Gemini & Cassiopeia

Sometimes at night I prefer just to look at the sky with my own eye rather than using binoculars or my telescope. I am enjoying trying to learn the various constellations and identifying them in the night sky. Of course, as I begin to identify them I also want to try and capture them with my camera.

And so recently I decided to try and capture Gemini and Cassiopeia which are currently both visible from my back garden. Gemini in particular is quite nice due to Juptier currently sitting within its boundaries so of course I am going to start with it.

Gemini is one of the constellations of the Zodiac and was described in the 2nd century AD by the astronomer Ptolemy. It's name is the Latin for "twins" and it is associated with the twins Castor and Pollux in Greek mythology. In fact the two brightest stars in the constellation are actually named Castor and Pollox. Gemini lies between Taurus to the west and Cancer to the east, with Auriga and Lynx to the north and Monoceros and Canis Minor to the south. In fact you can actually just make out Cancer and Canis Minor in my image below to the left of Gemini.

The other constellation I imaged was Cassiopeia which is named after the vain queen Cassiopeia in Greek mythology, who boasted about her unrivalled beauty. Cassiopeia was also one of the 48 constellations listed by the 2nd-century Greek astronomer Ptolemy. It is easily recognizable due to its distinctive 'W' shape, formed by five bright stars. It is bordered by Andromeda to the south, Perseus to the southeast, and Cepheus to the north. In the image below you should hopefully be able to see it in the central lower area just above the cloud cover.

Space Stations & Iridium Flares

Planets, Stars and Deep Space Objects aren't the only thing you can see by looking up at night. You should easily be able to see the odd tiny spot of light moving quickly across the sky which is of course one of the many satellites which orbit the Earth. These satellites range from the rather huge International Space Station to space debris like discarded rocket boosters. An interesting tool to find out what satellites are passing overhead is Heavens Above, this is a website where you enter your location and it gives you the time a satellite will pass along with its actual path across the sky.

Amazingly enough one object I had never actually seen was the International Space Station even though it is quite bright in the night sky. Therefore I used Heavens Above to find it when it would be visible from my back garden and went out to have a look. Its magnitude was supposedly -2.5 and I have to admit it was very obvious moving across the night sky. I managed to get a 15 second exposure of its transit across the night sky which you can see below. It is quite an amazing site when you realise that what you are seeing is a man made space station with people on board.

Another interesting thing I noticed whilst on Heavens Above is that there is something called Iridium Flares which seem to happen quite consistently every night and actually get up to a magnitude of around -8.5 which is brighter than Venus. It turns out that a satellite flare is the phenomenon caused by the reflective surfaces on satellites (such as antennas or solar panels) reflecting sunlight directly onto the Earth below and appearing as a brief, bright "flare". The Iridium Communications Satellite has a peculiar shapes which results in these flares being quite bright to the point that they can potentially even been seen in daylight.

Anyway after reading about these I decided I had to try and both see and image one of these flares. Seeing them was quite easy and I even got my normally uninterested wife to say "Wow" when she saw one of the bright flares. Imaging them however was a bit of an adventure, my first attempt failed because my timing was off and I got an image of the satellite before and after the flare, the second time was ruined by cloud cover meaning that whilst I saw the flare I failed to aim the camera correctly, the third time the satellite failed to flare for some reason and the forth time was when I forgot part of my tripod meaning I couldn't set up the camera. It was fifth time lucky however and on Easter Saturday I sat outside and finally snapped a picture which you can see below.

This wasn't actually the brightest flare I saw but at least I managed to catch it. You can see the transit of the satellite brighten in the centre which is of course where it has flared.

Stars and Webcams

Webcams are a good cheap tool for looking at planets and the moon but recently I decided that I wanted to see if they could also be used on stars in the hope that I might be able to try and take the odd double star image in addition to sketching them. I decided to start with a nice bright single star to image first by picking Betelgeuse before moving onto a double star which was Almach. I have highlighted the locations of those two stars in the image below.

So as said above I decided to look at Betelgeuse which has a variable magnitude of 0.3 - 1.2 so is reasonably bright and easy to find. In addition it is a red giant so I was hoping I would pick up some nice colour.

As you can see above, I did pick up some nice orange colouring but it isn't the most exciting of images and I can see why people don't normally spend time just targeting individual stars.

