Final test for the Transit of Venus

One more attempt this morning to try some different settings on the camera.  It appears that at the moment I am still seeing the best results from 1/4000 of a second at ISO 100.  I tried shooting in monochrome as well as with some different color schemes, but the standard is still giving the best results.  Below is an image taken this morning with my TEC 140 and Herschel solar prism at 7:52 AM MST (1452 UT).  I did play around with this shot using the freeware program GIMP, and used the unsharp mask tool and I also increased the contrast slightly. Overall, assuming the weather holds, I should be able to get some decent shots of the Transit on Tuesday.  Make sure and click on the image to see the full size.

If you are interested in what got me to this point with the new camera, read this post from yesterday. My next post on the Transit will be after the fact!

Venus Transit Authority

2004 Transit

I believe it is safe to day I've boarded the A train (Alan train) to H-E- double hockey sticks...(this is a family friendly blog, no cursing!).  I am so excited for the Venus Transit that will occur on Tuesday that I decided I was going to attempt to image the event.  After all, this is the last Transit of Venus that will occur in my lifetime and the only previous one in 2004 was not visible from the west coast of the US.  The next Transit is in December of 2117 at which point I, along with everyone else alive today will have been reduced back to stardust.

This decision to take images of the Transit of Venus was made about 7 days in advance....i.e. last Tuesday.  The "problem," if you will, is that in all my years as an amateur astronomer I have been strictly a visual observer.  Sure, I look at many astrophotos every day, but take one!?!  I leave that to the experts like my colleague Adam Block at the Mount Lemmon SkyCenter.  Back in the veyr late 1990's and until about 2001 I had an old Ricoh 35mm film camera that I used to snap some occasional shots of the Sun through my trusty C8...however, the difficulties of getting decent focus and the expense of developing rolls of film for one or two good shots quickly turned me off.  I simply enjoyed using the old peepers and making a sketch. Skip ahead a dozen years and along comes the Transit of Venus.  Impulsively on Wednesday, I purchased my ticket on the A-Train and am now traveling the road to...

I decided to take the plunge and purchase a Canon T2i DSLR camera.  I went with Canon for a few reasons.  One is that when I graduated college (shortly after the invention of the wheel) I purchased a then brand new first generation EOS Rebel 35mm film camera.  I backpacked through Mexico and took countless other trips with that camera and it really delivered excellent images.  Secondly, the astrophotographers that I know and trust who own DSLR cameras utilize Canon.  Finally, although I have not yet downloaded or tested it, there is a software program called BackyardEOS that has been developed by an astrophotographer that is not only economical ($30) but well regarded among amateurs like myself.  Below are pictures of the Canon T2i for those of you wondering what it looks like.

Just so one can appreciate my timeliness in preparing for this event, I purchased the camera on Wednesday afternoon and then hightailed to Starizona in order to purchase a T ring and adapter so that I could couple the camera to my telescope.  Wednesday night I read key parts of the manual and did a little internet research on some recommended settings for imaging the Sun.  Thursday morning I awoke an hour early to set up my white light solar telescope and take some practice shots.  Using my 102mm f/11achromatic  refractor and my Lunt Solar Systems Herschel Prism I quickly ran into my first problem...I could not achieve focus.  With no time to consider alternatives, I packed up and went to work.   Thinking through things later that night, I decided that I really should use my TEC 140 apochromatic refractor to capture this historic event as it is a precision telescope. Why would I purchase such a nice camera and then consider using a cheap lens?  Further, the TEC 140 is shorter at f/7 and has a feathertouch focuser which is designed for imaging!

Faithfully on Friday morning I again got up an hour early and tried to reach focus....Success!  I spent about 30 minutes trying different exposures and then hustled off to work.  I had a lot to get done in the morning and then had to drive a couple hours north to Phoenix to give a talk at the Saguaro Astronomy Club monthly meeting.  The meeting ended at 10 PM and I was home in bed by 12:30 AM.  Thank goodness my dear spouse runs faithfully several times per week...not only does it give me a heavenly body to observe (remember, family friendly) but she runs shortly after sunrise and as a result I was awake at 0700 this morning to try again.

Below, I give you a single shot taken at 1/4000 of a second, ISO 100, at 8:15 AM MST (1515UT) through the TEC 140 and Lunt Herschel Prism.  The only processing done here was to reduce the image scale (which I cut about in half) and to slightly sharpen the image.  The color (hopefully) comes from the fact that there is a layer of smoke in the sky from the Gila fire across the New Mexico border.  This is the largest wildfire in NM history and the smoke has been filling our skies for days.  You can see in the image that I know nothing about processing yet.  Make sure to click on the image and enlarge it to full size.

Click to enlarge

You can see in the image that I captured the visible sunspot groups as well as some extensive facula surrounding the spot groups near the limb.  Overall I am quite happy with this first attempt, and my plan is to capture many raw images of the Transit of Venus on Tuesday and then I can take my time and learn how to process them after the fact.

Annular Eclipse time lapse from SkyCenter

Throughout the special eclipse program we had at the Mount Lemmon SkyCenter, Adam and Miwa Block faithfully snapped images of the eclipse every few minutes.  The result is the time lapse video seen below.  Be sure to watch it full screen with the volume on as it gives a nice sense of what we experienced.

