gemini – Page 2 – welcome to somewhereville (.com)

January 22, 2015September 23, 2018

CNYO Observing Log: The Winter Of Lovejoy – Green Lakes, Jamesville Beach, And New Moon Telescopes HQ – January 9 to 14, 2015

A re-post from the CNY Observers website (www.cnyo.org).

Caption: Comet Lovejoy imaged on January 10th by the ever-impressive CNY astrophotographer Stephen Shaner. From his CNYO Facebook Group post: Last night was the first in over three months it was clear enough to shoot, but it worked out well because Comet Lovejoy is at its peak. Here's a quick process of about 40 minutes of exposures between 8-9 PM as it crossed the meridian. FOV is roughly three degrees. Distinct pale green coma in the eyepiece but unable to make out a tail or see it naked eye.

The 2015 skies are going to be full of comets. Well, at least six, to be exact, that will be either naked eye- or binocular-visible. That's still quite a few to those keeping track! The amateur astronomy community has taken heroic efforts to scientifically identify and track new comets in the last, say, 400 years. The rise of, for instance, the Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System (or panSTARRS) as a method for finding and tracking both comets and near-earth asteroids (or, lumped together, "objects," for which you might hear the abbreviation "NEOs") has greatly increased the number of accounted-for fuzzy objects in our fields of view (and provided us a giant leap in our existential risk assessment infrastructure to boot). Quite simply, we've more + better eyes on the skies, meaning we're bound to continue to find more and more comets and asteroids. You can even subscribe to NASA twitter feeds that announce the passing-by of these hopefully passers-by (see @AsteroidWatch and @NasaNEOCam).

The discovery of NEOs may or may not qualify as a modern John Henry-ism, as amateur astronomers are still discovering objects at a decent pace thanks to improvements in their own optics and imaging equipment. Comet Lovejoy, C/2014 Q2, is one such recent example discovered by famed modern comet hunter Terry Lovejoy (who has five comets to his name already).

Comet Lovejoy And More In CNY

Comet Lovejoy has made the winter sky that much more enjoyable (and below freezing cold that much more bearable) by reaching peak brightness in the vicinity of the prominent winter constellations Taurus and Orion. Visible soon after sunset and before the "really cold" temperatures set in (after 10 p.m. or so), Lovejoy has been an easy target in low-power binoculars and visible without equipment in sufficiently dark skies. Now on its way out of the inner solar system, its bright tail will shrink and its wide coma (that gives it its "fuzziness") will disappear as the increasingly distant Sun is unable to melt Lovejoy's surface ice. Those of us who dared the cold, clear CNY skies these past few weeks were treated to excellent views, while the internet has been flooded with remarkable images of what some have described as the most photographed comet in history (a title that will likely be taken from it when a few other comets pass us by during warmer nights this year).

Caption: The tiki lounge at Green Lakes State Park, 9 January 2014.

The first observing session around Syracuse this year happened at Green Lakes State Park on January 9th. Bob Piekiel, one of CNY's best known and most knowledgable amateur astronomers, had his Celestron NexStar 11 in the parking lot behind the main office, which was fortunately kept open for attendees hoping to warm up between views. To Bob's C11 was added my Zhumell 25×100's, providing less magnification but a wider field of view to take in more of the comet's core, tail, and nearby stars.

Caption: A very prominent Orion and arrow-ed Comet Lovejoy from the Green Lakes parking lot. Photo by Kim Titus.

The Friday night skies were only partially on our side, offering a few short-lived views of the Orion Nebula and Lovejoy. Jupiter was just bright enough to burn through some of the cloud cover to our East, giving us slightly muddled but otherwise decent views of it and its four largest satellites for about 10 minutes. By our 9 p.m. pack-up and departure, the skies were even worse – which is always a good feeling for observers (knowing they didn't miss a chance for any additional views by packing up early).

