Day 51 No observing today - looking back at 2013cs Supernova

Back in May 2013 I used a V filter for a 5 minute remote exposure of 2013 cs using T9 (Siding Spring). Using the V comparison stars shown in VPhot a V magnitude for 2013cs was determined as 13.979. This is slightly fainter than the predicted peak magnitude for 2013cs of 13.84 (based on a typical predicted magnitude of -19 for a Type 1a [ Link ] ).

See Stan Howerton image of Sn 2013cs on 20th May 2013 here.

 

 

Day 50 - 2014 Supernovae to date.

A lot on the news today about rain bringing down the Sahara desert in the UK. The ony day I can really remember it raining hard here in Cabrerea converted my car from shiny to dirt splattered that everyone said was due to the Sahara desert. (February)

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2014 Supernovae. DAta courtesy of IAU CBAT.

Day 49 Cloudy day - Telescope planning - Messier 83

A cloudy start to the day - but even so the Sun never seems to be far away - it is still generally bright.

I am working on the cabling and set up for the two telescopes when they are in position in June. This is the setup plan:

No observing here in Spain but i did manage this image of M83 from T30 in Siding Spring

Day 48 NGC 4945, dark New South Wales skies.

A misleading darker morning with the clock beating the Sun after the change to daylight savings yesterday. Of course I would prefer darkness saving time adjustment so it gets dark earlier in the evening so I can get started earlier! At 7 a.m. it was still fairly dark and Ursa Major was to the left of the hill La Pilica and Cassiopeia to the right. Vega was brilliant overhead. Who needs a clock! Looking at the position of the Sun today I see that "Mid-Day" when the Sun is highest in the Sky is about 11 minutes past 2 this afternoon. (Well not after noon actually). The Sun will be about 57 degrees in altitude gradually rising to a maximum of about 77 degrees on June 21st.

Here is Sky and Telescope's Sky Week starting today.

I managed to get some time on remote telescope T13 today and imaged NGC 4945 - quite a spectacular sight against the black New South Wales sky.

Not far from NGC 4945 whilst looking at the star chart for the region I spotted what looked like an unnamed "cluster" - not necessarily an actual cluster in that it may just be a chance line of sight effect  - perhaps it does have a name but I couldn't locate it - so I took an image with T13 centred on its RA and DEC. This was the result

I solved the plate - the details are here

 Although objects were visible this evening there was suficient intermittent cloud to call a halt to any observing plans.

Day 47 Clocks forward 1 hour in Europe - Pallas and Pomona

The clocks have "Sprung forward" by an hour today in Spain and in the UK so that Spain is now 2 hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time or Universal Time (U.T.). I checked my software to make sure it had all adjusted automatically as I have settings for Leyland Observatory, Cabrera Observatory, Siding Spring in New South Wales, New Mexico Skies , and various other remote telescope locations in the United States. I need to make sure that I know the local time whichever telescope I am using particularly to make advance automated bookings as these are obviously based on local time.

A couple of years ago I gave a presentation on remote imaging to Bolton Astronomical Society. I have now converted this to pdf format from PowerPoint so it can be downloaded. Click on the image to get the pdf file. It may take a while to download.

 A clear night tonight and I am trying out the CGEM mount with the SkyX software for the first time. I aligned the CGEM manually from the handset outside and aligned on 2 stars - certainly not as accurate as the 6 star alignment. SkyX connected without a problem having set the USB port to port 8. I slewed the telescope to the first target  by entering "2 Pallas" into the search box and clicking the slew button. Of course I was faced with a number of dots in the 38' field one of which could be the minor planet. I saved the image and solved the plate. In fact I had missed the field containing Pallas completely. By using the slow motion controls within SkyX I managed to get an image which solved to correspond to the position of Pallas. Pallas was extremely bright so I centred it in the on screen cross hairs and performed a "synch". I should have carried out a 6 star alignment! With the solved image in which Pallas was indicated by its SkyX label I took a number of images and moved on to look at minor planet 32 Pomona. A lot fainter than Pallas and harder to spot but definitely there. I took a few images and went back to Pallas to take another image. I then went back to Pomona and reimaged it so I could detect the movement.

The first image was taken at 20:46 U.T. and the second at 22:11 U.T. so it has moved over an 85 minute period.

 

The animation clearly shows the motion of Pallas.

 

 these are the Pomona images 21:44 U.T and 22:20 U.T.  - a time difference of 36 minutes.

  

The Pomona animation - ignore the edge effects.

Day 46 Messier Objects M101, M5, M10 and NGC 6811 imaged using T11 in New Mexico

A cloudy blowy day here in Cabrera with some odd bits of sunshine getting through.

T11 in new Mexico was available so I took this 10 minute image of M101.

and then a 10 minute image of the globular cluster M5

and then a 10 minute exposure of M10

 

and a fairly spectacular closer look at M10

 This is the telescope used for the above images

The video below (no commentary) shows the Rosetta Spacecraft. From Wikipedia:

"Rosetta is a robotic spacecraft built and launched by the European Space Agency to perform a detailed study of comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko. It is part of the ESA Horizon 2000 cornerstone missions and is the first mission designed to both orbit and land on a comet.^" 

"Comet Churyumov–Gerasimenko, officially designated 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, is a comet with a current orbital period of 6.45 years.   It will next come to perihelion on 13 August 2015. Comet Churyumov–Gerasimenko is the destination of the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft mission, launched on 2 March 2004, which "woke up" from hibernation mode on 20 January 2014 to monitor the comet and select a suitable site for an attempted landing in November 2014 by its Philae lander."