I think double stars are different and Almach is a lovely double star with a nice yellow primary component and a tiny blue secondary component so I was hoping this would be a bit more interesting to see.

Yes, this was much more interesting to see and I love how you can see the blue colour of the secondary although I had to over expose the yellow on the primary to enable the webcam to pick up the dimmer companion. In the future it may be possible for me to take two images at different exposures and merge the images together to stop me over exposing the brighter components.

Overall, this has proved that I can at least image doubles in some manner and I may try and look at a few others in the future after I have at least done initial sketches.

Hello Mars!

So the last week of March and beginning of April this year have been terrible for astronomy. I had begun to forget what a star looked like but on the 6th April the clouds finally decided to part and for a few hours at least the sky was open to me. I decided therefore that now was the perfect time to try and image Mars as I was only a few days away from when it was due to look its best for the year.

Thanks to imaging Jupiter in the past I now know a little bit about the settings needed with Sharpcap and was recording videos within 5 minutes of setting everything up. This turned out to be quite handy as it was already about 10.45pm by the time I got around to getting the webcam out and I needed to be up early for work the next day.

I was actually quite happy with how much detail I managed to pick up with my first attempt and therefore decided to give the 2x Barlow a go to increase the magnification.

All I can say is that there was much more detail here than I had expected to pick up with my Xbox Webcam. The darker regions are there to see on both the barlowed and unbarlowed image. Quite simply I am pretty chuffed with this and hope I get a chance to go out again and image it some more. I might try and take a longer length video next time although I need to read up on how long I can image it before planetary rotation causes issues..

My first steps on the Lunar 100

Whilst discussing the moon on the Central Scotland Observers Group forum one of the members mentioned the Lunar 100 as a potential mission for people to undertake. For those of you who don’t know, the Lunar 100 is a list of the Moon's one hundred most interesting regions to observe as described in the April 2004 edition of Sky & Telescope magazine.

There is actually a handy check-list of the Lunar 100 on the Highlands Astronomical Society website along with a nice little diagram showing where on the moon they all are which you can get to via this link.

Anyway, the first three targets on the list are as follows:

L1 - Moon
L2 - Earthshine
L3 - Mare/highland dichotomy

These are all pretty easy for anyone to just go out and see with their naked eye but I thought I would try and grab a picture my compact camera through the 25mm Eyepiece on my telescope.

It isn’t the best to be honest and I don’t think you can make out any Earthshine but I think we can all agree that it is the Moon and the light and dark contrast of the Mare and Highlands is clearly present.

After ticking off these three easy targets in the list I decided to work my way through a few other features on the list. The first of which was L10 - Mare Crisium ("Sea of Crises") which is a lunar mare that is 555 km (345 mi) in diameter. There are some lovely clear craters in this mare but my favourite is the crater Picard, the reason for this is simply because the name makes me think of Captain Picard from Star Trek.

My next target was L12 – Proclus which is a crater located to the west of Mare Crisium which has an asymmetric ray system whose features suggest an oblique impact at a low angle. If you look at the image below of L10 and L12 that I captured you can see the rays actually extending into Mare Crisium itself.

My final target of the night was L25 – Messier & Messier A which are two craters located in the Mare Fecunditatis (“Sea of Fertility"). These two crater are lined up with each other with two near linear rays extending westward for Messier A. It is actually theorised that Messier crater was formed by an impact at a very low angle, and that Messier A could have formed following a rebound by the impacting body

My attempt at capturing Messier and Messier A is shown below and is quite obvious due to its two linear rays.

I did attempt to use my 2x barlow to get a closer picture of these two craters but as usual with my barlow it wasn't very good. The more I try and use it the more I realise I probably need to change it sooner rather than later!

So overall I have enjoyed my introduction into the Lunar 100 and look forward to continuing my exploration of the lunar surface in the future. It at least means that I won’t have to groan in dismay as much when the moon is ruining the view of other objects in the sky.

More Double Stars in Ursa Minor

I have already done a little bit of double star hunting in Ursa Minor but on the last night out in my back garden I decided to go back and see a couple of others. I like looking at targets in Ursa Minor because it is pretty much always visible from my back garden and is high enough to avoid a fair chunk of the local light pollution.

