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| Horsehead Nebula Image Credit; Purnendu Gupta |
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| The Leo Triplet |
The Leo Triplet - or Leo’s Trio as I like to call them. Three galaxies near the tail of Leo the lion, 35 million light years away. Ancient photons that started out when yet another mass extinction was unfolding on the earth 35 million years ago - and the Antarctic ice sheet was only beginning to take shape. They finally arrived yesterday, fresh as daisies. Relativistically for photons, time stands still.
This is my first deep-sky image of 2022, and also possibly among the farthest objects I have ever imaged. I like to pretend this is a (very) poor man’s version of the iconic “Hubble ultra deep field” photo taken by the Hubble space telescope.
On an early October evening I stepped out of my door to be pleasantly surprised by this string of pearls in the sky.
It was approaching nautical twilight. The brightest stars were becoming slowly visible and the last traces of sunset glow had faded. Jupiter, Saturn and Venus formed a vaulted arc across the sky and over our rooftops marking the plane of the ecliptic. The yellow dot on the left was unmistakably Jupiter, lofted high in the sky. It’s light a beacon frozen in time. Calm, unchanging, out of reach as if on purpose. Saturn was a few degrees to the west, and a billion miles away. Fainter, yet distinct. In the west, Venus, easily mistaken for an airplane light, shone through a wisp of cloud, racing for the distant rooftops. In the center of the view, a three quarters moon hung close to the southern horizon - near Sagittarius. The teapot’s spout tipped towards the core of the Milky Way hidden behind the suburban light dome. In a few days the galactic core would dip below the horizon to hibernate in its winter lair.
The sky was less than perfect - a hint of haze, a thin veil of cloud obscuring the moon and Venus. And yet this moment, this arrangement seemed special. A congregation of visitors that showed up at my front door - unannounced - spanning the entire field of view as if to not leave the viewing to chance.
I grabbed my camera - plopped an ultra wide lens on it, set it on a tripod and clicked away.
The above is a single shot processed separately for the sky and earth - in an effort to mimic what the scene looked like to the naked eye.
The graceful Whirlpool galaxy (Messier 51) in a gravitational embrace with its companion.
At the center of what is known as a grand design galaxy, space swirls around and disappears into a black hole. Just like water swirling down a bathtub or kitchen sink drain. What we see as the spiral arms are the trail of stars and dust as they follow the swirling curves in spacetime.
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| Craters at lunar terminator © 2020 Purnendu Gupta |
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.
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.
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.
