Seems like Ann and I were both on the same mission (night before last)… to capture the rare meeting of Mars and the beehive cluster. I had a bout of poor planning 🙂 because I set up in a location where by the time it got dark enough the pair started to set behind the trees. I managed to get a few 30sec to 1 minute unguided shots with the 80mm scope. This is also a first light with my Williams Optics type II field flattener. The flattener gives me sharper stars out to the edge of the frame and reduces my f ratio to f5 from f6.3.

uncropped image: http://www.weatherandsky.com/main.php?g2_view=core.ShowItem&g2_itemId=1573&g2_imageViewsIndex=2

A few more images taken over the past month:

M106 spiral galaxy
http://www.weatherandsky.com/main.php?g2_view=core.ShowItem&g2_itemId=1560&g2_imageViewsIndex=2

M92 globular cluster
http://www.weatherandsky.com/main.php?g2_view=core.ShowItem&g2_itemId=1568&g2_imageViewsIndex=2

KerryLH

Conditions are favourable tonight and look good for tomorrow night for anyone wanting to watch Mars pass through the Beehive Cluster (M44)in the constellation, Cancer. Mars is fairly easy to spot even from the city – look in the western sky for its orangish glow. Use the sky map in the centre of this month’s Event Horizon to help you locate Mars and M44. (The May 2008 newsletter can be accessed from the main website page using the Newsletter button on the left side.)

Binoculars or a widefield, low-powered telescope are best for watching this event. Watch to see Mars pass in front of the cluster’s stars as it moves ever so slowly through M44.

Ann T.

Here’s a photo I took at about 9:55 this evening. Apologies for the bad focus. I had to compose and focus very quickly before Mars disappeared behind my neighbour’s tree! I’m sure others will add much better photos over the next day or two. This shot is with about 1600 mm of focal length at f/9, ISO set to 800, 20 second exposure.

Mars in M44

Sky & Telescope has a good article and star chart for finding Comet Boattini. The comet is faint and low in the southern sky from here. As the article explains, we’ll need a dark, moonless sky and a good southern horizon to see it.

Here is a link to the article and star chart: http://www.skyandtelescope.com/community/skyblog/observingblog/19012569.html

And here’s a link to a site with the comet’s co-ordinates: http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/iau/Ephemerides/Comets/2007W1.html

Happy hunting!

Ann T.

While my success with observing may not have always been the best, I was very lucky to spend a good portion of Sat night with two of the club’s lovely and talented astro-dollies.

Seeing that the new Binbrook Conservation Area Clear Sky Chart was indicating some promising conditions, which I verified on the weather websites, I sought out some compatriots to join me at Binbrook for observing. While many were away for the long weekend or working, I was fortunate enough to get replies from Jackie and Ann.

I joined Jackie at the main gate about 8:20 as the clouds were just starting to clear as predicted. We headed over to the hill to set up and caught a very nice sunset with some interesting lavender colours.

A young couple enjoying the sunset.

Ann joined us by around 9 and we got busy setting up our gear. Ann had her new Orion EON 80ED and Jackie had her trusty SkyWatcher Celestron ED80. Both are excellent scopes with nice sharp views.

I’ve been trying to get set up to collimate my Mak since I’ve noticed that the focus hasn’t been as sharp as of late. If I succeeded with this, then I felt I’d have a better chance of nabbing Comet Boattini faint and low on the horizon. With the promise of clear skies, interspersed with the occasional cloud, I thought it would work out.

Alas the clouds were more prevalent than anticipated. Unfortunately the clear spots didn’t last long enough to finish the collimation. So I’m not sure if my efforts improved things, or we just got lucky we very good and steady seeing between the clouds. We did get some sucker holes and had a nice time looking at the moon and a brief glance at Saturn and 4(5?) moons in the Mak.

Ann managed to get some nice shots of the moon and hopefully she’ll post 1 of them.

Moon shot by Ann Tekatch

During one of the cloudy periods, waiting for them to pass (which they did move rather quickly considering the very light winds), we enjoyed watching some fireworks in the distance and hot chocolate.