The night of Saturday, January 10th turned into a much better night for observing, offering a good opportunity for some long-exposure images to try to capture Lovejoy just past its luminous prime. The following image was taken from one of the parking lots at Jamesville Beach – the same spot where Larry Slosberg, Dan Williams and I observed the nova in Delphinus. Light pollution aside from the 30 second exposure, the brightest constellations are clearly visible and a fuzzy, bright green star is clearly visible in the full-sized image. Click on the image below for a larger, unlabeled version of the same.

Caption: An array of Winter's finest from Jamesville Beach, 10 January 2014, 8:00 p.m. Click on the image for a full and unlabeled version.

The imaging continued in Marcellus on January 10th, with Bob Piekiel producing a zoomed in view of Lovejoy.

Caption: An unmistakable view of Comet Lovejoy. Image by Bob Piekiel.

As with all astronomical phenomena (excluding solar viewing, of course), the best views come from the darkest places. A third Lovejoy session was had up in West Monroe, NY on Wednesday, January 14th with fellow CNYO'er Ryan Goodson at New Moon Telescopes. Putting his 27" Dob to use, the green-tinted Lovejoy was almost bright enough to tan your retina. With dark skies and no observing line, we then attacked some subtler phenomena, including the Orion Nebula in Orion, the Eskimo Nebula in Gemini, and the Hubble Variable Nebula in Monoceros. The images below are our selfie with Lovejoy and the best of Winter, a snapshot near the zenith (with Jupiter prominent), and the Northern sky (click on the images for larger, unlabeled versions).

Caption: Ryan and I pose for 30 sec, our fingers completely missing the location of Lovejoy (red arrow). Click for a larger view.

Caption: Some of Winter's finest from NMT HQ, including a prominent Jupiter just to the west of (and about to be devoured by) the constellation Leo. Click for a larger view.

Caption: A view of NMT's opening to the North, including Cassiopeia at left (the sideways "W"), the Big Dipper in the middle, and Jupiter at the right. Click for a larger view.

A Clothing Thought…

As we can all attest to, the nighttime temperatures this month have oscillated between bitterly cold and painfully cold. The pic of my Element's thermometer at my midnight departure from West Monroe read -12 F (and the tire inflation warning light stayed on until I hit 81 South), yet with the exception of the tips of my toes, I wasn't very bothered by the cold.

It's one of the cold realities of amateur astronomy – you never realize how cold it can get outside until you're standing perfectly still at a metal eyepiece. The solution is as old as the sediment-grown hills – layers! The top half of my outfit for the evening is shown below, featuring six (yes, six) layers from turtleneck to final coat. My bottom half featured three layers that decorum permits me from showing here. For those wondering how the blood still flows below the belt, the answer is simple – buy yourself an outer layer two or three sizes larger than you usually wear. In my case, my outer coat's a bit baggy and my outer pants are a very tightly-meshed pair of construction pants with a 40" waist (from a trip to DeJulio's Army & Navy Store on Burnet Ave. in Syracuse).

And don't worry about color coordinating. The nighttime is the right time for the fashion unconscious.

April 27, 2012September 23, 2018

Some Light Science Reading. The Constellations: Orion

As first appeared in the April 2012 edition of the Syracuse Astronomical Society newsletter The Astronomical Chronicle (PDF).

Image generated with Starry Night Pro 6.

Much can be said about the old hunter Orion. To Central New York observers, it had (until very recently) been the case that Orion made his way across the Night Sky during the coldest and least hospitable (to most nighttime observers) months of the year. Conditions would keep observers in hiding from him (some of the best CNY observers I know would risk surgical strikes on the Orion Nebula with their fastest to set-up and tear-down equipment). The abbreviated winter of 2011/2012 and reasonably early start of the SAS observing season have provided us with excellent opportunities in the past few months to make Orion The Hunter now the hunted. The mid-April observing session will be the last "official" opportunity to observe Orion before he disappears behind the Western horizon until the most nocturnal of us can next see him in our Eastern sky before sunrise in late August. I then take this opportunity to discuss Orion, one many CNY/SAS members may know the best by sight but may know the least by observing attention.

