Living here in the USA, things have been a bit surreal over the past year. As the Great Orange One (GOO) that occupies the office reserved for President has done his best to divide our citizenry and alienate us from the rest of the conscious world, it is sometimes difficult to remain optimistic about our future. Fortunately, there are events that remind us of our place in the universe; and despite the deep divisions that are being cultivated by the GOO, there are greater forces at work that serve to unite us here on Earth. There is something about seeing the solar system in motion in a way that we do not witness frequently, that seems to recharge my desire to make the world a better place.
Early this morning we were treated to a widely publicized total Lunar Eclipse. This eclipse occurred on the second full moon within a calendar month (a "Blue" moon), and also at the time of perigee, when the moon is at the closest point in its elliptical orbit around the Earth (the "Super" moon). The occurrence of a "Super Blue Lunar Eclipse" is indeed rare, with the last one occurring in 1866, one hundred and fifty two years ago! I observed the eclipse from work, (The Mount Lemmon SkyCenter) where we were providing a live stream of the eclipse for NASA.
The image at left was taken with my Canon 6D and a 70-200mm lens set to 100mm, just before sunrise. You can see the eclipsed moon hanging in the dawn sky with Picacho peak in the distance at lower right (along with I-10 traffic just in front of it).
Below is a collage of some of the images I captured during the eclipse, using my Canon 6D and my Stellarvue 90mm refractor. Remember to click to enlarge (perhaps twice if your browser automatically resizes images to fit the window)
So you missed the eclipse and are wondering when the next lunar eclipse is here in AZ? The next eclipse in Tucson will be on January 20, 2019 starting at 7:36 PM local time.
Finally, my friend Roger who observed and photographed the eclipse with me, had a little fun with my image above...
Happy New Year and welcome 2018! There is much to celebrate!!
It is fitting that 2018 started off for me with an astronomical adventure, as it provided some fodder for a blog post...and in addition, New Years Day is the anniversary of this blog! It all began here, in Googleland, on January 1, 2010. While I have trailed off in the frequency of blog posts, my enthusiasm for astronomy remains strong. The icing on the cake, is that today is the 22nd anniversary of my marriage to the love of my life, Beth.
As for the astronomical adventure, it happened that there was a transit of the International Space Station across the disc of the Sun as seen from central Tucson today. This is the third time I have observed a transit of the ISS across the Sun, and you can read about the first adventure here, and the second here.
Today, I headed out to Himmel Park in central Tucson with my friends Jerry and Travis and set up my TEC 140 refractor with a Herschel Prism. At the last minute I decided to use my Canon 6D to record video, instead of attempting to 'burst shoot' the transit. This would take a lot of stress out of having to touch the camera and capturing an event that lasts approximately 1 second!
Without writing a novel, it was a success! I am posting the original video at the bottom of this post, and I also created a composite of 32 individual frames showing the transit. You can see in the composite image below that we were not perfectly centered under the ISS shadow, but we were very, very close.
Click the image to enlarge
To appreciate the scale here, consider that the Sun is about 93 million miles away and the ISS was approximately 421.5 miles downrange from me during the transit! Because the ISS is so close, one must be on a very narrow ground track of the ISS' shadow in order to have the transit appear centered on the Sun. Today's transit lasted 1.4 seconds on the center-line.
How fast does the ISS orbit? It orbits the Earth in approximately 92.6 minutes, which results in an apparent ground speed of 7.885 km/second (4.9 miles/second)! The ISS is also fairly small- It's dimensions are approximately:
Length72.8 m (239 ft)
Width108.5 m (356 ft)
Height≈ 20 m (66 ft)
The distance of the Space Station today, coupled with it's actual size, translates into an apparent angular diameter of 41 arcseconds- and the Sun is about 1800 arcseconds in diameter. So the ISS is about 2.2% of the apparent diameter of the Sun...in other words, you could fit about 44 ISS's across the Sun's face today. You can now appreciate why a video capture is the easiest.
Here is the short video...pay close attention as the transit is only 1 second! Watch it full screen for easier viewing.
