Jason Nishiyama @evilscientistca@octodon.social
Teacher, astronomer, political scientist and father.
A society that places things (firearms, low taxes, convenience over safety, religious dogma, etc.) above its children is lost.
Another frustrating night of guidance problems...
NGC 6826 is known as the blinking planetary as its brightness is such that in a small telescope it seems to disappear or blink when you look directly at it. It's about 5000 ly distant.
A focusing mask is often used in astrophotography to ensure a sharp focus. With this mask, when a line appears in the middle of the created image, the telescope is focused.
Artificial satellites are a bit of a hazard when imaging the sky. This one went right through the target, making the image useless.
The space between stars in galaxies is so great that when galaxies collide there are hardly any collisions if any at all between stars.
This is what happens when the autoguide system goes haywire during a 10 minute exposure on a telescope...
From Saturday - the Galaxies M66 (L) and M65 (R) in the constellation Leo. 0.2m telescope. 5 min L, 2 min each RGB.
M66 is ~31 Mly from Earth, M65 is ~40 Mly away.
From 2 weekends ago. Barred spiral galaxy M109. 14 minutes L, 4 min each R, G, and B. M019 is about 67 Mly away in the constellation of Ursa Major.
Whooohooo!
Messier 101 is a galaxy in Ursa Major. It is about 22 million light years from Earth. Image from last Saturday. 13 minutes L, 5 minutes each R, G and B. 0.2m f3.9 telescope.
Tonight's project complete.
Messier 34 is an open cluster in the constellation of Perseus. It's about 1500 ly away and on the order of about 200 million years old making it fairly young.
Light travels under an inverse square law. That is if you double the distance you get 1/4 the light.
We can use this property of light to measure the distance to objects if we have a way of determining their intrinsic (actual) brightness and measure their apparent brightness here on Earth.
From Saturday night, galaxy M108 in Ursa major. 19 minutes L, 4 minutes each R, G, and B. 0.2m f3.9 Newtonian telescope.
We measure the distance to nearby stars by how much they shift over the period of a year as the Earth moves around the Sun in its orbit. This is our most accurate distance measurement for objects outside of the solar system.
From astronomy outreach last night, the Baker-Nunn telescope.
Finally Photoshop was used to bring the R, G and B mosaics together into a single colour RGB image.
These 18 processed images (6 each in R, G, and B) were then transferred back to the Mac for processing in photoshop. Photoshop merged the 18 images into three mosaics, one for each of R, G, and B.
The now ~4800 images were then transferred to a Windows machine where the program Registax was used to create 6 images covering the Moon in R, G, and B. Registax registered the images, threw out about half due to quality, then combined and processed the images for sharpness.