One of the topics covered in the 2011 SAS lecturing series was how we observe. Not the discussion of optics or the physics of planetary motion along the ecliptic, but the visual and mental mechanisms we use to translate the photonic triggers in our retina into mental pictures of celestial objects. Orion was the astronomical example I used to describe Pareidolia, how we impose a kind of order on things we see despite that order not being present in the actual collection. When you look at a cloud, you may see a face, an animal, or something your mind triggers as being something it clearly is not. I often placed the infamous "Face On Mars" next to the Constellation Orion to show clearly how we see what we think we see despite all reasonable evidence to the contrary (or the two can be mangled together, as shown below). The clouds may look like an animal, the "Face On Mars" looks unmistakably like a shadowed face, and Orion, as it happens, has looked like a human figure to virtually all peoples for as long as we have record of Constellations, the same way Scorpius has appeared as a scorpion to every civilization for which this little monster was part of the local biosphere.

Pareidolia is not just for cognitive neuroscience! One of the keys to learning the sky I discussed last year was to let your mind wander while staring at the sky and see if certain things jump out at you. The constellations are, for the most part, made up of the most reasonably bright star groupings, but if you see any type of geometry that makes some part of the sky easy to identify, run with it. This same philosophy may be responsible for the rise of the asterism, or "non-Constellation star grouping," as the distillation of mythological complexity into more practical tools for everyday living. For instance, I suspect everyone reading this can find the asterism known as the Big Dipper, but how many know all of the stars of its proper Constellation Ursa Major? Our southern tree line and Cortland obscure some of the grandeur of Sagittarius, which means we at the hill identify the location of its core (and several galactic highlights) by the easy-to-see "teapot." The body of Orion is a similar case of reduction-to-apparent, as the four stars marking his corners (clockwise from upper left)…

Betelgeuse (pronounced "Betelgeuse Betelgeuse Betelgeuse!" – marking his right shoulder; a red supergiant of very orange-ish color even without binoculars)

Bellatrix – the left shoulder (so you now know the Constellation is facing us as originally defined) – a blue giant known also known as the "Amazon Star"

Rigel – the left foot; a blue supergiant and the star system within which the aliens that make the Rigel Quick Finder reside

Saiph – the right foot; a star dim in the visible but markedly brighter in the ultraviolet. Saiph and Rigel are about the same distance away (Saiph 50 light years closer at 724 light years, a point to consider as you observe them both)

… and the three stars marking his belt (from left)…

Alnitak – A triple-star system 800 light years away with a blue supergiant as its anchor star

Alnilam – the farthest star of the belt at 1359 light years, this young blue supergiant burns as brightly as the other two, making the belt appear equally bright "al across"

Mintaka – 900 light years away, this is an eclipsing binary star system, meaning one star passes between us and the main star in its orbit (about every 5.7 days)

… are obvious to all, while the head and club stars require a longer look to identify.

Sticking to Naked Eye observing for a moment, Orion is not only famous for its historical significance and apparent brightness. Orion is ideally oriented to serve as an order of alignment for several nearby Constellations and is surrounded by enough bright stars and significant Constellations that curiosity alone should have you familiar with this part of the sky in very short order. As an April focus, it is of benefit that all of the Constellations we'll focus on either hit the horizon at the same time as Orion or they rest above him.

