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.  

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