2020 A Great Conjunction - and a Galilean Connection

 

Patience pays. Or is it persistence. Finally got a glimpse of the "Great Conjunction" of Jupiter and Saturn on the evening of Dec 23, two days after its closest approach (on the 21st). After a major snowstorm in New Jersey the prior week, dense clouds and fog that hung over the US east coast persisting for five days relented for a few hours enough for this capture from my front porch.  

The angular separation at peak conjunction on the evening of the 21st was about 6 arc minutes. In this image from 2 days later, they’re slightly wider apart* but still close enough for both to fit in a single eyepiece view of a medium size telescope.  Jupiter's four largest moons are visible in the picture left to right are Io, Europa, Callisto and Ganymede with an orbital plane inclined at an angle to the ecliptic.

Tyger Tyger: A Surprise in LEO

 

The morning of November 17, 2020 at 5:48 a.m. EST, this image landed on my camera sensor. I say "landed"  since I didn’t expect it, unlike the meteors in Leo that I wanted to photograph. In fact, after setting up my camera on a tripod on the crunchy frosty grass of my backyard some two hours prior in the hope of capturing a Leonid meteor or two, I was back in my bed warm, cozy and asleep as the camera clicked away until dawn.

A morning scan revealed this unexpected glint right in the middle of the constellation of Leo. I was later able to identify the object based on the capture time and trajectory compared with known satellite transits.  It was the now defunct earth observation satellite, Envisat,  that was launched by European Space Agency (ESA) in 2002. 

The Envisat mission was concluded in 2012 when it lost contact with the earth, five years after its planned end of life. This school bus sized satellite weighing 8 tons is the largest civilian satellite ever. Five hundred miles above the surface in low earth orbit (or LEO) this piece of zombie tech will continue to orbit the earth for over 100 more years before burning through the atmosphere much like a meteor.   

Now for the Leonids.

Little Red Dot

 Mars last night, from my backyard, a few days after the 2020 opposition.

At ~40 million miles, the south polar ice cap is a tiny white speck. It is mostly made of frozen carbon dioxide which makes up 95% of Martian atmosphere. 

The faint ring, top right, is Olympus Mons, the largest volcano in our solar system. Standing 2.5 times taller than Mount Everest it all but touches the edge of Martian atmosphere. If you climbed to the top - you would be close to space!

At this moment, US, Russian and Indian satellites and rovers are active surveying the planet. The latest NASA rover Perseverance with the first helicopter /drone is on its way to land in Feb 2021 which will greatly increase the pace of discovery. 

All this to prepare for the first manned mission planned to happen by 2030. This little red dot, the subject of much of our history and mythology across cultures and ages, may become our first step to becoming a multi planet species.

The Andromeda Clique

Andromeda (M31), M32 and M110, DSLR on telescope tracking mount.

Andromeda galaxy and its two smaller cousins captured using an SLR camera and a zoom lens from my backyard.

The swarm of stars that look like the background is actually the foreground, all of them within our Milky Way. While we can’t make out any individual stars in Andromeda here, two astronomers with inputs from a third, studied it and happened to change our understanding of the universe and our place in it forever.

Wiser: 2020 In Hindsight

Comet Neowise seen in the wee hours of morning shortly before sunrise on July 12, 2020. The picture was taken from my second floor guest room window looking north east using a camera with a telephoto lens. This was my first "naked eye" comet and possibly the last in its class I would actually see in my lifetime. I had not been able to see the comparable Halley's comet when I was 10 years old, and don't expect to see it return when I'd be 86 either. Thanks to this cosmic visitor, I also unearthed an unexpected connection, from about 55 years ago.

 

Trifid: Three in One.

Visible in binoculars as a tiny region of fuzziness at the top of the spout of the "tea pot" (the Sagittarius constellation), the Trifid nebula has been described as the site of "unspeakable beauty and unimaginable bedlam" simultaneously showing colors and chaos of star birth and evolution. The light we see today from this region 50 light years across, is about 3000 years old.

