Comet Jacques (C/2014 E2)

I have always enjoyed observing comets and have sketched several nice ones over the last decade.  More recently with my foray into the world of DSLR photography I have also taken a couple pictures of comets such as C/2011 L4 Pan-Starrs in the evening sky.  With a few clear nights this week as the monsoon season wraps, I made a couple observations of Comet Jacques (C/2014 E2) which has been in the northern sky for a few months.  This comet was discovered this past March, and reached perihelion (its closest point to the Sun) on July 3rd 2014, passing Venus ten days later at a fairly close 7.9 million miles!  On August 28th, the comet made its closest approach to Earth at 52,415,761 miles, which is comfortably, a little more than half the distance to the Sun.

Two nights ago, on Sept 2 (UT) I took my first pictures of a comet through a telescope!  Using my 140mm refractor, I captured ten 20-second images of the comet, at ISO 1600 using the program BackyardEOS.  Below is a single image of the comet with the levels and contrast adjusted in photoshop.

My intention in taking 10 exposures was to stack them, bringing out any detail that may not be visible to the eye or in a single exposure.  In the stacked image below, you can see that I aligned the images on the comets nucleus and as a result the stars appear to trail.  There is a brighter inner coma around the nucleus as visible in the above image, and stacking the exposures revealed a fainter outer envelope of glowing gas.

Being my first try with a comet, I think this little experiment turned out quite well.  This attempt was all about getting my feet wet imaging a comet with a DSLR.  Next time I will pay more attention to timing my exposures in order that the star trails are more uniform, and will also spend a little more time figuring out the optimal exposure.

Hydrogen hotness

I spent the better part of this weekend in Denver, Colorado and it seems that while I was gone Tucson went from the humidity of monsoon season to hot and dry.  While the weather in Colorado was perfect (to this Arizonan) with daytime temperatures in the low 80's and early afternoon showers, the weather back home is reminding us that our rainy season is all too fleeting.  It is hot and dry again, with the hope of some last gasp monsoon activity late in the week.  Before long, the sights and sounds of thunderstorms will be gone for another year.

Of course the upside to drying out is the return of the clear skies that make Southern Arizona a mecca for amateur astronomers.  As the coffee was brewing this morning I stepped outside and was immediately moved to set up my solar telescope and do some observing of the Sun for the first time in months.  The skies were bright blue with no breeze and observing the Sun with my hydrogen alpha telescope confirmed that the atmosphere was fairly steady as well.  After a few minutes observing I finished a cup of java and decided to try and image through the telescope.  It has been some time since I last attempted this and immediately recognized how out of practice I was.  Focusing was difficult, tuning the etalon filter to achieve detail on the laptop screen was challenging, and getting the gain, gamma and exposure times to balance out nicely was nearly a chore.  Looking in the mirror I do not see an astrophotographer.

Even my post-processing routine was something of a distant memory.  I had taken 30-second videos of the Sun at the full resolution of the ASI120MC sensor (my astronomical video camera) as well as binned 2x2.  The best 300 frames (out of about 900) were aligned and stacked in registax with some sharpening and denoising applied as well.  First up, the binned image:

Next is the full resolution image and you can see that the atmosphere was impacting the final image more than when binning during capture.  The active region left of center was, I think, flaring subtly during the exposure as it seemed to brighten slightly more even after I pulled the camera and put the eyepiece back in.  Click the image to enlarge it to full size

So what is the endgame of this sweaty exercise this morning?  Well, I am motivated for the first time since June to spend several hours after dark looking through my telescope!

School is back in session

The Sky School that is.  This weekend is our annual training workshop for the graduate student fellows who serve as science instructors at our immersive, residential UA Sky School.  This year we have an outstanding group of 8 graduate fellows who will spend the academic year leading programs at the beautiful campus of the Mount Lemmon SkyCenter.  Below is an image of the group at Windy Point on the Catalina Highway.

As we hiked through the Lemmon Rock and Meadow Loop trails in the afternoon we were treated to some spectacular views of isolated thunderstorms moving across the Tucson valley.  Below is an image of one of these downdrafts.

Final image from the day is a Red Tailed Hawk that spent a few minutes checking us out during our tree identification lessons.  In case you are curious, he is sitting in a Ponderosa Pine, about 20 feet off the ground.  Click the image (or any of the others) to enlarge.

More stormy skies

Captured a few more images tonight, although the conditions were not nearly as favorable as last night.  Below are two images from tonight's storm taken with the Canon T2i and Rokinon 14mm f/2.8.  The first shows the clouds and rain illuminated from above and behind, while the second shows a strike within the falling rain.

Monsoon lightning

This weekend I received a new lens that I purchased specifically for taking exposures of the Milky Way, a Rokinon 14mm f/2.8.  This lens has a very good reputation for night time photographing of the skies and I was very happy with my first couple of shots (posted yesterday).  Despite the lens being fully manual with no electronic connection to the camera making focusing in the dark a challenge, the images are sharp and colors are rendered quite nicely.  Last night we had widespread thunderstorm activity throughout the Tucson valley and while we did not receive much rain at my house there was quite a bit of lightning.  I managed to capture the image below with the new lens; it is a 4 second exposure at ISO 400.  The raw file was processed in Photoshop and reduced in size for bandwidth purposes.  The picture was taken at 7:40 PM and it was quite dark out.  The illumination you see is primarily from the lighting itself.

Summer roundup

3 posts in 3 days faithful readers, I can hardly believe it myself.  My summer is essentially over with the University returning to full swing next week and our programming with the Mount Lemmon SkyCenter and UA Sky School full steam ahead.   I have been promising pictures from Mount Lemmon and without further ado below is an image of several of our domes taken from a very nice vantage point.  I was borrowing a friends Canon 6D which is a full frame camera (and a dream of mine) and using my 24-105mm zoom lens.  The image (as all of them in this post) is presented at a reduced resolution.  Overall I was very impressed with the dynamic range of 6D as well as the low noise when shooting at high ISO.

Any self-respecting blog post sharing images from Mount Lemmon must include a sunset.  No matter how many times I have watched sunset (more than I can count) from the summit, it is far and away my favorite experience on the mountain.  The image below was taken from the northwest area of the summit ridge while sitting quietly with a group of high school students visiting from Fryeburg Academy in Maine.  This was taken with my Canon T2i and a 10-22mm zoom lens.

This weekend we have seen some monsoon thunderstorms of the variety that make 2 months of no astronomical observing worthwhile.  These storms are simply ferocious with winds raging to 60 mph, driving rains, and lightning that can strike fear in even the most seasoned natives among us.  One of the benefits to these storms are the multitude of photographic opportunities that precede and follow them.  Below are two images from the storm we had Friday night.  Both images preceded the sunset storm with the clouds high in the western sky and rainbow in the eastern sky.

Both of these images were among the first I have taken with a new Rokinon 14mm f/2.8 lends that I received on Friday.  I had just enough time to open the box, attach it to my Canon T2i and run outside.  I purchased this lens primarily for use in shooting the milky way due to it's fast aperture and reputation.  That being said, I was very impressed with the way the lens handled the spectacular colors in the evening sky and I will certainly be playing with this in the daytime as well.  This summer I had the opportunity to make a new friend, Jon Webb, at the Grand Canyon Star Party and he introduced me to this lens.  He spent the week imaging the Milky Way with this lens and you can see his results below.


Timelapse in Canyon Country from Jon Webb on Vimeo.
This short series of night and day sky time-lapse videos were taken during the summer of 2014 between Arches National Park, Canyonlands National Park and on the north rim of the Grand Canyon national park. While this video was not sponsored by the U.S. National Park Service (NPS) I would like to thank the NPS and all its employees for maintaining such beautiful locations so that I and others can enjoy the night sky from them. I would also like to thank the Saguaro Astronomy Club in Phoenix, AZ for hosting the star party on the north rim of the Grand Canyon where part of this footage was shot. Finally, while I do not own the rights to the soundtrack I would like to highlight the music, Human Legacy, produced by Ivan Torrent and I highly recommend viewers of this video check out his music.

A fountain of love

Picking up from yesterday's post and trying to build some blogging momentum, here are a few more pictures from the summer travels.  I know I indicated some Mount Lemmon images but I am pushing those to tomorrow.  First up today are a couple shots from our trip to North Carolina to see Beth's family.  While they live in Garner (a Raleigh suburb) we spent the majority of our time on the coast just south of Wilmington.  The weather was not the most cooperative for taking pictures during our stay (add to that that we spend most of our time on the beach) but I did get a couple pictures from Wilmington that are worth sharing.  First up is a picture of the boardwalk and the Cape Fear Memorial Lift Bridge on the Cape Fear River.   It is currently the highest bridge in North Carolina and features a lift span that can be raised 135 feet allowing ships to navigate below. The lift span itself is 408 feet long.  I was hoping to catch it with the lift span in the lifted position and a ship passing below, but no such luck this year.

The picture below was taken in front of the Federal Building in downtown Wilmington.  That sexy woman being swept up in front of the fountain is none other than my dear wife Beth (I am the guy doing the sweeping), and my son Ian took the picture.

Now that you have seen these two pictures, here is something interesting...I forgot to bring my camera with me that night and these images were both taken with my phone!  I have never been one to take pictures using my phone but I am amazed at the results. Keep in mind that these are reduced in resolution for the blog, from around 5000 pixels wide to 1200 in landscape orientation. In case you are wondering, it is a Samsung Galaxy (naturally).