shots like this one.

Line 'em up! Head 'em out!

2009-03-09T03:03:00.004-05:00

Click on image for a large view

I was filling up my gas tank when I spotted these geese and goslings crossing the street. Cars had stopped to let them by. I grabbed my camera and caught them as they were crossing in front of shopping mall stores. They looked so much like kids with their teacher and chaperones out on a field trip. You probably need to scroll the bottom scroll bar to see the whole image.

Taken with my 18-55mm zoom lens at 18mm.

Peek-A-Boo Meadowlark

2009-03-09T02:45:00.005-05:00

Click on image for a larger view

While camping out last Summer I spotted a Meadowlark playing peek-a-boo with me in the tall prarie grass. I took many shots, but most were almost impossible to tell there was a bird there. Meadowlarks are extremely shy birds and hard to get close to them. This is probably an Eastern Meadowlark, but beacause I live near the edge of the territories between Eastern and Western species, it could be one or the other.

Taken with my 300mm f/4 IS L lens.

Winter Rose

2009-03-04T02:08:00.003-06:00

Click on images for a larger view

All roses are pretty, especially in the Winter sky. Astronomers have named this the Rosette Nebula. It sits in the constellation Monoceros, right next door to Orion (see the constellation diagrams above. The rectangle in the diagram is the area of sky that my 300m lens and camera combination cover in the sky). This a very large nebula, taking up 5 times the area of a full moon, but so faint it is impossible to see unless you are in very dark skies, and even then, special filters are needed at the eyepiece to see its faint nebulosity.

For as big as it is, the Rosette is still very far away, 4500 light years distant. It's diameter is estimated at 130 light years across. Remember, light travels at 180,000 miles per second, so the light you see left that object 4500 years ago. What makes the nebula glow is the cluster of stars in darker center of the rose. High energy light from the bright young stars ionizes the surrounding hydrogen gas clouds to light up the red emission nebula. The hot wind of particles from these stars is also evacuating the cluster center. Slowly, over millions of years, the gas and dust will eventually condense into 10,000 or so stars. A truely remarkable piece of nature that can only be seen at its best in photographs.

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"The sky is the ultimate art gallery just above us." - Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 82)

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Technical Data: I took its picture while waiting for comet Lulin to rise above the treetops, and also to give "First Light" to a new CCD camera. My Canon 300mm f/4 lens was used on a CCD-Labs Q453 camera http://www.ccd-labs.com/Qseries/q453.htm The camers is cooled to -35C beyond ambient temperature. It does this to get rid of noise that is inherent in long exposure imaging. The imaging chip is 23.4mm(h) x 15.6mm(v) APS film equvilent, about .65 smaller than 35mm film. I took 6 images, 10 minutes each. 20 flat frames and 20 bias frames were taken, then all these images were processed in DeepskyStacker and final processing in Photoshop CS2.

Beautiful Snow Day

2009-03-02T04:23:00.003-06:00

Click on image for a larger picture

Saturday morning I woke up to a nice snowfall. We had about 4 or 5 inches on the ground, so I had to go out and play with my camera. Even though it was around 20 degrees, my pond was not frozen, but made an idylic scene. Right before I went back inside I saw a colorful robin fighting the blowing snow. This is only the second time this winter that we have had any significant amount of snow in my area, south of Kansas City. Hopefully we'll have another one before the end of March.

Comet Lulin

2009-02-24T23:16:00.004-06:00

Click on each image for a larger view

The two images above are of Comet Lulin as it approached it passage near the Earth. Cloudy skies and equipment problems have prevented me from taking its picture before this, but it all came together last Sunday morning.

Surrounding the comet's nucleus is a huge coma of glowing green fog caused by sunlight warming the ices on the comet's surface. You see two tails. The long pointy tail on the rights side is the dust tail, consisting of very small particles of comet dust. The tail on the left side is a gas tail and is actually being blown about in the eddy's of the solar wind (electrically charged paticles coming from the sun). Both tails seem to be pointing directly opposite each other, but in fact, the are both being blown away from from the sun. Only our perspective from the Earth makes it seem that way.

Notice, in each picture, the bright star trail at lower left. The glow you see around the star is actually part of the gas tail making it look foggy. The comet is much closer than the stars, so any part of the comet will block out those stars or make them look foggy.