Going through some pictures this morning and I found one that I took in Portal a couple weeks ago that I thought was worth sharing. Not long after sunset I was setting up my camera for some late night attempts at the Summer Milky Way, and took the picture below as a test shot to make sure I had the focus set properly. You can see the setting winter Milky Way, intersected by the zodiacal light, and in the lower right is a very bright bolide. A bolide is a large meteor that is exploding in the atmosphere (they are often referred to as fireballs). You can see the green color, which was easily visible to the naked eye. Unfortunately, this one was on the horizon and not overhead- Had it been overhead the streak would have been much longer, it would have appeared brighter (less atmospheric extinction of light), and there may even have been a visible vapor trail.
Just back from another weekend adventure out to the dark Skies of Portal, AZ. Seems that my blog is slowly turning into the Portal report...in any event, below is an image of the Milky Way just after it cleared sufficiently above the horizon for a picture. In this image we are looking toward the center of our galaxy, in the constellation of Sagittarius.
The green glow just above the horizon is air glow- light being emitted by Earth's atmosphere. This is from several sources, such as the recombination of atoms which were ionized by the sun during the day, light caused by cosmic rays striking the upper atmosphere, and energy emitted by the combining of nitrogen and oxygen in the upper atmosphere.
While the entire sky has air glow (and as a result it is never truly dark), the glow is most obvious about 10-20 degrees above the horizon. This is because the glow is subtle, and we are looking through about twice as much atmosphere looking across the horizon than when peering overhead. (We do not notice the air glow on the horizon due to atmospheric extinction of the light on the horizon).
I really do have a great job- I always tell folks that somehow I married a great hobby with a lot of administrative experience at the University...and now I get to worry about the budget and work with telescopes at the same time! Two weeks ago we held two first ever events at the SkyCenter- a DSLR milky way and star trail workshop and a Messier Marathon. Here is a single shot of the summit as the milky way was rising on March 25th-
While I had to work and did not 'participate' in either event, I did manage to squeeze off a few pictures of my own during the night- First, this is a single 20 second exposure of M 13, the Hercules globular cluster, taken through the 24" Phillips telescope using my Canon 6D. I was impressed with the image out of the camera, so I decided to try and process it a little using Photoshop...and while I know the color of the stars is a little saturated, I still like the result.
In addition, I took a 30 second exposure of the M 57, the Ring Nebula in Lyra. The image below is a 100% crop, and my colleague (and professional photographer) Sean Parker worked the processing a bit to bring out the galaxy (IC 1296) nearby the ring...but the ring itself is very much what the Canon delivered.
Final image from the weekend, is an exposure I took inside the dome of the 32" Schulman Telescope during a break in the Messier Marathon while guests were waiting for the summer constellations to rise a little higher. It seems bright in the dome, but consider all the lighting is coming from red led lights that illuminate the steps leading into the dome!
Time for what is becoming a quarterly tradition...a blog post!
In February, I made a trip to the dark skies of Portal, AZ with my good friends, "The League of Extraordinary Ordinary Observers" for our regular gathering of opinions, half-baked ideas, conspiracy theories, and of course telescopes. We had our usual good time and saw some wonderful celestial sights.
I have posted pictures before of the summer milky way from Portal (see my previous post, for example...remember, quarterly tradition!), yet I do not believe I have ever captured a decent photo of the winter milky way. One reason for this is that we tend to take our trips when it is warmer than February and the other is that the winter milky way is much fainter than the summer. To explain quickly, in the summer night sky we are looking toward the central bulge of our galaxy in Sagittarius, and the center of our galaxy contains a much higher density of stars. In the winter night sky, we are looking out away from the center of our galaxy and our view across the plane of the galaxy is not nearly as bright as when we look inward toward the center.
Below is an image of the winter milky way, that I captured in Portal. It is a stack of 3 individual frames and is to me, quite striking. Not only can you see detail and dust lanes in the plane of our galaxy that are invisible anywhere near a city or town, but you can also see several subtle (and I mean subtle) pink nebula such as The California Nebula, Barnard's loop, The Rosette Nebula, etc. Be sure to click the image to enlarge.