I've color-coded the significant stars marking notable Constellations in the image below. If you're standing outside on any clear night, the marked stars should all be quite obvious (we're talking a hands' width or two at arm's length). From right and working our way counterclockwise…

(RED) Following the belt stars to the right will lead you to the orange-ish star Aldebaran, marking the eye of Taurus the Bull. This is a dense part of the sky, as Aldebaran marks both the head of the Bull and also marks the brightest star in the Hyades star cluster (a gravitationally-bound open cluster 150 light years away composed of over 100 stars). Just to the right of this cluster is the "Tiny Dipper" known as the Pleiades (Messier 45), another dense star cluster worth observing at all magnifications. Both of these clusters are simultaneously easier and harder to find at present, as Venus ("1") is resting just above them, providing an easy way to find both clusters but plenty of reflected light to dull the brilliance of the two open clusters.

(ORANGE) Auriga, featuring Capella (the third brightest star in the Night Sky), is an oddly-shaped hexagon featuring a small triangle at one corner. Auriga, like Ursa Minor in last month's discussion, is made easy to find by the fact that the five marked stars are in an otherwise nondescript part of the sky (relatively dim generally, but brighter than anything in the vicinity). Venus will dull Hassaleh (Auriga's closest star to Venus and the two open clusters below it) but Elnath and Capella will be easy finds.

(YELLOW) Castor and Pollux, the twins of Gemini, are literally standing on Orion's club. Making an arrow from Mintaka (the right-most star of the belt) and Betelgeuse will lead you to Alhena (Pollux's left foot), after which a slow curve in a horseshoe shape will give you the remaining stars.

(GREEN) Canis Minor is two stars (which is boring), but is significant for containing Procyon, the 7th brightest star in the Night Sky (which means it will be an EASY find). But don't confuse it with Sirius, which is the big shimmering star in…

(BLUE) Canis Major is the larger of Orion's two dogs and contains Sirius ("The Dog Star"), a star so bright (magnitude âˆ’1.46) and so close (8.6 light years) that it appears not as a star but as a shimmering light. Some would say an airplane, others would say a hovering UFO. Part of my duties as president involve intermittently explaining that it is not the latter.

And, with respect, Monoceros is an old Constellation but not a particularly brilliant one. Having Canis Minor and Canis Major identified will make your identification of Monoceros quite straightforward.

We now turn to the other "stellar" objects in Orion, composed of three Messiers and one famous IC. M78 is a diffuse nebula almost one belt width above and perpendicular to Alnitak. You will know it when you see it. M43 and M42 (marked as "4" in the image below), on the other hand, are so bright and close that you can see their nebulosity in dark skies without aid of any optics.

M42 – The Orion Nebula is, in the right dark conditions, a Naked Eye sight in itself. For those of us between cities, even low-power binoculars bring out the wispy edges and cloudy core of this nebula. For higher-power observers, the resolving of Trapezium at M42's core serves as one of your best tests of astronomy binoculars (I consider the identification of four stars as THE proper test of a pair of 25×100's. Ideal conditions and a larger aperture will get you six stars total). You could spend all night just exploring the edges and depths of this nebula. You can take a look back at the Astro Bob article in the April 2012 edition of the Astronomical Chronicle (From My Driveway To Orion, Nature Works Wonders) for a more detailed discussion of this part of Orion.

M43 – de Mairan's Nebula is, truth be told, a lucky designation. M43 is, in fact, part of the M42 nebula that is itself a small part of the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex (not THAT'S a label). M43 owes its differentiation to a dark lane of dust that breaks M43 and M42, just as the lane of dust in our own Milky Way we know as the "Great Rift" splits what would otherwise be one continuous band of distant stars the same way a large rock in a stream causes the water to split in two and recombine on the other side.

Finally (and the one you'll work for), IC 434, the Horsehead Nebula, lies just to the lower-left of Alnitak (1). The Horsehead is itself a dark nebula, a region absorbing light to make it pronounced by its difference from the lighter regions around it. To put the whole area into perspective, The Horsehead is itself STILL within the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex. The sheath of Orion's Sword and nearly the entire belt is contained in this Complex, like dust being rattled off with each blow from Orion's club.

