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.  

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.

ISS - Part 2

My dad, now in his early seventies, having seen the wide angle shot of the ISS (see the post ISS - Part 1) mentioned that they used to watch Russian satellites as kids from the terrace of their home in Calcutta (Golpark) based on schedules published in local dailies.  This made me think that we should be able to do something more advanced in 50 years time.



Turns out, a "household" telescope can actually see details on an object about the size of a football field (70m X 200m)  flying at 34 times the speed of a commercial aircraft (17,000 miles/hr) in low earth orbit (250 miles above earth).

The photo above was taken on December 25, 2018 at 6:13 a.m. EST.

ISS - Part 1

International space station flying over our neighborhood at 6:22 a.m. on Dec 22, 2018. Shot with a wide angle lens and a composite of several timelapse shots to create the streak (center to left of frame).