These nebula would be more visible if my camera was astro-modified to be more sensitive in the red, however, I am impressed that the Canon 6D and Rokinon 14mm combination caught them at all. The (distorted) bright star lower left is Sirius and the double cluster in Perseus is visible in the upper right, just to give you a sense of how wide this shot is. I would be remiss if I did not mention the zodiacal light reaching from the lower left up through the Pleiades into the milky way. The Zodiacal light is sunlight, scattered by dust in the plane of our solar system left over from the time of our solar system formation. It is visible in dark skies after sunset and before sunrise, and is brightest in the spring and fall.
The other fun thing that occurred during the trip to Portal, is that I took a day to drive to Socorro, NM where I met a fellow amateur astronomer from whom I was purchasing a dobsonian telescope. It is my first dob after all these years and it reminds me I need to update the equipment page of this blog as the only telescope that I currently have listed on that page is my TEC 140! In any event, at left is the new scope and I hope to share some adventures with it soon...In case you are wondering, it is a 12.5" Obsession Dobsonian, with a mirror by OMI.
I just returned from 3 nights attending to my favorite dark-sky astronomy activity...a new moon trip to Portal, AZ hosted by my good friend Jerry. Accompanied by several other great friends- and most importantly my son, Ian, this trip was just what the doctor ordered It had been a long time since we had a father-son trip and it fed my soul to be with him for just a few days.
Despite our best astronomical intentions, we only had one clear night (which was tremendous). We were instead treated to some intense and dramatic monsoon storms for two days. Below are several pictures from the trip- so instead of rambling on about spending time with my son and good friends, here are some pictures...
Thursday night thunderstorm- looking north
Same cell, a few minutes later!
After dark, cloud to cloud lightning illuminating the sky with stars in the background
Friday night, a pass of the International Space Station through a hold in the clouds
Clouds did clear somewhat late Friday night, allowing for this shot of the Milky Way
Milky Way at last! Saturday night was our reward (Horizon is blurred due to tracking on stars)
Looking to the northeast Saturday night, lots of green airglow (which was noticeable to the eye)
So that is the Portal roundup- we observed many objects through several telescopes, but the best part was being with great people under desert skies.
2065. That is the number running around in my head this morning...or to be clear, the year 2065. In 2065, should I still be kicking and screaming, I'll be in my 96th year here on the 3rd rock from the Sun...and that is the next time that Earth, Venus, and Jupiter will be lined up as closely as they are now. Below, is a picture I took from the roof of our home last night of Venus and Jupiter in the western sky just after sunset. You will need to click to enlarge it to appreciate the planets near center.
Click to enlarge and see the planets near center!
I arrived home later than anticipated and barely had time to climb up to the roof and take pictures of the conjunction- and for the life of me could not seem to get a decent exposure quickly. Of course when I came back into the house it was then that I discovered I had left my circular polarizing filter on the lens. Very good for landscape, not so good in low light!
Venus is the brighter planet above and to the left of Jupiter. Last night these planets were separated in our sky by less than the diameter of our full moon! Keep in mind that these planets are not actually near each other in space- after all Venus (the 2nd planet) is inside our orbit to the Sun and Jupiter (the 5th planet) much further outside our orbit. It is just that from Earth, looking out on a line to Jupiter, we see Venus in its orbit right next to that line.
So, 2065 until we experience such similar geometry...if I'm around, I hope we have limited artificial lighting enough to see the alignment...and if not, perhaps my family members will have opportunities to see an Earth - Jupiter conjunction from Mars!
This week saw the Earth swing through the debris trail left by comet Swift-Tuttle, producing the annual Perseid meteor shower. Prognosticators and Astronomers alike were suggesting that due to perturbations of the comet by Jupiter, we would be plowing through a particularly denser area of the debris stream and that we would experience an active shower compared to many years. Predictions were for upwards of 200 meteors an hour, and I believe these were accurate.
I packed up my camera and friend Travis, and we headed up the Mount Lemmon Highway to the Geology Vista pullout at about 9 PM on Thursday evening...we were joined by the entire meteor shower watching community of Tucson, who apparently had the same idea...the pullouts on the highway were all full by 10 PM! I set up may Canon 6D with a 14 mm Rokinon lens at f/2.8 and took 60 second exposures for several hours. I obtained about 10 exposures with meteors and below is a crop of one of them, with the brightest Perseid I captured. (Be sure to note the Andromeda Galaxy, below the left edge of the Perseid).
