3 hour old full moon

Canon Powershot S3 IS, hand held. Moon was 3 hours old, just rising above the trees.

Moonrise at Coast Guard Beach

ntbt

Venus

Ahhh, the joys of cell phone astrophotography. Cropped and brightness / contrast adjusted, that's all.

Moon and Masts

Two schooners in town for the Provincetown Schooner Regatta. Sorry for the poor quality, this is a cell phone photo.

Moonset over Manchester

Here's a quick shot of the moon setting. Probably one of the last Manchester moon shot's I'll take.

I never really did like this apartment but I must say, the photographic opportunities have been great. There used to be 4 or 5 huge trees which all were dying or dead. The town cut those down a few years ago. Once they were gone the camera came out. Odd that tree cutting would improve a natural setting. Then again, as an astronomer, I guess I should know that already!

I'm especially fond of the sunrise reflecting off the building pictures, the sunsets, and of course my lunar eclipse shots that got published in the Union Leader. I'll try and dig some of those up later.

Sun Pillars, the moon and an unwasted night

So we're driving back from the Cape and the skies are pretty nasty, snowing actually. But for some reason I check the Clear Sky Clock and it shows nice skies that night at YFOS. I'm pretty happy, it as been a dreadful winter. I check online to see who else might be going and frankly I'm given some questioning "looks."

But sure enough, as the sun starts setting it starts clearing to the west and we are treated to some nice sun pillars.

This is kind nice. At the time I thought the were sun dogs but I found out I was wrong when writing this post.

So Steve is trying to get Rags to go to YFOS. He'll bring the Burgess and Rags will bring the GoTo Nova and Jeannette drives and drives and we get home.

And the moon is honking bright. Drat, forgot about that. I saw all the blue on Clear Sky Clock and forgot that blue in the last row is bad.

It doesn't matter too much, it is pretty darn cloudy still also so we call it all off.

But around 11pm or 11:30pm it clears up nicely and I get the binoculars out. I'm looking out the south windows now, looking for M36, It takes me a long time to find it. I'm comparing the sky to the chart in Stellarium and it is just wrong. I eventually figure out that I'm putting Mars into Auriga and when I correct that M36 is easily seen. Don't even need averted vision to see a fuzz patch.

The nearby moon makes M38 completely impossible to see. I've got the star patterns dead on but it just isn't there. I'll have to try this when the moon isn't so bright.

I go over to M37 and I find it but just barely. Averted really helps.

I try, half heartedly, for M35 but I'm not too disappointed when I fail to grab that one.

Off to bed now.

Wide Field imaging and MM practice

So, the Messier Marathon was supposed to happen this weekend but we were clouded out both Friday and Saturday. Sunday night was clear and moonless so I figured I get some MM practice time in, as well as shoot some widefield shots of constellations. So off to YFOS I went.

I was, of course, running late, but this was part of the MM practice. How much time does it take from when I get to the site until I am fully set up and aligned?

It turns out that that is 45 minutes, seem pathetically slow but I'll just have to take that into account. Then again, it will be much easier to get to Larry's by dusk for a DST MM in April. I wish I had measured how much time it took until I was aligning, because that initial setup time can happen while it is still light, but does it really matter? As a test, I only used 2 calibration stars for speed. That cuts some time off. (I choose two only because after I did the first one, the GoTo to the second one was pretty darn close.)

I check out M42, but the transparency seems pretty poor, not much detail could be seen. This was also true of looking up at the stars themselves, there didn't seem to be all that many.

So I took my Canon A610 and attached it with a bracket to my counter weight bar. This is something I got on Astromart months ago. Tonight would be the first time I was using it. I took some shots of the Orion Constellation, then the bottom part of the constellation, and then a shot with the Pleiades in it. The A610 can take 15 second frames with 15 second dark frames. I set it to take 10 of these in continuous mode. A manually focused on infinity. I did play around with the ISO setting but sadly the EXIF data does not record that! This is a real shame because one of the shots I took was rather nice and I have no idea what settings I used. I forgot how to set aperture on so I just used whatever the camera was set to.

Just as I was in the middle of shooting, Gardner and Rich showed up for MM marathon of their own. I was glad, I really don't like being at YFOS alone.

Here's a full frame shot of the bottom of Orion. (Click the image to see the full size one.)

Now here is a 100% crop of the sword.

I also tried using Registax to see what it could do with 10 frames. Here it is:


To me this is odd, it didn't do much at all. I was a little disappointed with this. But anyways, it was fun. Here's the shot that turned out best of all.

You can see the Pleiades in the middle upper left, the Hyades Cluster of Taurus in the upper left, Aldebaran showing its orange color. Mirfak and the Alpha Persei Cluster are in the center right, and bright Capella owns the upper right. (You really need to click this one to see anything...)

I do wish there were more stars. This was the best shot of the evening and I don't know how I made it. I know I'll being trying this again and I appreciate any advice.

The haze was getting worse and we all retired to the warming hut to chat a bit. We probably stayed about 15-20 minutes and we checked the sky again and it was getting better.

Gardner was really fighting dew with his binoculars but Rich seemed to be doing wel with his Pronto. Just as I was about to pack it up, he called out that he got M1. Now I've tried for this before with binoculars from Manchester and failed everytime, I wanted to see it. So I punched it into the hand controller and hey, there it was! I was tired so I didn't look much.

I tried for a quick succession of M objects that I knew were in the sky. Bang, they all were there, must have gotten half a dozen in about 2 minutes. It does seem like a Goto scope, once it is setup, really makes short work of a Messier Marathon! ("And yes, I realize that this isn't necessarily the point, just let me enjoy what I do, ok?," he said a bit testily...)

I had to be at work the next day so I reluctantly started tearing down the equipment. By the time I was done the haze had cleared and the skies were gorgeous.

Of course...

Crescent Moon and Venus over Manchester

Here's a shot of the crescent moon and Venus over Manchester NH.

The moon is way over exposed but I needed to do that to get the sunset just right. You can also see star tracks on both the moon and venus but that is expected. I think the exposure was 15 seconds.