Nova Delphini and the Moon

A nova was discovered by Koichi Itagaki of Yamagata, Japan, on August 14. Because of clouds, I couldn't get it's picture until August 16. The above image shows the nova in the constellation Delphinus. Another constellation, Sagitta (the Arrow) appropriately points to the new star.

A nova is usually a White Dwarf that has a close orbiting companion star that is dumping hydrogen onto the surface of the White Dwarf. After many layers of hydrogen accumulate, the bottom layer explodes in a runaway hydrogen-fusion reaction.

I used my Canon 4ti at ISO 800 and my 70-200mm f/2.8 Canon lens set at 70mm. Twenty exposures, each 15 seconds long. Tracking was done with my new iOptron SkyTracker.

I couldn't help but to take an image of the gibbous moon sitting close by the nova. The same equipment was used, but the exposure was much shorter and I zoomed the lens up to 200mm. Exposure was 1/200 at f/8, ISO 200.

What Satellite Is This?

The image above is of a very bright satellite (not a meteor). This is usually called a satellite flare, and most satellite flares this bright are Iridium Flares. They are named after the Iridium communication satellites that produce this events. Most Iridium flares last for 10 or 15 seconds. What is strange about this flare is that it lasted for about 1 1/2 minutes. I know this because the image you see is from a combination of 3 images, each 30 seconds long (taken from the Milky Way time lapse video). The other odd thing is that I cannot find which satellite did this. I used an App called "Satellite Safari", which seems to be pretty accurate, since I can find much fainter satellites on other images. If anyone can figure out what satellite did this, please let me know. Here are the facts about the image:

Camera is facing South
Date and time: July 6, 2012 between 4:45:05 and 4:46:41
Field of view is about 95 degrees wide by 73 degrees high
Traveling from right to left through the constellation Pisces

Green Spiraling Meteor

Click on the image for a larger view

While looking at the thousands of images I shot for the Milky Way time lapse I came across one with a fairly bright green meteor. One thing very cool is that I can see that it has a waviness to it instead of the normal straight line.  Apparently the tiny pebble was oddly shaped causing it to spiral and vaporize as it hit the upper atmosphere at an extreme speed.

I have searched for other images of spiraling meteors but have not been able to find one. Apparently these are very rare. I found several sources of visual reports, but no photos. The earliest report was from a 1949 article in  Popular Astronomy Journal.

Surely this can't be the only image of a spiraling meteor!

The Milky Way Timelapse and How I Created It

The Video can be viewed at various resolutions. Once the video is running, choose them by clicking on the symbol that looks like the Sun at the lower right of the video. If you have a fast internet connection, it is best seen at 1080p and on a big monitor (Full Screen).

Here is a time lapse video from 3 nights in early July, 2013, of over 2000 images of the Milky Way. Shooting these was fairly straight forward. I set my Canon t4i with my 10-22mm f/3.5 lens on a tripod (the lens was set to 10mm at f/3.5). I used an intervalometer to shoot 30 second RAW exposures, all night long (about 7 hours each night), with a 2 second delay to allow the camera to file the image to the 32 Gig card. I also used an AC adapter so I wouldn't have to worry about a battery dying in the middle of the night and I used a dew heater around the lens to keep the dew off. The dew heater is a home made heater made from resistors and powered from a 12 volt power supply.

On the last night of shooting, I used a  new toy that had just arrived in the mail. Between the tripod and the camera, I placed an iOptron SkyTracker. Normally, the SkyTracker is polar aligned and will follow the sky as tracks from East to West allowing me to take longer exposures with no star trails. Instead of polar aligning, however, I pointed the polar axis straight up. This allowed the camera to follow the Milky Way in azimuth, that is, horizontally from left to right. I didn't know if this would work, but I was pleasantly surprised. It worked better than I thought it would.

Once I had the images, I improved their look by working on them in Canon's Digital Professional software. It allows me to make adjustments to one image, then the software makes the same adjustment to the rest automatically. I converted the RAW images from high resolution images to much smaller, and workable, JPG images. To make the time lapse video I used ProShow Producer. It is normally used to make slide show type videos, but I figured out how to make it produce a time lapse sequence. This was done by telling the software to run each frame for zero time with an interval of .1 seconds between each frame. ProShow allowed me to add music and text to the video. Finally, Proshow has a menu choice for YouTube videos. It makes the video then uploads it.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed putting it together.