I close by taking a look at the perilously ignored club attempting to tear into Taurus. At present, asteroids surround Orion's Club like pieces of debris flying off after a hard impact. All are in the vicinity of 12th magnitude (so require a decent-sized mirror), and all are also moving at a sufficiently fast clip that their paths can be seen to change over several observing sessions (if, by miracle, enough clear days in a row can be had to make these measurements). I have highlighted the five prominent ones in the image below.

Is it an oddity to have Orion so full of asteroids? Certainly not! Orion is placed near the ecliptic, the apparent path of the planets in their motion around the Sun. Orion's club just barely grazes the ecliptic at the Gemini/Taurus border, two of the 12 Constellations of the Zodiac, the collection of Constellations that themselves mark the ecliptic. As nearly all of the objects in the Solar System lie near or within the disc of the Solar System, you expect to find all manner of smaller objects in the vicinity of the Zodiacal Constellations. In effect, Orion's club is kicking up different dust all year long as the asteroids orbit the Sun. You only have a few more weeks to watch the action happen before Orion's return in the very early early morning of the very late summer.

– Happy Hunting, Damian

July 24, 2010September 23, 2018

Some Light Science Reading. The Constellations: Cygnus

As first appeared in the June/July 2010 edition of the Syracuse Astronomical Society newsletter The Astronomical Chronicle (PDF).

Constellation Map generated with Starry Night Pro 6.

Those in the vicinity of Manlius, NY are no doubt aware of the presence of Sno-Top (home of the best soft black raspberry in the area, IMHO) and the duck pond at town center(-ish). Those continuing just a tad further along Fayette Street (92, DeWitt-to-Cazenovia direction) also know that the swan population is localized to the higher pond near the Saucy Swan Restaurant (they do make for loquacious patrons). These facts, combined with the oppressive CNY heat of early July, made the choice of Cygnus the Swan obvious for this month's constellation. Fittingly, Cygnus is an astronomical feast for naked eye, binocular, and telescope observers alike and, as it is half-way between horizon and zenith in early July in the early evening, it is strategically placed for accessibility with all manner of optics.

Cygnus is surrounded by several dangerous Constellations. The animal Constellations Draco, Velpecula, and Lacerta might enjoy freshly killed what the king Cepheus would otherwise enjoy glazed. The massive Constellation Pegasus is a problem in its own right. Trampled by horse is bad enough on the ground, but to have to avoid trampling by a flying one is another matter altogether. Lyra may be the only reminder to Cygnus of its terrestrial past, having been the instrument of choice for one of Cygnus' human attributions (that man being Orpheus. See below). For those using only their free pair of 1×7 binoculars (that is, your pair of eyes), the cross that makes up the body and elbows of the wings of Cygnus are most obvious. The bright stars Deneb, Sadr, and Gienah (and the nearby Vega in Lyra, the easiest of the stars in this part of the sky to find starting at sunset) are perhaps most obvious, but the rest of the body is pronounced. As the evening progresses (and on reasonably clear nights), the most striking feature of Cygnus is the river of stars and interstellar dust that is our view of the Milky Way (as if Cygnus is flying above it).

As a collection of prominent stars within the body of the Milky Way, you can guess that the Constellation we know as Cygnus has a long and distinguished history. The Greeks ("Give me a Constellation, any Constellation, and I show you that the history of that Constellation is Greek") have many swans in their mythology, from Zeus (who fathered Gemini and Helen of Troy disguised as a swan, or so the story goes) to Orpheus (turned into a swan upon his death and placed next to his lyre (Lyra) to characters in Ovid's Metamorphoses. Cygnus is a member of the "Famed 48," the 48 original Constellations contained within Ptolemy's Almagest.

Alberio. From wikipedia.org.