Despite being at nearly 7000 ft in elevation and looking to the northeast (away from the glow of Tucson), you can see a lot of scattered light in the lower portion of image...the bulk of this is from the constant parade of traffic on the highway as well as cars that would pull into Geology Vista, leaving their headlights on, despite the lot being full and filled with obvious meteor watchers.
Finally, a quick bit of clarification on terminology...in space, these objects are called 'meteoroids' (like asteroids)...what differentiates them from asteroids is simply their small size. They are called 'meteors' only while plowing through our atmosphere and burning up. So a meteor is actually the bright streak we see, or what is commonly referred to as a shooting star. Should a piece of one of these actually survive the trip through the atmosphere and land on the ground, we then have a 'meteorite.' So, in space - meteoroid; burning up in atmosphere - meteor; safely on the ground - meteorite!
Finally, lots of excuses for not blogging much anymore, but the most honest one is lack of time...life continues to be busy and fulfilling and when I have down time, I seem to spend it relaxing and not at the computer.
We have lived in our house for over a dozen years and in that time have had all manner of wildlife remind us that we are simply squatters. We have the daily rabbits, ground squirrels, hawks, coyotes...we commonly see and her packrats, owls, bats, and tarantulas...and occasionally even a bobcat. Just this week a scorpion came indoors and stung my niece on the toe in the middle of the night. In the summer months we sometimes see a large gopher snake around the front of our property and a medium sized king snake perusing the backyard. We have never had a rattle snake in our space...until today.
While enjoying an early morning cup of coffee and cinnamon roll at the local coffee house with my lovely wife, I received a text message from my son that he had walked into the backyard and as he looked at our dog Cosmo he immediately noticed a large snake just ahead of the dog. Fortunately, the dog had not seen the snake and he was able to get the dog inside. Upon closer inspection (not that close) he saw it was a diamondback rattlesnake and not one of our known, local denizens.
Click the pictures to enlarge and enjoy him/her from the safety of your monitor.
Yesterday saw the planet Mercury transit the face of the Sun from our unique perspective here on earth. Slightly more common than a Venus transit which will not happen again in our lifetimes (see this post and this one as well), Mercury transits the Sun 12 or 13 times each century, always in May or November. The apparent size of Mercury is rather small against the Sun, approximately 1/5 that of Venus.
We had a few programs running simultaneously yesterday for the transit- up at the summit of Mount Lemmon the SkyCenter hosted a special program for visitors, and we also conducted an outreach event for students at Canyon View Elementary school. The Sky School was hosting a group of 5th graders from Canyon View at our mountain based program, where I was operating the telescopes. I set up at the Babad Do'Ag pullout approximately 2.5 miles up the Catalina Highway where we begin our Sky School programs with an exploration of the concept of a Sky Island. Mercury began its transit prior to local sunrise and the transit is approximately a 7 hour event. I was all set by 5:30 AM and enjoyed watching the shadow profile of the Santa Catalina Mountains slowly creep across the Tucson basin as the Sun rose. At left is the Coronado 90mm Hydrogen Alpha telescope we used for visual observation, as well as my 90mm Stellarvue triplet, 2x barlow and Canon 6D that I used to take pictures of the transit. (Many folks ask about utility of the pink foam...it is simply to shade my camera in the Sun!)
Here are a few of the excited 5th graders observing the transit, I enjoyed the amazement of the student in the grey and red shirt exclaiming "It's so small!!"
I took a large number of images (approximately every 10 minutes until it was over) and processing them will require some time. I did process one from near mid-transit and it is presented below. As always, click the image to enlarge it and if your browser automatically re-sizes images you may need to click it again.
So there you have it- a fun and science filled day sharing the wonders of our Solar System with a group of our future scientists and leaders!
As we say, a bad night in Portal is better than a good night most other places. I just returned from 3 nights camping with friends in Portal- and while we packed along all our telescopes and other observing gear, we only experienced about 2 hours of observing each of the first 2 nights. While many would be frustrated with the high cirrus that dominated the skies during our trip, good friends and beautiful mountains more than make up for the lack of celestial delights.