An interesting thing I noted about these two stars I chose to look at tonight was that both have Struve in their name but one was coded as STTA and the other as STF which is the code I have seen before. I therefore did a bit of research and discovered that the reason for the different codes is that a fair amount of the Struve family have been involved in astronomy and here seems to be several double star catalogues related to them! Therefore if you try and look up Struve 143 you would find out that there is three of them, STF 143, STT 143 and STTA 143! 

Anyway, I have decided that for any star that I find with the Struve moniker I am just going to use the coded name from now on. So the stars I looked at tonight were STTA 143 and STF 1798 whose locations are shown in the image below.

STTA 143 (HIP 78761 / SAO 8415)
RA : 16 04 48.95   Dec: +70 15 42.0
Magnitudes: 6.9, 8.8
Separation: 46.6”
Position Angle: 83°

STTA 143 was my first target of the night which I found relatively easily with my GOTO handset. The reasonable magnitudes and wide separation distance of the A & B components meant it was a pretty obvious split to see. As for colour, well both stars looked white to me which ties in with the spectral classifications of A0 & F8. I was quite happy to see that they did match what I was seeing as I was beginning to wonder if I was maybe just missing colour when observing.

STF 1798 (HIP 67959 / SAO 7912)
RA : 13 55 02.30   Dec: +78 23 59.2
Magnitudes: 7.7, 9.7
Separation: 7.6”
Position Angle: 11°

Finding STF 1798 was actually the first real challenge in my astronomy adventure because my GOTO handset didn't have the SAO number in its database. I therefore had to use the Right Ascension and Declination to point my telescope in the right area and then use a print out from stellarium to actually centre in on STF 1798. It was actually quite fun to do as it felt like I was really working to find the star for once and I felt a sense of achievement when I did find it.

In regards to the star itself, it was slightly dimmer than STTA 143 and the separation was much smaller, in fact it was smaller than the separation in any other star I had successfully split so far. This meant that the B component was very close to the brighter A component and at times was lost it the glare. I could make it out most of the time although I was not sure of the colour as it was washed out by the white of the A Component with its F2 stellar classification.

Overall, STF 1798 was probably my favourite star of the night because of the extra challenge in finding it and due to the fact that it is smallest separation value I have split so far. I must have spent about 20 minutes just gazing through the eyepiece watching the component appear and disappear in the glare as atmospheric conditions changed.

Canes Venatici Messier Hunting

The 23rd of March was a lovely clear and cold night so I couldn’t resist heading along to Harperrig where I met up with 4 other people from the Central Scotland Observers Group. I turned up without a plan but very soon I decided that with the lack of a moon I would try and at least tackle all the Messier objects in a constellation. My constellation of choice was Canes Venatici and I can happily say that it was a complete success with me managing to see all 5 Messier objects there. In additional I also bagged a Caldwell object, an interesting star called La Superba and a further galaxy that isn’t in the Caldwell or Messier lists but is one of the Herhsel 400 objects. You can see the location of all the objects I saw in the image below.

For those of you unaware of Canes Venatici I shall give you all a little background information. It was created in the 17th Century by Johannes Hevelius out of some faint stars which up until then had been included within Ursa Major and its name in Latin means "hunting dogs". The constellation is often depicted in illustrations as representing the dogs of Boötes the Herdsman, a neighbouring constellation to the east. Its other neighbouring constellations are Coma Berenices, and Ursa Major.

So now that I have dispensed with that bit of trivia I will get down to the nitty gritty of explaining what I saw!

Messier 3
RA: 13 42 11.62 Dec: +28 22 38.2
Type: Globular Star Cluster
Magnitude: 6.2

I had actually previously looked at this DSO before and on the whole it had looked like a prominent blurry cloud of light. With it being a bit darker tonight I was hoping to maybe see a bit more. What I saw was a much brighter and clearer patch of light in the sky but I still found it hard to resolve any specific stars in the cluster without using averted vision. I don’t know if maybe this is the best I can get visually with my telescope or if I need to just spend more time observing the cluster to get more out of it.

It is still quite an amazing object to look at anyway and I am sure I will be back again in the future.

