Total Lunar Eclipse

The full report and images will come later, but I wanted to quickly share one of the images I took during last nights total lunar eclipse.  I captured a couple hundred images through my 90mm Stellarvue triplet refractor and 1.6x Barlow lens using my Canon T2i, and they are all in RAW format...so when I have the time to go through them I hope to perhaps make a time-lapse of the eclipse, or at least share some of the nicer shots.  For now, enjoy this image taken at 12:54:54 local time (0754 UT on April 15th).  Click the image to enlarge.

Spotting a solar prominence and prominent solar spots

Spending this weekend at home, catching up on all the wonderful responsibilities and tasks that accompany being a husband, father and law abiding citizen, finally afforded me some time to enjoy observing the Sun.  As much as I enjoy preparing my state and federal taxes I believe I enjoy observing more...and the good news this year is that I do not need to pawn an eyepiece or two to pay a tax bill.

Saturday I spent a bit of time observing the Sun through my 60mm Hydrogen Alpha telescope, and was just starting to take some images when the power went out in our neighborhood.  Fortunately, I had already captured an image of a fantastic prominence before the power went out...and it is presented below.  I had to blow out the disc in order to expose the prominence, but you can see just how impressive it was.  Consider that the Sun is about a million miles in diameter and that this prominence was approximately 15% of the solar diameter in size and it is safe to assume that this tower of plasma was standing at least 150,000 miles high!

This morning I opened up my observatory and used my 90mm Stellarvue triplet equipped with a Lunt Solar Systems Herschel Prism to observe the Sun in white light.  I was rewarded with some steady views that showed several spot regions.  Below is a stack of 300 frames taken with my ASI120MC camera, at 9:04 AM local time (1604 UT).  Click the image to enlarge it to full size.

For comparison, here is an image from the Solar Dynamics Observatory taken near the same time with the active regions labelled.  As you can see, good optics, a decent camera and steady seeing can produce some impressive results!

A little Mars love

Between working many days and nights and generally poor skies on my days off, there have not been many opportunities for me in the past few weeks to get out and practice observing or imaging Mars in my backyard.  Last night was the rare night where skies were clear and I was at home with some time to observe.  Both seeing and transparency were slightly below average, but this photon deprived boy was not about to complain.

I opened up the roof and spent some time observing mars through my C11 between about 9:00 and 9:30 local time (0400 and 0430 UT).  The north polar cap has noticeably diminished in size over the past month as the Martian spring advances and there is a darker collar on the southern edge of the cap.  There continues to be very bright limb haze.  I had a hard time noting many dark features, likely due to Mars still hanging low in the east during my early observation.  I was able to identify Terra Cimmeria in the south, but that was about it.  While the image would no doubt be better with Mars higher in the sky, I was not about to stay up until midnight as I was looking forward to sleeping in my own bed for the first time in a few nights.

Below is an image I took using my ASI120MC camera, and it represents a stack of about 200 frames out of 2500, taken through the C11 and a 1.6x barlow lens.  You can see the north polar cap as well as the thin dark collar below it.  The wider, dark area south of the polar cap is Utopia Panitia.  At the south of the planets disc, the darkest feature facing us is Terra Cimmerium.  The bright spot near the limb on the right is Olympus Mons, and you can see the haze on the limb.

For comparison, here is a simulated image from calsky.com of mars at about the same time:

Currently, Mars is visual magnitude -1.40 with a true distance of 0.6286784 AU (94048948 km) from Earth.  In light time, it is 0h 05m 13.71s distant.  Hopefully as Mars come to opposition next week, I'll have more opportunities to take some images of the other side of the planet as well.