As I set out to image this for the first time ever, I felt a bit like fish out of water all over again. Knowing visual observation would be underwhelming, and wanting to do several targets in one night - I started with imaging right away. The scope alignment, go-to accuracy and focus test using Jupiter checked out fine. But once I slewed to Trifid and took the first shot, I couldn't trust if I really had it in the frame. There was something there obviously, but I didn't know what it was. The little fuzziness in the star field didn't look anything like the images on the internet. It was too small, and for all I knew, I could be shooting a random nondescript object in the region. To make matters worse, the minute long exposures were beginning to show star trails which I knew would be kicked out by the stacking software.  It was also the first half of July, too early for an August target after all. Despite all these ifs and buts, I decided to make some compromising tweaks to the setup and power through the imaging.

Fortunately, Trifid did not disappoint. In the image above, I got some natural colors - a dash of red here and bit of blue there, and of course the ominous dark "Y" that is the hallmark of Trifid. 

Mission accomplished. 

Eclipse on Jupiter

Io, one of the Galilean moons, casts a shadow on the disc of Jupiter as it makes a transit on the night of June 29, 2020. Also visible among the cloud bands is the Great Red Spot - a giant storm bigger than the size of the earth, raging on for over 300 years. 

Galileo discovered four of the Jovian moons. These were the first celestial objects to be the recognized as not orbiting earth. For promoting the heliocentric view, Galileo was placed under house arrest for life accused of heresy. 

Four centuries later, our view of the universe has changed much, but our struggles with the status quo continues quite the same. 

Freedom is (still) not free.

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Equipment: 1500 mm Mak Cass with 8-24 mm eyepiece and DSLR in eyepiece projection

Post processed in PIPP, AutoStakkert and Registax.

 

In a galaxy right here right now

The Milky Way rising in the skies above our home at about midnight a few days ago, on June 10, 2020.

This is a disc of stars floating in space (our sun being one of them), yet it appears as pale band across the night sky going from lower right to upper left here. One way to visualize this is If you were an ant sitting on a spoke of a bicycle wheel, and turned to look back at the center of the wheel you would see the thickness of the inside rim spanning your horizon. Likewise the diagonal band going from upper left to lower right here is the “thickness” of the disc of our home galaxy seen from the inside. 

Make a wish (upon a Lyrid)

A meteor caught on camera from my backyard. This one is in the constellation of Lyra. Hence a Lyrid. An annual meteor shower which peaked in 2020 on April 21-22.

The trail goes from green to yellow to red probably a sign of dropping temperature as it burns up. The bright star Vega (alpha Lyrae) is in the background.

As the earth orbits the sun it runs into debris left behind by comets which (mostly) burn up in the atmosphere (and occasionally cause dinosaurs to go bye bye). This comet last visited in 1861 and is estimated to come back every 415 years.

Remnants

Crab Nebula; Nov 22, 2022

The year was 1054. Emperor Renzong of the Song Dynasty reigned in China out of the capital city Kaifeng on the southern banks of the Yellow River. On the 4th of July, at the break of dawn, a bright star burst into view in the sky in the constellation of Taurus. It was so bright, it could be seen during daytime. It remained visible for 23 days during the day.  The star faded slowly over time and on 6 April 1056, 642 days or nearly two years later it disappeared from view. The Chinese wrote about it, as did the Japanese and Arabic astronomers.

Today, a thousand years later, a tenuous wispy cloud is all that remains in place of the progenitor star, now known as the Crab Nebula or Supernova Remnant 1054. 

Orion Revisited

Orion Nebula

Over six years after I first took this image (in 2013), here is another attempt at imaging the Great Orion nebula M42 in the Orion molecular cloud complex.

The first version of this picture was one of my first deep sky imaging attempts using a tripod mounted camera and a telephoto lens without a telescope. This version had the advantage of a 5 inch 1500 mm focal length telescope on a go-to mount and is a composite of 10 images at 20s each. Overall while this is a richer image, the process was a walk in the park compared to my first experience described here.