I did take a couple pictures on the second night which are below. These were both taken with my Canon 6D, a Rokinon 14mm manual lens (@ f/2.8), and were 30 second exposures on a non-tracking mount. First, is an image of the winter milky way, and notably you can see the star Canopus just hugging the horizon left of center. Canopus is the second brightest star in Earth's sky, with Sirius being the first. Sirius is the brightest star in the image...Orion is visible as are the Pleiades, Hyades, etc.
Below is an image of the Zodiacal light as it reaches up toward the milky way. (The zodiacal light is sunlight reflecting off of dust in the plane of our solar system.)
I hope that Spring attempt 2 to Portal, for the April new moon, provides clear skies and great company!
I think I need to make a T-shirt that says "I am not an astrophotographer" mostly to poke fun at myself. I have no desire to devote time to either data acquisition (hours per image) or learning the processing skills to create beautiful images of space (hundreds of hours learning, several hours for each image). Yet, for some reason, every few months I go through a phase where I stick a camera into a telescope and take some pictures to try and capture something pretty.
I stretch the contrast, try and clean up the noise a little, and assuming I did a decent job with focus call it a day. Then, I proceed to look at my pictures and realizing that I have the potential to do better I say to myself "Self, you need to learn how to this properly." I start to play around with photoshop, read about various techniques online and quickly retreat from the notion that I will be furthering my skills in astrophotography. Time goes by and soon it is "rinse and repeat." I suspect the truth is that I like taking pictures through a telescope, but am not going to devote myself to it. The lesson of course is to be satisfied with the process and results and not compare them to the many fantastic images taken by my friends and others on the internet.
Without further ado, more proof that I am not an astrophotographer. Three more pictures from my recent time on Mount Lemmon (see the previous post). Again, all of these images were taken with my Canon 6D through a 100mm Sky Watcher Esprit triplet refractor, and all are single exposures.
M31, M32, M110 - The Andromeda Galaxy and companions
M45 - The Pleiades
M42 - The Orion Nebula and NGC 1977 the Running Man Nebula (at top)
A shout out to Lady Galadriel for the reference in my post title. Tuesday night I was up at the Mount Lemmon SkyCenter (where I am the Director) assisting some folks with a filming project and took the image below at sunset. Watching the shadow of Mount Lemmon move across the San Pedro River Valley as the sun sets and then observing the shadow rise into the atmosphere is one of my favorite phenomenon to witness. Not only are the views singularly beautiful and serene from the summit, but with a clear atmosphere the Belt of Venus is remarkably vivid. The picture below was taken with my Canon 6d and 24-105mm lens at the 105mm setting. It is a handheld shot with an exposure of 1/60 of a second, ISO 200, f/5.6
It seems that throughout the year as the azimuth of the the sunset varies, the apparent shape of the mountains shadow changes slightly due to the perspective from which it is illuminated. I have noticed these subtle changes before, yet on Tuesday night the shadow seemed markedly pointed and picturesque. Other times during the year the shadow seems to be more rounded. For fun I may try and take pictures from this same spot throughout the year and see how much the shadow varies or if it is all my imagination. (Perhaps I am attributing too much to perspective and not enough to atmospheric conditions). One final note about this image- If you enlarge it, you can see the LBT on Mount Graham approximately 60 miles to the East. It is the white spot on the ridge, just above the snowy area on the right side of Mount Lemmon's shadow.
I spent a few hours observing through the Phillips 24" telescope with the guys I was helping out. Riding atop the Phillips Telescope is a Sky Watcher 100ed f/5.5 triplet refractor that provides very nice wide-field views to our guests. I am certainly no astrophotographer, but thought it would be fun to try and take a picture through the telescope. Below is a single 30 second shot (ISO 6400) of the double cluster (NGC 884 and 869) taken through the telescope. Be sure to enlarge it to its full size.
Overall it was a beautiful (and cold!!) night on the mountain, one that reignited my passion for observing.
Several years ago my friend Dean Ketelsen carefully scouted the Catalina Highway to identify a location from which he could take a picture of the Sun setting behind Kitt Peak National Observatory, some 60 miles distant. Dean maintains an excellent blog and I highly recommend visiting- In addition to being a knowledgeable amateur astronomer, his professional career has led him to work at the Steward Observatory Mirror Lab, where among other projects they fabricate the largest telescope mirrors in the world. His blog often features work from the lab, such as this post yesterday.
Each year Dean organizes a trip up to the spot on the Catalina Highway to observe and take pictures of the Sun as it sets behind Kitt Peak- and it does this very near the winter solstice. Approximately 3 days before solstice the alignment is favorable, and again 3 days following the solstice just as the Sun is again trekking northward in our sky. I have done this trip a few times in the past and you can read about these adventures on my blog from 2013 (my favorite images), 2012, and I even attempted a time-lapse in 2013.
This year I headed up with Dean and a few others on Thursday, December 17th and set up with my TEC 140 triplet refractor, Solar Prism (i.e. Herschel Wedge) Canon 6D DSLR. I focused on the Sun in advance and had the mount tracking as the Sun moved towards the Horizon. I had planned to try another time-lapse but unfortunately I forgot to turn off the tracking on the mount until halfway through sunset- so instead of seeing the sunset, the time-lapse would have shown Kitt Peak rising. First, a single shot of the Sun taken just after set-up with addition of a 1.6x Barlow lens (a converter).
Below is a single shot from the moment when all the structures atop Kitt Peak were illuminated by the Sun. Note the green rim on the upper limb of the Sun caused by refraction of the sunlight through the Earth's atmosphere.
As always, click the above images to enlarge them and finally, Happy New Year to all!
Yesterday, observers in North America were treated to a rare celestial alignment as the waning crescent moon passed in front of Venus. At approximately 9:23 AM Venus was covered by the illuminated edge of the moon as it (the moon) slowly trekked eastward across our sky. I had my eye on the sky all morning in anticipation of this event and did not think I would get to see it as the sky had a thick covering of cirrus even before sunrise.
If I have learned one thing in my life as an amateur astronomer, it is much better to attempt to make a trip or an observation in the face of uncertain weather,than to throw in the towel in advance. It is weather after all- it is unpredictable. Countless times I have awoken during the night to make an observation that others skipped because it was overcast when they went to bed...and certainly I have driven 16 hours to a star party and been clouded out for 4 nights! (Texas Star Party).
In this spirit, I loaded up my binoculars, camera, lens, extender and tripod into a backpack and took them to work with me...At 8:30 AM I looked outside and the sky was a mess in the area where the moon would be. So much so that I went back inside and nearly forgot about the occultation. At 9:15 I remembered it was about to happen and grabbed my equipment and ran outside. Sure enough, the haze had thinned just to the point where I could barely see the moon! It was difficult to focus and I was in a terrible hurry to catch Venus before it disappeared, yet I managed to get the image below. It is nothing to write home about, but considering the effort I went to observe this occultation, I figured it deserved a post!
My friend and comrade in astronomy Dean Ketelsen has a very nice post on his blog with better images of the occulation. In addition, Dale Cupp (also a friend and a volunteer who works with me) took the amazing image below through his 11-inch telescope.
This past weekend I spent in Portal, AZ for what was again a spectacular 4 nights of observing with great friends. The skies are wickedly dark, and when the atmosphere cooperates, some among us can see stars around magnitude 7.2 - 7.3 at zenith! Over the years the El Paso light dome has grown slightly to where it can be seen faintly rising about 5 degrees above the southeastern horizon. It does not impact observing in any fashion, yet it is a stark reminder that even in the proverbial middle of nowhere, our dark skies are a diminishing resource.
The two images of the milky way seen here are each a 30 second shot- taken with my Canon 6d and a Rokinon 14mm wide angle lens. (At left, you can see my very sexy TEC 140 posing with the Milky Way.) The picture below was taken with the camera tracking the stars on my Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer mount.