Messier 51 / Whirlpool Galaxy (+ Companion Galaxy NGC 5195)
RA: 13 29 52.7 Dec: +47 11 43
Type: Spiral Galaxy
Magnitude: 8.4 (NGC 5195 - 10.5)

The Whirlpool Galaxy is a spiral galaxy estimated to be approximately 23 million light-years away from the Milky Way. An interesting aspect of Messier 51 is that it has a companion galaxy known as NGC 5195 that it is actually interacting with.

To be honest, I have actually tried to see this galaxy a few times from the back garden but have never managed to see it so I was very happy when I finally managed to spot it. In addition, I even managed to see the companion galaxy which I wasn’t actually expecting to see.

Whilst I struggled to see any of the spiral arms via my 127 MAK I did get the chance to look at it through a 12 inch Dobsonian scope which did show up some of the spiral structure. It was still a nice enough sight in my own scope and with averted vision it is possible I might be able to pick out some more of the galactic structure in my own telescope.

Messier 63 / Sunflower Galaxy
RA: 13 15 49.3 Dec: +42 01 45
Type: Spiral Galaxy
Magnitude: 9.3

The Sunflower Galaxy is a spiral galaxy estimated to be approximately 37 million light-years away from the Milky Way. Supposedly the spiral arms are meant to resemble the petals of a flower which explains the name but to be honest I couldn’t make out much structure at all in this galaxy so I have no idea if it is true. In fact at times I could barely even make out the core and so averted vision was my saviour as it did help make it more obvious. To be honest this galaxy was probably the hardest to see out of everything I looked at during my tour of Canes Venatici.

Messier 94
RA: 12 50 53.1 Dec: +41 07 14
Type: Spiral Galaxy
Magnitude: 9.0

Messier 94 is another spiral galaxy, but this one is estimated to be approximately 19 million light-years away from the Milky Way. What I noticed about this galaxy was that it has quite an obvious bright core that I could see without any issues. However, once I moved away from the core I didn’t really pick up any sort of structure at all. It was like the bright core was overpowering everything else which resulted in this galaxy looking more like a globular cluster than a galaxy.

Messier 106
RA: 12 18 57.5 Dec: +47 18 14
Type: Spiral Galaxy
Magnitude: 9.1

My final Messier target of the evening and unsurprisingly based on what I had seen so far it was another spiral galaxy! Anyway The Messier 106 is estimated to be approximately 23 million light-years away from the Milky Way. The view in the eyepiece was quite nice with a central core being clearly surrounded by a dim halo.

Caldwell 21
RA: 12 28 11.9 Dec: +44 05 40
Type: Irregular Galaxy
Magnitude: 10.0

The one Caldwell I viewed actually turned out to be an irregular galaxy which was nice considering I was beginning to suffer from spiral galaxy overload by the time I looked at it. The galaxy is estimated to be approximately 12 million light-years away from the Milky Way and it was therefore the closest galaxy I viewed during my observing session.

When I looked at this galaxy it was obviously different to the spirals I had already seen as it had an obvious box like shape. I actually enjoyed seeing this because it did look different and I think in the future I will try and study this more along with all the other Caldwell objects in Canes Venatici.

La Superba (HIP 62223 / SAO 44317)
RA: 12 28 11.9 Dec: +44 05 40
Magnitude: 4.8 - 6.3

I decided to take a look at the star called La Superba because its rather interesting name caught my attention. The name actually comes from a 19th century astronomer called Angelo Secchi who was hugely impressed with the beauty of the star. The star is a giant red "carbon star" which means it has started to fuse helium into carbon and it is this process that results in a strong red colour. Another interesting aspect is that it is also a semi-regular variable star, peaking at about +4.8 mag and diminishing to around +6.3 over a 160 day cycle.

Even though this star is supposedly one of the reddest in the night sky it still looked reasonably orange to me and I am not sure it was that much more vivid a colour that Betelgeuse. It is possible that it was at a dim stage in its variability and this dulled the colour slightly but I can't say I was as impressed I had hoped to be. In the end it was still a nice colourful star to look at when you compare it to the vast quantity of white stars around but I will need to check it out in the future just to see if I can notice any change due to its varying magnitude.

Overall, I am happy that I managed to see all the Messier objects at times I think I was rushing through them so I could fit everything into the observing period. I think in the future I may try and look back over some of these galaxies and see if I can pick out any more structure by really studying them although I think my telescope aperture is always going to limit me to some extent.