At the head of Cygnus is the star Alberio which, upon inspection with even low-magnification optics, resolves into two stars that make up quite possibly the best color contrast in the northern hemisphere (above, from wikipedia). Alberio A (the orange-ish one), is actually itself a true binary, meaning its two stars are gravitationally bound to one another. It is possible, with scopes larger than 20" and under excellent conditions, to resolve the two stars, Alberio B (the blue-ish one), is a single star that is not gravitationally bound to Alberio A, making this most famous binary an "optical binary," one where the two stars look very close but only because of our perspective from Earth. If Cygnus is out, this star always makes its way into the eyepiece of the 16" scope at Darling Hill. Further, for those who like to get their scopes perfectly focused (especially large binoculars), this combination is an excellent test.

M29. From wikipedia.org.

As is the case with all of the Constellations within the band of the Milky Way, Cygnus is host to several binocular and telescope objects. The two pronounced Messier Objects are M29 and M39, both open clusters. M29 (above, from wikipedia) is famous (to me) for being the one Messier Object that does NOT appear in the index of the Peterson Field Guide To Stars And Planets. Believe me, I have tried several times to find it (just assuming the dark conditions kept me from seeing it. It does appear in the Constellation map, though). This object appears within the binocular field of view of Sadr and is small but worth scanning in dark skies. M39 (below, from seds.org) is similarly nondescript, residing between Deneb and the stars of Lacerta.

M39. from seds.org.

Cygnus becomes quite interesting for its wealth of interesting New General Catalogue (NGC) Objects. The four most prominent objects are the North America Nebula (NGC 7000), the Pelican Nebula (IC 5070), the Veil Nebula (NGC 6960, 6962, 6979, 6992, and 6995), and the Crescent Nebula (NGC 6888). The North America (not American) Nebula (below, with the Pelican Nebula to its right, from wikipedia) is a testament to the only mild imagination of the working observational astronomer. Like many nebulae, details can be pulled out of this object with the use of filters. Depending on the conditions, the best way to confirm this structure exists in your scope is, frankly, to move the scope ever so slightly in the field of view of nearby stars and confirm for yourself that some slightly darkened patch of sky is staying put with respect to the background of stars. This approach, combined with averted vision, is definitely my method of choice for finding the locations of objects I may otherwise miss completely (and we've all had the experience of NOT seeing something in a scope that another person can even make detail out of). The very low surface brightness of the nebula makes it an at-least binocular object to observe, but it is noteworthy that this entire North America Nebula is reportedly four times the size of the full Moon. The Pelican Nebula (lower right of the image above) looks more like a Teradactyl to me, but there is some similarity in both (in case you do not see it, the pair of eyes are at upper left (with a bright star in each marking the pupils), the beak extends to the left (and is narrower than a typical pelican), and the body extends to some less structured arrangement down to the lower right).

The North America and Pelican Nebulae, photo by Jason Ware. From wikipedia.org.

The Veil Nebula is a collection of nebulae that make for haunting photos. I am very pleased to have a greyscale image of the Eastern Veil provided by our own Stu Forster (below and in the member gallery). This object is very difficult to observe without an OIII filter, but even an 8" scope will resolve the detail of this nebula with the filter (it is reported that in excellent sky locations, simply holding this filter to one's eye will make the Veil Nebula stand out). The Veil Nebula has also been the focus of some considerable Hubble imaging time and a web search for these images is definitely worth one's time.

The Crescent Nebula. Photo by Stu Forster.

Finally, the Crescent Nebula has also been the focus of some astrophotography time by the good Dr. Forster (below (The Crescent, not Dr. Forster)), appearing to me more like a floating brain than a boring crescent. The Nebula is formed by a Wolf-Rayet star, a type of very hot, massive star with a strong stellar wind. This nebula is actually a double-whammy, as the fast-moving stellar wind from this WR star is colliding with the slower stellar wind from this same star when it was a red giant some 400,000 years earlier.

The Crescent Nebula. Photo by Stu Forster.

Clear skies, Damian

Comet Lovejoy And More In CNY

A Clothing Thought…

Spread the words:

Spread the words:

Spread the words: