Day 40 Messier Galaxy Imaging, Asteroids Video

An excellent clear night with no Moon. I used the SBIG ST9XE to image a number of Messier Galaxies. This was M88 - a 30 second image after reduction. From the plate solved stretched image below it is evident that stars down to Mag 16 are being detected.

and the Plate Solved M88 Image

The next galaxy is M65

and M81

M82 with SN2014J Fading

 M84

Minor Planets or Asteroids have come to the fore since the incident last year in Russia. Here is the video about the NASA Grand Challenge.

Day 39 Mars and Martians - Frank Acfield Lecture on Mars - Identifying stars on any image on the web.

It is 6:39 a.m. here in Spain ( 05:39 U.T.) and the Moon and Mars are visible in the lightening sky.  I used my ETX90 on a tripod to view Mars through the front window of my litttle house here. The ETX was very out of focus and I had to use the lamp that is fixed underneath the Cabrera arch to get approximate focus before I moved on to Mars. It was quite small with the 32mm eyepiece on the ETX. No sign of missiles being fired from "a great gun" on  the surface as described at the beginning of  the H.G. Wells book "The War of the Worlds" - well that's one less thing to worry about! I looked up the book in my Kindle to find the reference to Ogilvy the astronomer in his observatory.

" I still remember that vigil very distinctly: the black and silent observatory, the shadowed lantern throwing a feeble glow upon the floor in the corner, the steady ticking of the clockwork of the telescope, the little slit in the roof - an oblong profundity with the stardust streaked across it. Ogilvy moved about, invisible but audible. Looking through the telescope one saw a circle of deep blue and the little round planet swimming in the field. It seemed such a little thing, so bright and small and still, faintly marked with transverse stripes, and slightly flattened from the perfect round. But so little it was , so silvery warm, - a pin's head of light! It was as if it quivered, but really this was the telescope vibrating with the activity of the clockwork that kept the planet in view"

 The reference to the transverse stripes and polar flattening seems to me more like a description of Jupiter than Mars but it is fiction after all! I was trying to remember the description of Mars in the Edgar Rice Burroughs book "A Princess of Mars" (recent film version "John Carter" }and 74 pence and 30 seconds later there was the book on my kindle! I wonder what Wells and Burroughs would have thought of that. I will read the downloaded book later!

This was the situation with the Moon and Mars. Saturn was blocked by a building so I could not see it.

 Here is the data provided by Cartes du Ciel for the planet at this time from this location

Magnitude: -1.1
Diameter: 13.9 "
Illuminated fraction: 0.985
Phase: -14 ?
Distance: 0.6736 au
Solar distance: 1.6363 au
Velocity: 22.4km/s
Position angle: 35.9
Pole inclination: 19.7
Sun inclination: 24.2
Central meridian: 311.02
Ephemeris: DE405
Date: 2014-03-22 05h39m00s

Coordinates: Apparent Topocentric
Apparent RA: 13h36m17.08s DE:-07?00'29.8"
Mean of the date RA: 13h36m15.31s DE:-07?00'22.5"
Mean J2000 RA: 13h35m31.24s DE:-06?55'53.6"
Ecliptic L: +204?51'49" B:+02?48'43"
Galactic L: +321?54'29" B:+54?18'21"

Visibility for your observatory:
Cabrera 2014-03-22 05h39m00s ( UTC )
Universal Time: 2014-03-22T05:39:00 JD=2456738.73542
Local sidereal time:17h28m59s
Hour angle: 03h52m 42s
Azimuth:+243?54'40.5"
Altitude:+20?09'53.9"
Rise: 20h02m Azimuth+98?17'
Culmination: 1h47m +45?56'
Set: 7h28m Azimuth+261?41'

I just spotted this Patrick Moore video on Twitter from the West Yorkshire Astronomical Society that I follow - have a look by clicking on the image below..

Of course this all seems dated as we can satisfy our curiosity about Mars in a much simpler way now. Watch this very brief Curiosity Rover update from a few days ago. When the video ends it goes straight on to the previous report so stop when you have had enough!

On Day 33 I had discussed Frank Acfield and his course of lectures 45 years ago.

I looked back at the notes I had taken on 29th January 1969 about Mars which was the topic of Lecture No. 7.

I was looking back at images taken here in Cabrera with my Canon 40D and 38mm lens and came across this one

With so many stars it can be difficult to work out which part of the sky this is so I thought I would try astrometry.net which solves images and labels them. I submitted this and 30 seconds later I was told that it was successful and an annotated version of my image was returned.

