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).

Big Dipper - Saptarshi

One of my first constellation photos. The Big Dipper/ Saptarshi (সপ্তর্ষি মন্ডল ).

Taken from the balcony of my second floor apartment in Woodbridge New Jersey ion July 4, 2014.  This west facing balcony that offered a restricted view of the sky and overlooked a parking lot was my first "observatory" where my budding interest in astronomy took root. Little did I know that the hobby with stay with me into the next decade.

Chasing Orion - first light

"..This is an image of the Orion Nebula - a star forming region in the Orion constellation (Kalpurush/কালপুরুষ  in Bangla) as seen from my balcony in New Jersey on 25th December 2013 between 1 and 3 a.m in the south western sky.

The nebula is more than 1,400 light years from earth. So the light captured here has been travelling for 1,400 years.To put it in perspective, the light started near the end of the Gupta Empire in India and landed on my camera sensor on Christmas of 2013). "

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Thus began my email I wrote to a friend in 2013. It was the day after I had made my first deep sky photo using only a camera, a tripod and a computer (yes, no telescope). He was a friend from my undergraduate days, now a professor in the UK and shared some of my excitement. The email continued ...