Video stream from Annular Eclipse

During our special Solar Eclipse program at the Mount Lemmon SkyCenter, we streamed live video of the eclipse via the Night Skies Network website.  Our stream was delivered using my Lunt Solar Systems 60mm pressure tuned Hydrogen Alpha telescope and an Imaging Source DMK 41 camera.  This stream went fairly well and was a dry run for our planned live stream of the Transit of Venus on June 5th.

One of the administrators of the Network, made a video capture of his monitor and posted it on You Tube...this is video of the portion of the eclipse which includes mid-eclipse...that is the time of greatest eclipse, when 87% of the Sun was hidden by the moon at our location atop Mt. Lemmon.

2012 Annular Solar Eclipse

Unless you are nocturnal, you no doubt realize that yesterday many folks on Earth were treated to a very spectacular Annular Solar Eclipse.  The reason that this eclipse was annular (coming from the Latin, annulus, meaning ring) is that the moon was at it's furthest point from earth in its elliptical orbit when it passed between us and the Sun.  This was a very beautiful event to witness from start to finish, and I was fortunate to be working with my colleague Adam Block as we conducted a very special eclipse program at the Mount Lemmon SkyCenter.  We set up multiple telescopes providing guests views in both white light and hydrogen alpha, as well as providing everyone with specialized eclipse viewers.  While we had about 80 individuals on top of Mount Lemmon viewing the eclipse, we had literally thousands who watched a live stream of the eclipse over the internet.   We will do this again for the Transit of Venus on June 5th, and if you would like the web address, drop me an email.  I took the image at left near the time of greatest eclipse (6:38 PM local MST).

I made a white light sketch of the Sun prior to the eclipse to note the days spots, and then drew in the approximate maximum eclipse.  I was quite busy keeping an eye on our live feed as well as entertaining guests, so my sketch is truly an approximation as I lost track of which part of the Sun's disc was not eclipsed.  You can see in the sketch that we experienced about 87% of the Sun, including all the sunspots eclipsed by the moon.  Click the sketch to enlarge it.



I took many pictures with my trusty point and shoot camera and you can see a slide show of them at the bottom of the post.  For those of you suffering with devices that will not correctly display the slide show, I am pasting a few highlights here.  Below are shadow images of the eclipse, cast on our domes as the sunlight filtered through the pine trees.

 Here are some images of our guests enjoying themselves.

And of course sunset was spectacular!  There are wildfires to the north and the smoke attenuated the brightness of the Sun just enough that we could view the eclipsing Sun set naked eye...it was a beautiful magenta color and at the end, looked like a shark fin swimming on the horizon.  It was awesome to hear the guests break out in spontaneous applause when the Sun finally set.

And at last, here is the slide show!

Observing Jets in Centaurus A

I am a pretty faithful reader of Phil Plait's blog for Discover Magazine titled "Bad Astronomy."  Phil is an entertaining and informative science writer who frequently utilizes images generated at the Mount Lemmon SkyCenter as the subjects of his posts.  For example, see this post on NGC 5426/5427 from a few days ago.

Today, Phil posted an interesting piece on the jets emanating from the black hole at the heart of the "Centaurus A" galaxy.  As soon as I read the piece, I laughed to myself and thought how ironic it is that an Astronomer like Phil, (and I am sure he is far from alone in this) is surprised that these jets can be seen in visible light.  At it's heart, Astronomy is an observational science...yet, Phil's post is a reminder of how far the science has gone from having Astronomers spend time at the eyepiece.  This is not a bad thing, simply a reminder that the machines are not yet ready to take our place...I hope.  Incidentally, the image of Centaurus A (NGC 5128) at right is from NASA and can be found here with an accompanying article on the jets.

At left is a page from one of my observing logs from April 9th 2010.  Click on the image and enlarge it and read what is inside the red box I have drawn...yes, I believe I saw one of these jets visually in a 9.25 inch Schmidt Cassegrain telescope.  I was in Portal, Arizona under approximately magnitude 7.5 skies with my good friends Jerry Farrar and Bill Gates.  Bill was observing the galaxy with us and noticed these jets.  When he pointed them out, I was able to spot one of them by gently bumping the telescope back and forth.  Now I can not say for certain that our observations of light streaming from the galaxy is necessarily the same feature that Phil points to in his article, but it is hard not to believe they are related.

In case the writing is hard to decipher, I wrote "Bill Gates pointed out the bright areas streaming from the galaxy, perpendicular to the dark lane.  This was extremely low contrast and resembled the faintest of cometary tails streaming south (generally).  He could see glow to the north as well, although this was a "maybe" for me using the 9.25 inch SCT."


EDIT:  I actually wrote about this observation in a blog post back in April 2010!!  Read it here.

Were these the jets we saw?  Who knows...Either way, Bill is an amazing observer, and as my friend Jerry commented upon seeing Phil's blog post, the ESA, NASA, and the NSF should consider funding Bill to look through his telescope!

TEC 140 - A face anyone can love

Now this is a face anyone can love (see previous post).  Last new moon I was in Portal, AZ with some good friends (still need to write up my observing highlights from the trip...maybe I'll get to it this weekend...)...My friend Mike Wiles snapped a very sleek and sexy image of my TEC 140 waiting for dark...she raises the hairs on the back of my neck just looking at her...as always, click the image to enlarge and have a close up look.

For more information on the equipment I use there is a link at the top of the page, or you can click here.  I'd also recommend Mike's blog as he is a talented writer.