Additional details were returned

I also submitted this image

and this solution was returned

After a little bit of work in photoshop.....

I managed to get time on T13 in Siding Spring again and took this 10 minute image of IC 2177

This was the effect of solving it in astrometry.net

The evening approached and it looks like another clear evening. I set up the telescope with the Canon 40D attached to an old 135mm lens that I used to use when I had my old Zenith film camera (actually I still have it)  with the appropriate adaptor. I went through the usual 6 star alignment - this time I used a flexible ball head between the camera and camera mount on the 4 inch refractor so I could align the two imaging systems. Again perfect go to once aligned. I was using CCDSoft on the 4 inch and using that as a guider effectively to test out the 135mm lens. I was using APT software again on the Canon. The main difficulty is of achieving focus on the lens as I was using the 30m powered USB cable to run both cameras and the telescope control from inside the house but I managed it with a bit of trial and error. In using the Nexstar remote handset on the laptop screen during alignment the instructions say that I should not use the "real" handset but I found that if I did it was not a problem. When I told the telescope to slew to an alignment star using the simulated handset I would go out and check through the finder "scope" and use the real handset to centre the star. I would then go indoors and do the final adjustment to centre the star in the CCDSoft reticle using the simulated handset and then press ENTER to tell the telescope it was centred in the finder and then ALIGN to tell it it was centred in the "eyepiece". It may sound complicated but in fact it is extremely straightforward and simple. The polar alignment that I did originally was the key.

The telescope sits outside under its scopecoat on the tripod and I find that extremely satisfactory with my telescope 2 setup. I know it is Spain and it rarely rains but when it does the scopecoat does its job. I don't see any problems in doing this in the UK to save having to dismantle the telescope constantly. I have 3 scopecoats here - one for Telescope 2 as described, one for Telescope 3 (TAL1) and for the C14. With my C14 and Paramount I need stepladders to be able to take off or put on its scopecoat - that is the most difficult part! But the C14 is still sitting indoors waiting for its suitable location - I am working on that!

From the terrace towards the La Pilica hill I could see Ursa Major standing on its tail to the North East, Jupiter high in the sky to the South, Castor and Pollux shining brightly, the Pleiades to the West, Cassiopeia geting ready to slide under Polaris as Ursa Major went overhead later on and a glowing mass of stars in a way that I would never see from Lancashire.

I am using Microsoft "One Drive" to simplify saving images so I set up APT with today's date on OneDrive on my controlling laptop knowing that the images would be accessible from my other laptop.

March 2014 - Moon, Saturn and Mars in the morning, Siding Spring imaging of NGC 2442, NGC 3324, NGC 3293, IC 2391, NGC 2432, IC 2944 .

It is 6 a.m. here in Spain (5 a.m. U.T.) and I have just been out to look at the incredible view of the Moon close to the planet Saturn with the planet Mars shining at magnitude -1 to the west. It is quite a sight in the early morning sky. I used my 8 X 30 binoculars to view the Moon and Saturn- quite spectacular to see the planet and Moon in the same field of view with craters near the Moon's terminator very clear and sharp in my excellent binoculars.

A sunny day with a little chill to the air. This morning  I started to image an object from Telescope T3 in New |Mexico and the observatory roof immediately closed. I am in the middle of taking an image of NGC 2442 from Telescope T13 (single shot colour) in Siding Spring Australia. So far so good. The script is running and has found 98 stars in the plate solution that it uses to centre the object - that means the sky is clear and the image should be OK. T13 has quite a wide field of view so many objects are too small to image. NGC 2442 is a galaxy that only has a major axis of 6 minutes of arc so it will not fill much of the T13 field of 97' X 73' of arc.

Still waiting for the main image to reach the server but the preview image has arrived.

I then moved on to image the nebula NGC 3324- here is the preview image.

The cluster towards the bottom of the image is NGC 3293. I took another 10 minute image with that cluster centralised.I will process the image later - this is just a jpeg preview.

Another target I have wanted to image is IC 2391 or Caldwell 85. (C85).  This is an open cluster in  the Constellation of Vela with a major axis of 60 minutes of arc so it will fit quite well within the T13 field of view. here is the preview

Whilst in the southern hemisphere I imaged the open cluster NGC 3532 which is Caldwell C91 which has a major axis of 50 minutes of arc.