Also, in the bottom image, notice a dark triangle shape just to the right of the bright, fuzzy star trail. I'm not sure what this is, but I see a much fainter and longer dark area in the top image also. My only guess is that it could be a small tail disconnection (which happens quite a bit).

The top picture consists of 40, one minute exposures combined into one. Each of the 40 images was aligned on the comet's nulceus. The comet is moving pretty fast, almost 5 degrees per day, so in the 40 minutes the stars trailed like you see. The bottom picture consists of 6, 10 minute exposures. All exposures were taken with my 300mm f/4 Canon lens, mounted on my CGE telescope mount. Each image was guided on the comet's nucleus with an autoguider.

Sky-Wide Rays

2009-02-01T16:34:00.002-06:00

Click on image for a larger version

Today, I was honored with the "Optics Picture Of The Day". The above picture is a part of the event I photographed during a star party that my local club, the Astronomical Society of Kansas City, was holding out away from the bright city lights. The picture shows crepuscular rays extending away from the setting sun. Crepuscular rays are nothing special in themselves, however, when the rays extend clear across the sky (180 degrees), that is a "Kodak moment". Les Cowley, the webmaster of "Atmospheric Optics" is using the fisheye images I made of the event. The picture is changed every day, so you may not see my image if you click on this link on a day other than today: http://www.atoptics.co.uk/opod.htm so use this permanent link instead: http://www.atoptics.co.uk/fz190.htm

Make sure and click on the various links in the text to see explanations of what causes these rays. Also, be sure to look and read about all the fascinating optical events going on above our heads: http://www.atoptics.co.uk/index.htm

Feathers In The Sky

2009-01-27T00:45:00.003-06:00

Click on image for a larger version

A few days ago, the temperature got up to 70 degrees, so Gloria and I went out for some fresh air by walking around the neighborhood. A big change in the weather was expected the next day, so I think these high cirrus clouds blowing out of the West was the start of it. Anyway, these beautiful sky feathers just tickled me into getting their picture.

Railroad Reflection

2009-01-27T00:30:00.003-06:00

Click on image for larger version

I crossed a railroad track and noticed the reflection of the sky on the tracks, so I had to stop to photograph this wonderful play of light and dark. I took a few pics, then luckily a formation of geese added the final element in the composition.

Running Bird

2009-01-15T13:59:00.004-06:00

Click on the image to see a large version

The astrophoto you see above commonly goes by the name "Running Man", but I always see this as a bird with running legs as outlined below. Actually, it is a huge cloud of dust and gas in the constellation Orion. It is blue because of starlight reflected off the small dust particles, similar to sunlight reflecting off the earth's atmosphere making it blue.

Seeing shapes in clouds is fun, and I'm sure everyone has done this, but did you know there is a name for this. It's called nephelococcygia. It comes from a play written a very long time ago. The play, “The Birds”, was written by a Greek comic poet, Aristophanes, in 414 B.C. The characters in this play are birds. They are looking at the clouds and seeing the different shapes they make. Another character in the play calls them crazy for doing such a thing. So, nephelococcygia literally means “cloud cuckooland”. Now it means to look for changing shapes and transformation in clouds. I found a website for nephelococcygiaites (gosh, is that a word) that is full of great images and information for cloud lovers: http://cloudappreciationsociety.org/

The Running Man (Bird) image was taken on October 30, 2008, with my 10" f/5.5 newtonian (1397mm focal length) and my Canon XTi. Ten images, 5 minutes exposure each, were processed in DeepSkyStacker and Photoshop.

Sun, Moon and Venus Pillars

2009-01-03T03:07:00.003-06:00

Click on image for larger view

Beams of light like you see above are created by light shining through millions of ice crystals in the atmosphere. A great website http://www.atoptics.co.uk/halo/platpill.htm explains how this works. The above picture was taken January 5, 2002, six years ago. What reminded me of this picture was another one on Spaceweather.com but instead of sunlight creating the pillar, they were caused by streetlights. The neat thing about these is curved arcs at the top of the pillar. Something new and mysterious: http://spaceweather.com/archive.php?month=01&day=01&year=2009&view=view

Pillars can also be created by moonlight and even the planet Venus. I was looking at some pictures of these when I suddenly realized I had taken some myself and I didn't realize it until now. Take a look at the closeup picture of the Moon and Venus image from my blog of December 24 below. Click on the image to make it larger and you will see small pillars extending both above and below the Moon and Venus. I can't believe I missed these.

I have seen pillars coming off streetlights while driving my car, so be on the lookout for this cool weather phenomenon.