As pretty much everyone has heard, there was a Trident Missile (ICBM) test conducted off the coast of Huntington Beach, CA on Saturday night. While this is approximately 525 miles northwest of Portal, AZ, the test lit up the sky to the point where the milky way was nearly invisible! The expanding cloud of vapor from the test rose at least 40 degrees into the sky and appeared to be rather layered. As we later learned, the layers were caused by the separating stages of the rocket as it rose into the upper atmosphere. Anyway, after watching this military muscle flexing freak show for a few moments, it occurred to me that I should take a picture of it....so I ran and grabbed my camera and quickly tried to capture it before the missile itself disappeared behind the Chiricauhua mountains just to our west. Below is an image that represents what we saw, and given how quickly I was trying to get the camera on tripod and working, came out better than I deserved! I got several more, but this one has a little of everything from the stars to the layers of vapor to the missile itself. Be sure to click to enlarge it (and this is reduced in size for the blog...thanks Google!)
By now, there have been many images of the Total Lunar Eclipse this past Sunday circulating around the internet. I was leading a public eclipse observing group of about 75 folks so taking pictures was not my primary objective for the evening...yet, I did try and capture some between talking about the eclipse, debunking the "blood moon" nonsense, and generally just enjoying the warm fall evening.
Two images below, one of the partial phase prior to totality, and one image from near totality. These were taken with my Canon 6D and a 70-200mm f/4 set to 200mm with a 1.4 extender. There was a slight breeze and I wish I had more time to play with the camera as I would have set the ISO a bit higher in order to capture images a bit faster (resulting in sharper images). As things were, the images near totality was a 2 second exposure.
No, this is not a post about politics or the Presidential campaigning shenanigans that we are already suffering on a daily basis here in the U.S.A. Rather, it is a post to share some pictures of juvenile Red-Tailed hawks that I took yesterday on the summit of Mount Lemmon at Steward Observatory's field station. I had spent the better part of the day on the mountain working as we had a group of students from Catalina Foothills School District visiting us at the UA Sky School (you can see pictures here). Following the students departure there was a group of three hawks that were playing near the summit.
The hawks often circle overhead, floating on the laminar airflow that rises over the western summit ridge line and flows to the east. Sometimes they can 'surf' the air current and appear nearly motionless overhead for 10-20 seconds, or longer. (It is this same laminar airflow that is a factor in our frequently excellent astronomical seeing conditions). Below is an image of one of these hawks 'surfing' taken with my Canon 6d and a 70-200 mm lens at the 200 mm setting. The exposure was 1/1600 of second at ISO 100, with an aperture of f/4.5. Click on it for the full size image.
The picture below shows two of the hawks playing- the one on the left had landed in the tree and was then dive bombed by the one on the right. I took the image a fraction of a second too late as I was hoping to get the hawk on the left still in the tree looking at the incoming hawk. Both of these pictures are crops from the center of the original image but have not been reduced in size. (EDIT: Apparently, however, Blogger does compress them...)
As I catch up at work and attempt to at least get my desktop organized (the Windows desktop on my laptop that is...) I found this image of the Zodiacal light that I took out in Portal Arizona this past winter. I had just acquired a new Canon 6D and a small German Equatorial tracking mount to take long exposures of the sky...It is a fun image with the Milky way on the right running parallel to the Zodiacal light on the left. Brian Koberlein published a nice explanation of the Zodiacal light on his blog, check it out.
I actually did not set out to take pictures of the Zodialcal light, but was just trying to practice using the camera-mount system as it darkened, in preparation to take pictures of Comet Lovejoy. I do not remember the details of this capture at all, other than it was 90 seconds at ISO 1600, and I suspect I was using my 14mm Rokinon wide angle lens. If you look at the upper part of the image, just to the leftt of the Milky Way, you can see the Andromeda Galaxy. The light dome above the horizon is likely Sierra Vista, and is invisible to the naked eye.
Early this morning we were treated to a widely publicized total Lunar Eclipse. This eclipse occurred on the second full moon within a calendar month (a "Blue" moon), and also at the time of perigee, when the moon is at the closest point in its elliptical orbit around the Earth (the "Super" moon). The occurrence of a "Super Blue Lunar Eclipse" is indeed rare, with the last one occurring in 1866, one hundred and fifty two years ago! I observed the eclipse from work, (The Mount Lemmon SkyCenter) where we were providing a live stream of the eclipse for NASA.