Although the comet will be low in the early evening sky from Cabrera it is magnitude 20 - requiring a big telescope to detect it - way beyond the capability of my telescopes. (About 300,000 times fainter than the faintest star you can see with the naked eye if my calculation is correct!!"

It is currently in Sagittarius

The clouds have cleared at 6 pm here in Cabrera - hopefully it will stay that way. My plan tonight is to use the 4 inch refractor with the SkyX to look at some of the minor planets now that I have updated the large minor planet database on my laptop - it now has 638926 minor planets!!

 I spoke too soon - clouds rolled in and practical astronomy was abandoned.  No remote telescopes available either.

Day 45 How much dark time in the summer in Almeria?

I have now confirmed the location of my Spanish Observatory between June 2014 and November 2014. It will be here in Cabrera but at a high point with 360 degree views. This is it on the left.

The telescopes will be situated to get the best view towards the South where I can take advantage of the lower latitude of 37 degrees - being able to see further South than from my observatory at 53 degrees. It may seem that June is an odd time to start with less dark hours than in the winter but again because of the latitude the day / night variation is less. I have compared the variation netween Preston (Leyland Observatory is very close to Preston) and Almeria in the charts below and roughly estimated the number of hours of darkness in each location between June and November.

The images are courtesy of Gaisma and the copyright is theirs. To obtain a chart for your own location please visit their website here.

A cloudy evening so no imaging.

Day 44 A Lunar Eclipse from 2001 and today's observations of Variable Star V 0552 Auriga

Outside my front door today I was lucky enough to bump into the Norwegian author George Manus who kindly provided me with signed copies of two of his books. Browsing throught them briefly today I noted an astronomical observation made from Cabrera on January 9th 2001. This was a total lunar eclipse. I used my "time machine" to go back and run through the eclipse. Here is the simulation of the Moon part way through the eclipse courtesy of Software Bisque "The SkyX". The time was 18:14 U.T. when the Earth's shadow was part way across the Moon as in the image.

At 22:27 U.T. the shadow was half way en route to the end of the eclipse.

If you can get hold of "Thoughts and Events - The first 51 days in 2001" then it is worth reading the whole section to see the background to the observation by George Manus.

The other book is "Reflections" by George Manus.

Another clear evening and I decided to try to monitor a variable star with a very short period of less than 2 hours. I had managed previously to image BL Cam the rapidly varying star in Camelopardalis the Giraffe. From a sequence of images I was able to generate the light curve for this star:

This star has a period of 0.0391 of a day which is about 56 minutes.

Tonight's target is V0552 Auriga which was chosen because it also has a short period - 0.0609 days which corresponds to about 88 minutes.

The AAVSO provides a locating chart for the variable as shown below.

Variable Star V0552 Auriga

This is my 15 second image as a negative. Note also the presence of another variable star VV Auriga.

This variable star has a period slightly longer than 88 minutes - about 425 days!

When I started to develop a light curve I realised that the SNR - Signal to Noise Ratio was insufficent so I need to reimage this object with a longer exposure - making sure I do not saturate comparison and check stars. To be continued.....

Day 43 Skychart download and Messier galaxies

I came across this source for a free sky chart that is provided month by month. If you go to skymaps.com you can download a pdf that should print easily - if you need a paper copy. It shows you the current objects visible and list objects for the naked eye, binoculars and telescope.

Click on the image to go there.

 

This Week from Sky and Telescope

An excellent night tonight for naked eye astronomy with Jupiter shining brightly overhead, the Pleiades . the Hyades , the Great Nebula in Orion and much more. It is a good opportunity for a Messier Marathon to try and observe as many Messier objects as possible as pointed out in the above video. Unfortunately I have a very restricted view at the moment so cannot really try to do this but it might be interesting to spot as many as I can on one night this week.

Still working through my images taken this week this one is M99.

 and M98

and M90

M84 and its neighbourhood

I have a backlog of images that I am working through. On 23rd March this year I used the Meade 4" refractor and SBIG STX9E to image a number of galaxies. M84 was one of these and is shown below again.

M84 is in the constellation of Virgo and is clearly an elliptical galaxy. There are a number of other galaxies in this image and once more by "solving the plate" I can find out what the galaxies are and  get an exact measure of what I have imaged.

I have already set up a Field of View indicator in The SkyX. I select my Meade refractor from a comprehensive list of known telescopes and do the same thing for my SBIG from the camera list. SkyX knows all of the details of these and does a calculation of the field of view. SkyX knows the dimensions of the main chip ( and the guider chip for the SBIG which has two cameras in one effectively) and produces an appropriate diagram to the correct scale when matched to the SkyX chart.

This screenshot illustrates how it works.

 This is a zoomed in view of the above chart with my superimposed image annotated with the galaxies identified by SkyX.

 

This is the data from the plate solution

So if the image is 38 minutes across and the accepted size of M84 is about 6 minutes of arc then there is a discrepancy between that value and the size on my image. 6 minutes should be 6 X 60 / 4.52 pixels which equals 80 pixels or so.(Or more simply = 512*6/38)

I have stretched the image as much as I can to try to bring out an indication of its size to corrrespond to 80 pixels in the image below. The ruler indicates the size in pixels. (The image is 512 X 512 pixels)

 However on checking on the SIMBAD clickable map for M84 the central portion of M84 only measures 4 minutes of arc based on the SIMBAD scale.

On that ruler I measure 35 for the 1 minute dimension at bottom left and 140 for the central blue core - in opther words 4 minutes of arc. That brings it much closer to my image size but it illustrates the potential for variation in supplied and measured values. This is a link to the SIMBAD page.

I thought I would try the astrometry.net website on the same image. It made short work of solving the image and providing results.