Finally at around midnight, we decided to pack up, mostly due to frustration with the clouds. The seeing was quite good if one ignored the clouds (and we tried), the humidity was low and the temps were mild so otherwise it was a good observing night.

And sure enough as we were pulling away, the clouds finally seem to part completely and mocked us with clear skies for the 2 hours Jackie and I sat having coffee at a local coffee shop afterwards. But as I said, I had a very nice time with 2 great young ladies and that is always lucky in my books.

Tuesday night promised the last clear skies for a while, so Jim, Jackie, Ed, Ann and I met at the alternate site at Binbrook to try and find Comet C/2007 W1 Boattini. Low to the southern horizon in Hydra this 7th magnitude comet was going to require clear horizons and transparent skies. Sadly, the atmosphere didn’t cooperate, and despite Ann being well prepared with current coordinates, our attempts to find the comet failed. We did, however, get in some good star-hopping practice. But no comet. We have had to console ourselves by looking at Bob Christmas’s excellent photos.

We certainly did enjoy ourselves though, and had a nice tour of the solar system. Aside from the very identifiable red of Mars, there was also Saturn, that looked particularly good through Ed’s 12″. Perhaps the biggest treat of the night though, was Mercury. Following the Sun into the west, it showed a clear crescent phase through all the scopes that were pointed at it, including my little 80mm refractor. It had a nice warm brown colour, but I think that had more to do with the low altitude than the actual colour of Mercury.

After Mercury had set and we had abandoned all hope of finding the comet we turned out attention to the moon. High in the sky and showing a nice terminator, it pleased all who observed, in any instrument. Of particular note was the Straight Wall, that showed clearly at this phase.

A couple of weeks earlier I had tried to point my little point-and-shoot camera through the eyepiece of my scope, and had some surprising success. Here is a shot from that night.

A nearly full moon from the hill at Binbrook

At Bayfront on Saturday night I took the fuzzy shot (thanks to the clouds) that I posted on the blog’s entry for our public night. On Tuesday I thought that I would try again, and here are the results.

The southern highlands

Ptolemaeus, Alphonsus and Arzachel

I offer these shots not as the best you have seen on this blog (hi there, Kerry and Bob and Tim and…) but as an example of what we all could do, even if we aren’t the skilled and experienced astrophotographers we would like to be. My camera has a small zoom (the 35mm equivalent is 24-85mm) and is nothing fancy, and the scope was my small but mighty Orion ED80, an 80mm refractor. I simply hand held the camera in front of the eyepiece (a 10mm that shows the entire moon in the field of view). Yup, hand held. No attaching gizmos, no accessories of any kind. Others that have stronger zooms have had success just by using the telephoto function on their camera and no scope.

Try it out! There might be great lunar shots waiting for you in your future! Of course I would be happy to offer any tips, but our club is full of others that have much more skill than I. The HAA is a wonderful club indeed!

Click on the title of this blog to go to my HAA Gallery page, where the first 3 photos are of the Whale Galaxy, the Whirlpool Galaxy and Comet Boattini, which I took last week at Spectacle Lake Lodge, near Barry’s Bay, Ontario.

Cheers,

Bob Christmas

Below: The Whale and Hockey Stick Galaxies

From John Gauvreau

This is the moon from Bayfront, through the clouds and shot by pointing my point-and-shoot camera through the eyepiece of my 80mm scope. Despite the clouds the visitors seemed to really enjoy the views!

A fine assortment of HAA members and their scopes, ready to host the public.

_____________________________________________________________
KerryLH Update:

Daytime solar and lunar observing at the Nature Centre (Hamilton beach). It was a perfect day with many curious people passing by.
Many still enjoyed the view of the sun even with no sunspots. The waxing cresent moon had some interesting features.

Evening session:
Excellent turnout of people looking at Mars, Saturn and the moon.