Again a 10 minute exposure on Telescope T13

 

The next target is IC 2944 or Caldwell 100. This cluster is 35 minutes of arc across.

The preview jpeg arrived

Day 37 Planet visibility - Current appearance of the Moon and Saturn - Sky and Telescope's Week.

I spent most of the day planning my more permanent location for my main telescope. It started cloudy in the day but cleared and was warm later. I know that the Moon and Saturn are going to appear close to each other in the sky tonight but the moon will not rise until 11:9 p.m. with a transit at 2:39 a.m. so I need to make sure I don't miss that. The Moon will have a phase of about 79% (waning)

This shows the visibility of Solar System Objects for tomorow

This is what the Moon will look like

and this is the current view of Saturn if you have a big telescope!

This week's Sky and Telescope's video is worth watching.

For those in New York and elsewhere the occultation was spoiled by poor weather this morning - I don't know if anyone managed to see it.

Day 36 List of Supernovae Discovered in 2014

A cloudy start to the day. Starting to think about Supernovae searching for when I have my suitable Spanish location. I have listed all supernovae discovered in 2014. The data was obtained from the IAU List of Recently Discovered Supernovae.

Object Host Galaxy Discovery Date Type Name Discoverer 2014A NGC 5054 2014 1 1 IIP 2014A Kim, Zheng et al. (LOSS) 2014B NGC 4939 2014 1 2 IIP 2014B Kim, Zheng et al. (LOSS) 2014C NGC 7331 2014 1 5 Ib 2014C Kim, Zheng et al. (LOSS) 2014D UGC 7170 2014 1 1 Ia 2014D Howerton, Drake et al. (Catalina Real-time Transient Survey) 2014E UGC 7034 2014 1 7 Ia 2014E Howerton, Drake et al. (Catalina Real-time Transient Survey) 2014F NGC 6667 2014 1 11 II 2014F Itagaki 2014G NGC 3448 2014 1 14 IIn 2014G Itagaki; Wiggins 2014H Anon. 2014 1 14 Ia 2014H Li, Mo, Wang, Zhang (THU-NAOC Transient Survey) 2014I Anon. 2014 1 17 Ia 2014I Parker 2014J NGC 3034 2014 1 21 Ia 2014J Fossey 2014K Anon. 2014 1 22 Ia 2014K Cortini 2014L NGC 4254 2014 1 26 Ic 2014L Zhang, Wang et al. (THU-NAOC Transient Survey) 2014M Anon. 2014 1 18 Ia 2014M Ma, Wei, Shang, Wang, Wang 2014N ESO 246-G22 2014 1 27 IIP 2014N Parker 2014O ESO 263-G4 2014 2 2 IIP 2014O Parker et al. 2014P ESO 264-G49 2014 2 2 IIn 2014P Parker 2014Q Anon. 2014 1 29 Ia 2014Q Morokuma et al. (KISS); Zhou, Mo, Wang, Zhang (TNTS) 2014R UGC 5055 2014 2 8 Ia-p 2014R Zhou, Chen, Wang, Zhang (THU-NAOC Transient Survey) 2014S Anon. 2014 2 21 II 2014S Tanaka et al. (Kiso Supernova Survey) 2014T Anon. 2014 2 22 IIn 2014T Tanaka et al. (Kiso Supernova Survey) 2014U NGC 3859 2014 2 23 II 2014U Tanaka et al. (Kiso Supernova Survey) 2014V NGC 3905 2014 2 21 II 2014V Smartt, Smith et al. (Pan-STARRS1 3pi Survey) 2014W Anon. 2014 1 25 Ia 2014W Dhungana, Ferrante et al. (ROTSE) 2014X ESO 379-G31 2014 3 1 Ia 2014X Parker 2014Y Anon. 2014 3 2 IIn 2014Y Zhang, Wang, Mo (THU-NAOC Transient Survey) 2014Z ESO 114-G4 2014 3 6 Ia 2014Z Parker 2014aa NGC 3861 2014 3 7 Ia 2014aa Arbour 2014ab Anon. 2014 3 9 IIn 2014ab Howerton, Drake eet al. (Catalina Real-time Transient Survey) 2014ac NGC 5837 2014 3 9 Ia 2014ac Leonini et al. 2014ad Anon. 2014 3 12 I-p 2014ad Howerton, Drake et al. (Catalina Real-time Transient Survey)

Day 35 The Moon Spica and Mars

Another good hot day allowing me to have breakfast on the terrace but in the evening clouds moved in.