A Video of the Geminid Meteor Shower

Click on Image for a Larger View

Last December, I posted several images of meteors taken from my backyard of the Geminid Meteor Shower. Now, I have done something slightly different with them. Above is a combined image of several of the brightest meteors on the night of Dec. 13-14, 2012.

As I mentioned last December, I took 1,555 images in 8 hours and 27 minutes. Since then I have been learning how to created time lapse videos, specifically for comet PanSTAARS. With those newly learned skills, I created a time lapse video of the whole night. All of the images take about 1.5 minutes to play, but I have done some other things to the video to make it more enjoyable, so it is now 5 minutes long. It is available on YouTube . It is best viewed on a large monitor and at 1080p (click the HD icon at the lower right of the video).

Following Comet PanSTARRS

Click on the images for a larger view

I have been having a lot of fun these last couple of weeks with comet panSTAARS.  The image above was taken on March 18, about 8:30 p.m.  Just as the camera shutter opened for 2.5 seconds, a car's headlights lit up the road and the houses. Normally, headlights are not what I want to see, but in this case it was a happy  to have them. The lens used was my 70-200mm f/2.8 Canon, ISO 1600 and +2/3 exposure compensation.

Although this comet is not as bright as it was hoped to be, I've never seen it without optical aid, it is good enough to capture with a few seconds of exposure and will be in the northwest evening skies heading further north every day. Unfortunately, as it climbs higher in the sky it is also moving away from us and getting fainter. During the last part of May the comet will be about 5 degrees away the North Star.

The above image was taken 5 days earlier, but with more clouds in the sky. This was a 2 second exposure using my 70-200mm f/2.8 Canon lens at 70mm, ISO 800. The shots I took from both days were used to make a time lapse video. You can see it on YouTube here.

The first picture I took of the comet was March 12.  At this time a 1.5 day old moon was just to the right of the comet making for a nice composition. Notice what looks like a star with a shadow above the comet. This is actually an airplane. The airplane and a flock of geese can be seen flying in this time lapse on YouTube I created from that day.

On the same evening, using my 300mm f/4 lens I took the image above which shows the planet Uranus below the comet. They look fairly close together, but in fact are very far apart. The comet was 104 million miles from us and Uranus was 1,953 million miles away.

Geminid Meteor Shower

What a wonderful night of meteor watching!  This year's Geminid Meteor Shower, on December 13-14, has got to be one of the best in a long time.  I set up my camera in my backyard and started shooting around 6:30 p.m. and didn't stop until about 4:30 a.m.  In those 10 hours I shot 1,155 pictures.  I didn't know how many of those images had meteors in them until I got some sleep.  Four hours later, I started going through each one, and I was amazed!  I got 37 meteors, quite a few airplanes and a few tumbling satellites.  Here are a few of the better ones.  Above is a Geminid burning up in the Earth's atmospher at 1:09 a.m., just below the Orion constellation.

This Geminid, at 1:17 a.m., below the bright star Sirius, starts out as a faint streak then explodes into a burst of light (click on the image for a larger view).  This particular meteor shower's debris is from a comet "rock", an asteriod called 3200 Phaethon.  Most showers are from debris streams left over from comets, however, in this case, this comet is dead, but the debris stream is still alive and well.

Here we have the Winter Milky Way between the Geminid and Orion on the right.  Geminids seemingly come from the constellation Gemini, just out of the picture at the top.

At 3:16 a.m., just as clouds started rolling in, a nice bright Geminid streaks at upper left while Orion is exiting at upper right.

This is not a meteor, but a very slow moving and tumbling satellite.  The picture is a combination of eight images.  Each exposure lasted 20 seconds plus 1 second interval, therefore the satellite traveled from top to bottom in 2 minutes and 48 seconds.  The gaps are from the 1 second intervals between ead shot.

Technical Data:

• Camera: Canon 4Ti on a tripod
• Lens: Canon 10-22mm f/3.5 (set at 10mm f3.5)
• ISO: 3200
• Exposures: 1,555 shots, each 20 seconds
• AC adapter in place of battery
• Dew Heater powered from a 110v/12v transformer wrapped around lens for dew prevention
• Canon Intervalometer for unattended exposures
• USB connecter from Camera to laptop for automaticlaly downloading images