New Year's Eve Show

2008-12-31T21:20:00.003-06:00

Click on picture for a large view

What a wonderful way to end the year. About 4 p.m. clouds started coming in slowly covering the Moon in the still bright sky so I thought the last conjunction of the year was going to be a bust. Gloria mentioned that the sky was getting some nice colors, so I broke away from my computer thinking "well, I'll just get a beautiful sunset". As it turned out, the clouds were moving away making for a colorful scene in my backyard. Colors like these only last a few minutes.

I didn't notice the airplane and its contrail until after I looked at the image on my computer. These is just pure luck, but it adds a nice element to the composition.

I put on my old 200mm lens from my Olympus camera to get this close-up. An inexpensive adapter lets me use these great lenses on my Canon XTi digital. There is no auto-focus or auto-exposure settings with these lenses, but that's okay, because taking these type of images is pretty simple. I take lots of pictures at various exposures (about 100 for this event) then choose the best ones on my computer.

If you would like to try this type of photogrpaphy, here is how it is done:

You can use just about any digital camera to do this. The one thing that your camera needs to do is to allow you to manually set the exposures and to manually set the focus. Read your manual to see how this is done. The next thing you will need is a way to take the exposure without touching the camera. On some cameras you can buy a shutter release, which is simply a switch you hold in your hand, with a length of cord attached to the camera. Again, check your manual to see if this is possible. If not, you can still take a picture without touching the camera, just use the camera's timer (yes, check your manual on how to use this). The last item you will need is a tripod. This, of course, is because you can't hand hold a camera at slow shutter speeds and expect to get a sharp image. If you can do all of the above, you are ready to go.

Here is what I do with my camera. It may be slightly different with your camera. After I have the camera on my tripod and the shutter release attached, I adjust the zoom lens, if the camera has one, to the composition I will be using. I make sure that the aperture on the lens is set to wide open (check your manual on this).

If the Moon or Venus is in the sky, your auto-focus will probably work on these bright objects, so use it to get the correct exposure. Once focus is set, turn off the auto-focus mode (check your manual), because most of the time the composition of the picture usually does not have the Moon or Venus at the focus sensors to auto-focus, so if you leave auto-focus is on, the camera will just try to focus on blank sky and never find focus.

I then set the camera to a shutter speed that I think will be close to the correct exposure. It usually isn't, but that is okay, just look at the image on the lcd. If the image looks dark, increase the exposure, if it looks too bright, decrease the exposure. It's that simple.

It's impossible to tell you what exposure to use because every situation is different. For one thing, the amount of light is constantly changing (the sky is getting darker). The best thing to do is to experiment and try it all out. Don't wait until a big event occurs. That is no time to learn how to do it. If this is all too much trouble, well, all I can say is there are lots of people doing this very thing and I guess you can just look at them on the net. Digital cameras have made photography especially easy to learn, considering the almost instant gratification of capturing wonderful scenes such as these.

Here's wishing everyone a Happy New Year!

Planets and Moon Lineup

2008-12-29T20:43:00.003-06:00

Click on pictures for larger image

A nice crescent Moon once again lined up with three planets today: Bright Venus at upper left, and below and right of the Moon, Jupiter sits over Mercury. Around 5 p.m. today I loaded my camera and tripod and started driving looking for a nice foreground subject. I live in Missouri, but only a half mile from the Kansas border, so I started driving west into Kansas along country roads. I couldn't find anything I liked and I was running out of time, but around 6:45 p.m. I found this nice pond in Paola, Kansas. It's actually the Waterworks pond for the town of Paola.

Tomorrow, the Moon glides 13 degrees further east and closer to Venus, then on New Year's Eve, it will be sitting above Venus, 3 degrees away. Mercury also moves eastward. Not by much, but enough so that it will be only 1 degree to the left of Jupiter. The two planest look close together but are really pretty far apart. Mercury is a little over 93 million miles from us, but Jupiter is 6 times further away, 558 million miles distant.

Hopefully, the skies will stay fairly clear.

Merry Christmas

2008-12-24T11:22:00.002-06:00

Click on images for a larger view

Four days after the Christmas eclipse, on December 29, 2000, the Moon graciously moved next to Venus for a wonderful conjunction. A nice amount of snow on the ground made for a beautiful Christmas card scene. A blue spruce lit up in front of my home created the final touch.

