Observing
I was fortunate enough to spend the past week in a cabin on an island in the St. Mary’s River, between Lake Superior and Lake Huron. There were two clear nights out of the six I spent there, and they were spectacularly clear and dark. I had my Unihedron Sky Quality Meter with me, and it registered 21.57, even with the Milky Way high in the sky, and I could see magnitude 6.1 at the zenith. That is a very dark sky!
I took one of the club’s 8 inch dobsonian loaner scopes with me along with my own 90mm refractor, and both provided spectacular views. Of course I enjoyed spectacular views of some old favourites, like the Lagoon (M8) and Trifid Nebula (M20), the Swan (M17) and the Eagle (M16), the North America Nebula (NGC7000), the Whirlpool Galaxy (M51) and many more. The 8″ dob and the dark skies gave much nicer views than I’m used to here in Hamilton with my scope.
I received this photo from Janina Plach and asked her if I could share it with you. Great photo Janina! Deserts are stunning landscapes by day and equally magical by night. Recently, I had the opportunity to explore Sedona Arizona and try my luck at astrophotography. This red rock formation is named “Courthouse Butte” and was illuminated by moonlight.
Even though the conditions last night were not exactly as expected at the start of the evening, as the night wore on, it got better, and lot of work got done. Of the 10 members that came out last night, most had projects to get their equipment sorted out. I had to work out the setup of a new autogider scope and standalone guider, to work together, before I head down to Cherry Springs. Vince Chaisson was working out how his new Celestron C GEM mount works. Leslie Webb was tuning up an older Polaris mount that he hadn’t used for a wile. Matthew Mannering was getting the kinks out of his Sky Stopper wedge. Most of the group was ready to call it a night by 1:00 am.or so. I think we all where successful with our night’s work, as everyone seemed to be happy.
Lovely image of the Sun taken by Bill using a 60mm double stacked Lunt solar scope and Point Grey Grasshopper video camera. This image was taken on May 6.
As Jim said, it was a great night at Binbrook and I hope everyone there had as good a time as I did. Here are a couple of images that I came away with. I took a few of the sunset before setting up for the night, and after everyone was done I got a camera and tripod shot of Mars and Spica over the trees.
We had a large group show up at the park last night, I counted 16 cars. the conditions where good even if the dew was heavy . Great views of Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn, as well as many deep space objects. All attending said they enjoyed themselves. Two people sent me some photos to post here. It was fun to get back out to the park after such a long stretch of bad weather, lets hope we can get the park opened more often in the future.
If the weather permits we will be observing at Binbrook at our normal viewing site on the hill. In an effort to entertain the fishermen that will be coming out for a early start for the Sunday morning derby . If you can attend identify yourself at the gate as an H.A.A member and drive to the hill location. Hopefully we will get a good sky I hope to see you there.
A couple weekends ago we were treated to what feels like an unprecedented couple nights in a row of clear sky. Not able to pass up the opportunity I setup my scope in the backyard to take advantage of three planets currently visible in the evening sky. First up, just after sunset Jupiter is visible in the Western sky trailing the Sun. After a little polar aligning and calibration of my scope I slewed over to Jupiter in order to capture a few frames of video. Next up was Mars which is visible rising to the East. With April nights still cool and damp dew was starting to settle on the objective so I slapped on my dew buster, let things clear and started capturing video of Mars. As the evening wore on Saturn began to rise just after midnight. At this point the seeing was starting to get a little undesirable as Saturn could be seen jumping wildly around on my laptop screen. Nevertheless I proceed to capture video of Saturn. After some software stacking and a little tinkering here are the results of that nights observations.
While camping in Algonquin Park the strongest aurora in years lit up the northern sky. Although conditions were partly cloudy the green glow can be seen under long exposure photography. This aurora was created by sunspot 1261 which erupted into an M9-class solar flare reaching Earth one day later on August 5th.
A comparison of The Whirlpool Galaxy (M51) photographed on two separate dates. The supernova can be seen in the top photograph taken at the Binbrook observing site on June 5th. An earlier photograph positioned at bottom shows the Whirlpool galaxy pre-supernova taken on May 8th in Burlington.