Comet Hartley Movie

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

C

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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.