I hope all of you have the nicest of holidays this year, and only the best for the coming year.

Christmas Eclipse

2008-12-24T11:06:00.004-06:00

Click on image for large view

Eight years ago, Christmas day 2000, there was a partial eclipse of the Sun. When I awoke that morning the sky was completely overcast. I was going to set up my telescope to get a picture of the event but decided not to do it because of the cloud cover. After the Christmas gift giving frenzy, Gloria happened to step outside for one reason or another, looked up and saw the partially eclipsed sun through the clouds. I looked at it, then ran back inside, grabbed my camera, which at the time was an Olympus 35mm film camera, attached a 200mm telephoto to it and ran back outside. The eclipse was peaking in and out of the clouds and I could see that much heavier clouds were heading this way, so I had no time for a tripod. Not knowing what exposure to use, I instinctively set the camera to it's highest shutter speed and shot off a few hand held pictures. Sometimes luck is all you have (and a few photographic instincts).

Wooly Worm

2008-12-23T02:38:00.004-06:00

While cutting out some overgrown bushes at home last month I saw this wooly worm and had to grab my camera. Old folklore says that how black the wooly worm is predicts how harsh the Winter will be, but most studies have shown that this is not true. This little caterpillar is now hibernating under some rock waiting for Spring when it will then spin a cacoon of silk and in about a week will turn into a Tiger Moth.

I received a nice note from a good friend, Dan Johnson, who mentioned a few things about my last post. He says that the turtles full name is the "Ornate Box Turtle" and that it is a female. I wondered how he knew it was a female, so I googled it a found out that male box turtles have bright orange eyes. He also said that what I called a moth is actually a "Skipper". Skippers are actually a third group that is related to both butterflies and moths. Also, moths are nocternal, whereas butterflies and skippers are diurnal, or active during the day. The tiny frog is a "Chorus Frog" according to Dan. Dan, by the way, is president of the Kansas Herpetological Society, so he should know. I just found out that Dan's teenage daughter caught a copperhead snake with her bare hands!

Wishing It Was Spring

2008-12-14T00:27:00.002-06:00

Click on each image for a larger picture

Now that Winter has turned my part of the country cold and brown, I just had to put up a few pictures from last Spring. I found the tiny frog on a lilypad. If this little guy made it through the Summer, I imagine he is sound asleep in his mud hole. The moth may have been eaten by a frog, but more than likely it got squashed on someone's windshield. My backyard always has box turtles in one corner or the other. This one was a little afraid of the big eye in front of my face.

Big Storm Coming!

2008-12-08T22:41:00.006-06:00

A month ago, November 5 to be exact, we were on our way to Colorado across the plains of Kansas. I had to pull over and get a picture of this threatening storm we were driving into.

Click on the image for larger image.

This is the back end of the storm after it went over McPherson, Kansas. A quarter Moon was shining in the deepening twilight. We stayed overnight in Great Bend, Kansas and woke up to some extremely windy conditions. After we crossed into the Colorado, near Burlington, we saw several 18-wheelers blown over by the high winds.

The Galaxy Song

2008-12-08T12:19:00.006-06:00

One of my favorite Monty Python songs from their film "The Meaning of Life". The facts and figures in the song are pretty close to current knowledge. A great song from a great film. Yep, Bugger all down here on earth!

Venus, Jupiter and Moon Conjunction

2008-12-01T21:16:00.000-06:00

Click on the pictures to see a larger version

My wife, Gloria, and I decided to see if we could find a nice foreground object to photograph the conjunction of the Moon with Venus and Jupiter today, so we loaded my camera and tripod and headed down the road. The clouds were playing peak-a-boo with them as we drove. Gloria spotted an old, run down barn and luckily the gate to the property was open. Dodging the cow pies and muddy spots I set up on the other side of the barn while Gloria waited by the car. I was glad she did, because the owner of the property drove up and while she talked to him I took a bunch of images, then it quickly clouded up. Gloria said she told the owner what we were doing and he told her only to make sure to close the gate so the cows wouldn't escape. It sure is nice to have great neighbors. When we got home, the clouds parted once again, so I took more images with my 300mm lens.

Notice the two stars on each side of Jupiter, at the upper right. These are really moons of Jupiter: Ganymede is on the left side and Callisto is on the right. Two more moons are closer to Jupiter, but only one is slightly visible as a pimple on the left side. This moon is Europa. The other moon, Io, is too close to Jupiter for it to be visible.

The dark side of the Moon is really not dark. The light that we see coming from there is really coming from the Earth, so we call it earthshine. Sunlight reflects off the Earth to the Moon, then reflects back to our eyes.

Also published on Spaceweather.com: http://spaceweather.com/submissions/large_image_popup.php?image_name=Tom-J.-Martinez-Moon-Venus-Jupiter_068_1228187695.jpg

Rain Storm Racing Across The Morning Sky

2008-11-25T02:18:00.000-06:00

* Click on the image to see a larger version *

This rainstorm was one of many that dumped rain all night at a rained out star party near Marion, Kansas. The Astronomical Society of Kansas City http://askc.org/ was holding the star party, and while everyone was still sleeping and trying to keep dry in their RV's and tents, I decided to see if I could get some lightning pictures, but instead I saw this incredible scene of waving clouds and a wall of water against the morning sky all racing across the open panorama of Kansas. I turned it into a panorama using two pictures. It was taken in June 29, 2003, with a Nikon Coolpix 995.
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This past Summer I sent the image to a contest for the KCTV5 2009 weather calendar and it was chosen for the month of June. When I received a copy of the calendar, I saw that three of the pictures in the calendar were taken by a good friend and great photographer, Dan Bush. His pictures made the front cover, inside cover and the month of December. Dan's images are some of the finest images in the country. Take a look at his website: http://www.missouriskies.org/
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If you would like a calendar you can can get one here: http://www.weather-calendar.com/Kansas_City_weather_calendars.html

Planets in Taurus - 2000 and Planets in Sagittarius - 2008

2008-11-24T02:22:00.000-06:00

I am putting this image here to show a few things: First, this shows the Plieades star cluster more like what you would see it with our unaided eyes, instead of the long exposure image in the previous post. But even this is a little misleading, because the camera sees a lot more stars than our eyes. Also called the Seven Sisters, most people can only see 6 out of the 7 stars. People with really good eyesight can see up to 10 stars. Go out about an hour after the sun sets and look to the East. How many stars can you see? Then think about how far away they are. One of the closest star clusters to us, it is 440 light years away.

Everytime I see this wonderful cluster it reminds me of a line from a poem by Alfred Tennyson:

"Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising thro' the mellow shade,Glitter like a swarm of fireflies tangled in a silver braid."
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The second thing this photo shows is another star cluster. The Hyades star cluster is a much more spread out cluster just East of the Plieades. It's brightest members form a sideways letter "V". The bright red giant star, Aldeberan, is at the end of one of the legs of the "V". Even though the Hyades is the closest star cluster to us (151 light years away), Aldeberan is even closer and not part of the cluster.

Finally, the two bright stars in the photo are really planets, Jupiter and Saturn. The picture was taken in October 2000, so you won't see these planets anywhere near this part of the sky (the constellation Taurus). Jupiter is now in Sagittarius, in the southwest just after sunset. Saturn is now in Leo, and rises in the East about 1 o'clock in the morning.

While you are out looking at the Plieades in the East, turn around and you'll find Jupiter along with brighter Venus. Watch these two planets from day to day getting closer to each other and on December 1, a beautiful crescent Moon will form a wonderful trio right after sunset. With any luck and clear skies I'll have a photo of the event on this blog.

The Plieades, also known as the Seven Sisters and M45

2008-11-22T02:44:00.000-06:00

This is the latest deep sky image. It is almost 3 hours worth of exposure (34 five minute shots). Taken from the Astronomical Society of Kansas City's "Dark Sky Site", about 75 miles south of downtown Kansas City, MO. (click on image for larger version)

First Post

2008-11-22T01:49:00.000-06:00

I've been taking photographs ever since I can remember. My first good camera was a 35mm Canon Pelix which I purchased from a co-worker around 1970. I later bought a Canon F1. I created my own pictures in my basement darkroom and learned the art of manipulating pictures in the darkroom of Hallmark Cards in Kansas City.

In the Fall of 1978 I joined the Astronomical Society of Kansas City and started a whole new hobby combining my love of photography and astronomy. Buying and building several telescopes and using them for taking pictures of the sky has become my lifelong passion. I now have three digital cameras, a Nikon 995, Canon 300D and a Canon 400D and various lenses.

So, what you will find here are pictures of landscapes, skyscapes and people from me trying to capture a moment of time. Feel free to post a comment, but most of all, enjoy.

Tom J Martinez