I am still working on the images from Monday (Day 33) so I spent some time doing that.

The four images below are of M40, M51, M63 and M81 - all taken with no filter and 30s exposure except for M81 which was 60 seconds. Clearly M40 does not look as though it should be in the Messier list. It looks remarkably like a double star - and that is exactly what it is. Messier was checking it I believe because Hevelius (Wikipedia Link) reported seeing a nebula there and although he could only see a double star he still included it as number 40 in his list. It is actually the double star Winnecke 4.

The Moon, Spica and Mars are close together in the sky tonight. Here are some details.

Day 34 - another clear night with the Moon rising later.

Having complained in the past about poor weather limiting my amateur astronomy when I get a series of nights of good weather I collect so much interesting data that I can't keep up. Even though the Moon became a pain later in the evening tonight I really didn't want to stop and ending up taking several hundred images- some single images and some "subs" to add together later.  I am way behind now - but I can't really complain.

I am really surprised at how accurate the goto is on my CGEM mount after a 6 star alignment. I imaged a lot of objects and each time the telescope faithfully slewed to the object. Only very minor adjustments were needed to centre them in the cross hair at the centre of the 38' X 38' field. I was able to use 60 second unguided exposures without any problem - 2 minutes were pushing it and a five minute trial showed distinctive trailing.

This is a 1 minute unguided exposure of M36 in Auriga as a negative.( Auriga is in a good position for me - well away from the Moon tonight)

 

 It is amazing how many stars you can image in a 1 minute exposure - this is from the centre of Cabrera "town" with a full Moon, a light under Cabrera Arch a few fet away and some light pollution from Garrucha Port at the coast. The box below shows that 210 stars were mapped from this image against catalogue stars.

Here is the plate solution that gives the details of the exact centre of the image

By getting an image link to the SkyX charts I can superimpose the chart and image and add labels derived from star catalogues to get B and V magnitudes for many of the stars. Stars that were included in the Tycho catalogue of 1997 are picked up by the software and the labels added. The Tycho instrument on the Hipparcos-Tycho satellite measured B and V magnitudes so stars included in Tycho are labelled with both magnitudes. Other stars are identified through other catalogues but do not have the photometric data that I need. However the Tycho data was re-examined and more accurate values determined with a total of 2.5 million stars! (Tycho 2 data).  However if I do a plate solution in the AAVSO VPhot online photometry software it gives Tycho 2 data or accepted values from the AAVSO database, Here is a sample of the labels from the centre of M36 - there are so many stars if I show the entire cluster all you can see is overlapping labels!! Of course there is more data that can be displayed in the labels such as distance of each star in light years , stellar type, RA and DEC coordinates etc. By plate solving you can apply this data to almost any star in your image for identification or scientific purposes.

Here are similar images of M37 and M38 showing the results of 1, 10 and 60 second exposures.

Day 33 My 1969 visit to Frank Acfield at Forest Hall Observatory in Newcastle.

Not a bad day but I decided to give the full Moon its dominance today and did no observing.

I had been thinking about how I got started in serious practical astronomy and remembered Frank Acfield who I knew in the late sixties when I was a young electrical engineer based in Blyth Power Station in Northumberland but living in Manor House Road in Jesmond in Newcastle(A lot of people I have since met seemed to live temporarily in Jesmond for some reason!).

          Frank Acfield                     Forest Hall Observatory

I visited Frank at his observatory in Forest Hall in Newcastle about 4 miles from Jesmond (on the left - images courtesy of BBC Sky at Night) -  and looked through his ten inch reflector at the Moon. That view and his enthusiasm really got me hooked. I had been in the dome at the Godlee Observatory in the UMIST building in Manchester University - the building where I was a student for 3 years, but had never got to look through the telescope there. (See my recent Godlee visit images here). I had only used a 60mm refractor prior to Frank's reflector.

I joined his course at Newcastle University. There was a course "text" recommended by Frank called "Stars at a Glance" which he thought was ideal for an introductory astronomy course.

As part of the course which as you can see was called  "An Introduction to Astronomy" we all got to visit his observatory. I think he split us up into groups of appropriate size and got us to visit the dome on non- course nights when the Moon was at an appropriate phase. I remember looking though his 10 " reflector at the Moon, being very impressed and thinking that I had to have one of those. Not too long later a 10" reflector was made for me by an amateur in Iver in Buckinghamshire.

I missed the first night of the course but took notes for all of the other lectures.(See later blog for details)

Frank Acfield was constantly referred to on The Sky at Night by Patrick Moore as his "very good friend Frank Acfield" Watch for the reference to Frank in this video

Day 32 Clear night - Trial of 4" Refractor and SBIG ST9XE Combination

A clear night with a 99% phase Moon!  I removed the focal reducer from my 4" refractor setup and took a number of images. The go to was very accurate once I went throught the normal setup on the CGEM. Most gotos were dead centre. I targeted a number of open clusters. All my images were 30 seconds. First of all M35 taken with a V filter.

I carried out a plate solution in SkyX to determine the field of view and plate scale.

So the field of view of the SBIG camera +4" refractor without the focal reducer is 38' 37" X 38' 37" and the plate scale is 4.53 arcseconds per pixel.  The camera is 83 degrees off north - I could rotate the camera to make north at the top to make life simpler. So the gotos were accurate to within that 38 minute field of view.

Then M35 again with a B Filter this time for the same exposure. The star brightnesses change depending upon their colour.

I will load both of these into VPhot at the AAVSO and determine V and B magnitudes for as many of the cluster stars as possible.

Then on to M36 with a V Filter

M37 with a V Filter

and M38 with a V Filter

OK not very exciting images but jam packed with data about the clusters. It just needs a bit of work to extract it!

I can make it more exciting in Photoshop! - Same image as above

Of course all of the data has now gone!!

I took a 30 second image of M81

 

and checked on the state of the supernova in M82

This was the image taken a few days back with my90 mm  ETX and Canon 40D

 A 30s image of globular cluster M3

 and open cluster M44

 then galaxy M64

and finally open star cluster M67 (Unfiltered)

Day 31 - C14 Telescope with SBIG ST9XE Camera

No Spanish astronomy today - I have taken some remote cluster images from New South Wales that I am working on but thought I would describe my C14 setup with and without a focal reducer. I show an f/6.3 reducer here but have now moved on to a X0.8 reducer.

Camera Setup 1 SBIG ST-9XE with C14 at full focal length

The camera is an SBIG ST-9XE which has a pixel array of 512 X 512 square pixels each of which measures 20 microns on each side.

This gives a CCD side length of 512 X 20 microns which is 10.2 mm. Of course as the CCD is square with square pixels I get a square image.  If the camera is used with my  f/11 Celestron 14 SCT, which has an clear aperture of 355.5mm ,then the focal length is 11 X 355.5 = 3910 mm. The CCD dimensions and focal length can be used to determine the field of view of the CCD with this particular telescope setup .With a knowledge of the field of view of the entire chip the number of arcseconds per pixel can be determined. The FOV is given by 10.2/3910 radians which is 8.96 minutes of arc. The number of arc seconds per pixel will therefore be 8.96X60/512 = 1.05 arcesconds per pixel. This is close to the figure determined by the method below.

 The exact scale can be determined by taking an image then finding a plate solution using The Sky which gives the exact number of arcseconds corresponding to each pixel.

Here is an example. The image below was taken with the set up described above.

 

The astrometric solution gives the scale of 1.09 arcseconds per pixel.

 

 So this means with 512 pixels, the exact size of each image is 512 X 1.09 arcseconds = 558.08" = 9.3'

So the Field of View with this set up is 9.3 arc minutes X 9.3 arc minutes.

Note also that the position angle from North is 0.19 degrees which is an acceptable value. It is not essential to have the camera with North at the top but avoids having to rotate the image to give a North up view.

Camera Setup 2 SBIG ST-9XE with C14 with f/6.3 Focal Reducer

  If an f/6.3 focal reducer is used the calculations are as follows.

Pixel size					2.00E-05
Number of Pixels					512
Chip Size					1.02E+01	mm
Focal Length of Telescope					3910	mm
Diameter of Primary Mirror					355.5	mm
FocalRatio					11
Effective Focal Length with f/6.3 reducer					2239.364	mm
FOV					4.57E-03	radians
FOV					1.57E+01	minutes of arc
Image scale					1.84E+00	arcseconds
From plate solution the ACTUAL Image Scale is					2.02	arcseconds per pixel
So image size is					17.23733	minutes of arc minutes of arc

The image above was taken at f/6.3 and solved as below

So the image size is 17.24 minutes of arc