Baby Stars

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.