Speck-tacular Mercury

Our nearest star seen against its closest neighbor.

A tiny speck, A giant world. Your point of view.

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Mercury transits the sun in 2019, for the last time before it will do so again in 13 years in 2032.

If the sun was the size of a basketball, Mercury would be a pin head size speck floating in the darkness 33 feet away. The earth would be a seasame seed sized object at 90 feet.

Spec-tacular indeed.

80,000 star "sunset" from ten thousand years ago

Updated view 10 months after first shot from my front porch on July 12, 2020.

Ever seen 80,000 suns set at once?

M22 Globular cluster, estimated to have 80,000 stars in the system hangs over the southern skies in the constellation of Sagittarius, poised to "set" below the horizon in about three hours.

This is light from ten thousand years ago, when in northern Mesopotamia, now northern Iraq, cultivation of barley had just started. World population is estimated to have been between 1 and 10 million at the time, slightly more than New York city and less than any of the top 10 most populous cities in the world today.

M22 also happens to be the first known globular cluster cluster discovered by a German astronomer over 350 years ago.

The silent bell

This is a single shot, post processed image of the Dumbbell nebula. Single shot is easy to capture. However not so easy on the post processing. PP approach is a 2 layer processing of the star field background and dumb bell nebula itself separately to bring out the reds and greens in the nebula while losing the noise.  The original picture below gives a sense of the difference post processing can make.

Lord of the rings

Saturn.

Sep 17, 2019;

Equipment:
Canon 70D: 1/13 s; ISO 1600
Single shot through a Celestron 127 SLT Maksutov- Cassegrain at prime focus

Whirlpool

Wispy light from 23 million years ago. The Whirpool galaxy is the first to be classified as a spiral galaxy.
This was when the early Miocene period was going on the earth.  The great apes had appeared on the earth, and ancestors of the human family too.  Humans would arise only 2.5 million years ago and anatomically modern ones only 0.8-0.3 million years ago.