20 Seconds of M45

I wasn't really trying to get a good shot here as I was experimenting with "drift aligning" my scope (more on this later), but this is a close-up shot of M45 (aka "Pleiades" & "Seven sisters")...more specifically this is one of the stars that make up M45 named "Merope".

The stars that make up M45 are very visible to the naked eye during the East night sky and look great in binoculars. Only with long-exposure photography do the beautiful blue nebulosity around each of the main stars start to appear. This blue nebula is called a "reflection
nebula" which means that the light from the stars are either behind or within them, illuminating the nebula for us to see.

M45 is 440 light-years away from earth which comes to 2,580,906,240,000,000 miles. It would take us 440 years to get there if we could travel the speed of light (670,616,629 mph). The fastest manned vehicle to date has gone about 24,800 mph..which at that speed would take us over 11 MILLION years to get there......

My First Nebula - M1

After still working out the kinks in the imaging process, I finally had an evening of pain-free image capture a few nights ago. I still have some bugs to work out and I will be addressing those issues next week - for now, take a look at my first nebula: M1 (aka the "Crab Nebula). Post-processing this image took a while, but turned out better than I expected for only a few 20sec exposures!

4th Observing Session: Moon Redux

Noticing a clear night last night I quickly set up the telescope with the intention to photograph the Moon again, but this time with the Meade Color DSI II camera instead of my Canon SLR to see the difference in camera quality.

What you see below is the Moon in its "Waning Gibbous" phase with about 70% of the surface visible. This mosaic was made up of only 3 exposures with slight sharpening and color correction in Photoshop.

3rd Observing Session - Moon & Capella

After a short vacation and the start of fall weather, I was able to do another photography session - this time with my DSLR camera.

The moon was out in full force during this session, which was the prime candidate of the night. Due to the size of the moon (and the wrong eyepiece I was using) I had to take multiple shots of the moon to make this mosaic (the black areas are parts of the moon that I wasn't able to take for whatever reason).

Due to the moon being so bright (and washing out all of the deep space objects) I was limited to viewing stars so I turned my scope to Capella, the 11th brightest star in the sky. Looking at Capella, it looks like one bright point of light, but is actually a close binary star about 42.5 light-years away. Intense X-ray radiation emanates from Capella, most likely due to surface magnetic activity in one of the stars.

2nd Observing Session (M31 & M33)

After a week of clouds we finally got one clear night yesterday so I set up the scope and focused on M31 (the Andromeda galaxy) and M33 (the Triangulum galaxy which I photographed previously). Learning from my first photography session, these two images turned out much better - with sharp focus, 16-bit color processing, better detail and dark frame subtraction.

M31 (aka "Andromedia galaxy") is the closest galaxy to our own (at 2.5 million light-years away) and consists of over a trillion stars (greatly exceeding the amount of stars in our own galaxy). M31 is one of the only galaxies which can be seen with the naked eye in a dark location as it is very bright (magnitude 4.4). M31 and our own Milky Way galaxy are set to collide in 2.5 billion years...




M33 (aka the "Triangulum galaxy") is a galaxy about 3 million light-years away, and is so close to the Andromeda galaxy that both are gravitationally bound to each other. M33 is also on a impact course to the Milky Way, but will take billions of years to reach us.

Space News

Lots of stuff going on this past week in Space related news:

9/29/08 - Critical Failure On Hubble Space Telescope Causes Shuttle Delay
A critical equipment failure aboard the Hubble Space Telescope on the eve of a long-awaited fifth and final shuttle servicing mission put astronomical observations on hold and forced NASA managers to delay the mid-October flight of Atlantis (STS-125). Assuming the Hubble mission is, in fact, delayed to next year, NASA will press ahead with launch of the shuttle Endeavour (STS-126) on a space station assembly mission around Nov. 14, two days earlier than currently planned.

9/28/08 - Finally A Successful Launch For The Falcon 1 Rocket!
The Falcon 1 booster redeemed itself Sunday with an electrifying launch that put an exclamation point on six years of hard work and disappointment for SpaceX, a startup company chartered to revolutionize space travel. The 70-foot-tall rocket successfully delivered a 364-pound hunk of aluminum nicknamed "Ratsat" to orbit on the launcher's fourth flight, ending a streak of three consecutive Falcon 1 failures dating back to 2006. SpaceX touts the Falcon 1 as the first privately-developed liquid-fueled rocket to successfully reach orbit.

9/28/08 - China Is Heating Up The Space Race
Three Chinese astronauts blasted off on the country's third human space voyage and have returned safely to Earth, ending a mission that included the Chinese space program's first spacewalk. China currently three missions planned for 2010 which will demonstrate how to assemble a small space station.