Passages of time

Let's just put it out there up front:  Today, is my 45th birthday.  This week I am at the summit of Mount Lemmon as we host students from Altar Valley middle school at our UA Sky School.  I posted awhile back about the development of the Sky School here and I can not emphasize enough how rewarding this aspect of my job is.  Last week I was honored to accompany Sky School co-founder Ben Blonder as we traveled to the White House where he was honored as a White House Champion of Change in Environmental Conservation Leadership for his vision and work at developing the Sky School.  Above left is an image of one of the students taking a tree ring sample this morning as part of her groups inquiry project to explore the possible relationship between tree growth rates and density.

So while I celebrate the passage of 45 years (gulp) of my life and marvel at how quickly time seems to pass as I grow older, I am fortunate to be spending this time at the Sky School, with incredible colleagues, public school students, friends, and even my dearest Beth and Ian who drove up to celebrate.  As is my custom, I like to mark significant events with astronomical observations, and I took a couple minutes early this morning to set up a solar telescope and take an image.  I was using a 90mm Coronado Hydrogen Alpha Telescope at the summit of Mount Lemmon, and despite steady breezes and an encroaching cold front managed a decent picture.

And with that, time for some cake!

Mars approaches!

No, this is not a blog post to let you know that Mars will pass closer to Earth than at any point in the history of our solar system in early April.  You can find that story circulating on the internet as it does approximately every two years as Mars approaches opposition.  This year, Mars will be at opposition on April 8th and will have an apparent diameter of approximately 15" (arcseconds).  Currently, Mars is .73 astronomical units from Earth and is 96.7% illuminated with an apparent diameter of 12.74"

A few months ago I purchased my first astronomical camera in order to learn to take planetary images in a run up to this Mars apparition.  Mars has always been my favorite planet to observe visually and I want to be able to capture some nice images as well.  Two nights ago I was out observing and imaging Jupiter and was impressed with how steady the seeing conditions were.  Below is an image of Jupiter I captured with my 11" Celestron Edge SCT and a 1.8x barlow lens.

As the seeing conditions were so favorable I decided to stay up far too late and try my hand at my first image of Mars.  I will not go into detail about the trials and tribulations of the process, but keep in mind that Mars is much smaller in apparent size than Jupiter, that its details are quite subtle, and the seeing conditions had deteriorated quite a bit by 1 AM.  I was not able to use the Barlow lens to increase the image scale so the picture below is straight through the C11.

All in all I am happy with the first effort.  I pushed the processing a little too hard but may go back and try again if I have some time.  Of note, you can see clouds in the Olympus Mons region on the right side! Olympus Mons is the largest volcano in our solar system and these are likely orographic clouds.  For comparison, below is a simulated image from the website calsky.com.

Double Rainbow

A wet winter storm has been making its way through Arizona today, delivering some much needed precipitation to the desert and mountains alike.  Yesterday I heard that the Santa Catalina mountains north of town are experiencing the driest winter in 30 years.  Typically the mountains would see an average of approximately 180 inches of precipitation annually, and this year there have been less than 30!

After a full day of wind and rain, the clouds broke in the west just before sunset and a spectacular double rainbow appeared in the eastern sky.  I grabbed my camera and although I did not have a lens wide enough to capture the whole rainbow I still managed to grab a few quick images of the vibrant colors.

Click the images to enlarge them to full size

Jupiter February 17th

Last night was the first clear night in several for us here in Tucson and I spent a few hours observing.  In addition to some typical targets, I observed the Supernova in M82 and was pleasantly surprised to see that it has dimmed only slightly.  It was still easily visible even in my 90mm refractor.  Using the 11 inch SCT, it seemed to have a slight yellow cast to it!?!

Of course, I also took an image of Jupiter under average seeing conditions-  and to my surprise, there is a very interesting feature on the "boring side" of the planet...a disturbance that is nearly as large as the great red spot and is also a shade of red.  It is more stretched than typical storms, and it will be interesting to obsreve how this region changes and how long it persists.  The image below was taken through my 11 inch Celestron Edge HD SCT with an ASI120MC camera...it is approximately 250 frames aligned and stacked in Registax with some tweaks in Photoshop.