All scopes pointed at the moon

________________________________________________________________
A couple of shots from Don Pullen

New members and winners of telescope at May meeting

Here’s an excerpt of an image of Comet Boattini, in Hydra, that I took at Spectacle Lake on Sunday, May 4, 2008. Equipment: Canon Digital Rebel 300D, Tamron 300mm lens at f/2.8, Super-Polaris equatorial mount. Exposure: 130 seconds.

More, and larger, images coming from my Spectacle Lake trip soon…

Looking like it might be the best opportunity of the week, Jim, Jackie and I headed out to the alternate site last night, to brave the damp and cold for a chance to do some viewing. When we arrived there were already two scopes set up, and their owner Brett there to watch over them.

The sky was not at its best, but the views of Saturn were lovely, with moons seeming to duck around each other as the ring plane closes and their orbits are seen close to edge on. All four scopes present gave excellent views. Visitor Brett was showing off a new Celestron 80mm apo, which, not surprisingly, gave almost identical views to my 80mm apo! He also had a Celestron 120mm achromat, which showed some purple fringing around the bright planet, but that did not detract from the excellent view that it gave. As more good quality large achromats like this one become available on the market, they really are an excellent value considering the very cheap prices that they sell for. Jim’s 8″ Schmidt-Cassegrain certainly showed the fainter moons that the smaller scopes didn’t show. His is an excellent scope and its larger aperture pulled through for us, and not for the last time of the night.

I had brought my camera with me, along with hopes of a few wide field shots. Last week I had pointed my little point-and-shoot camera through the eyepiece of my scope and came away with some surprisingly satisfactory pictures of the moon. This time I brought my trusty old Olympus OM-1, a fully manual film camera. I was lucky enough to get an excellent polar alignment on the first try (whew!) and used a 300mm lens to photograph the lovely pairing of Saturn and Regulus. At least, that was my intention until I ran out of film after two exposures! These are the kind of things I should check before I leave home, right? Oh well, I only need one good shot.

Galaxy hunting let us compare the wide field view of M84 and M86 together through my 80mm scope with the very detailed views of each individually through Jim’s 8″. Jim also took in M51 and I took in M65 and M66. We followed up with a few favourite open clusters, from the vast Beehive (M44) to the tiny but lovely NGC1502. We all topped off the evening with hearty welcome to everyone’s old friend, M13, the globular cluster in Hercules. Here again, Jim’s 8 inches of aperture showed detail that the smaller scopes couldn’t quite resolve. It was so nice to see this harbinger of the warmer seasons rising high enough to view properly.

Despite a glimpse of the summer constellations like Lyra and Cygnus rising in the east, the cold and damp finally defeated us and it was time to head for warm confines and warmer coffee. Good conversation always accompanies these gatherings, and this time included tales of adventure from past star parties and other places.

Large gathering or small, good skies or bad, observing with the HAA is always a great time with a great club.

Over the past month on clear nights where I am not too busy I have been trying to catch up on some imaging of the galaxies. I love galaxy season! There are so many countless targets to keep you busy with such beautiful/unique shapes and colours.

ANyway M51 is a target I tried a few times last year. I decided to image this one again because I wanted to see if I could get more detail out of it with better tracking and improved processing. Since this is a small target I stacked it in deep sky stacker with a 2x drizzle. I think it really helps when trying to process for intricate detail.
This was imaged with the C6 SCT @f6.3 ~ 945mm focal length

Another interesting target…
The Whale Galaxy
Click link for the wide view with the unusual Hockey Stick Galaxy…
http://www.weatherandsky.com/main.php?g2_view=core.ShowItem&g2_itemId=1483&g2_imageViewsIndex=2

M81 was imaged over two seperate nights. One from home and the other night at Binbrook.

… and finally last night before the moon rose I wanted to catch as many frames of the Virgo Galaxy Cluster/Markarian’s Chain with my Canon 100-400mm lens. I imaged at 300mm, f5.6, ISO 800, 22x3min. In the high res version you can see my tracking was horible due to poor alignment and breezy conditions… so really it is not a great judge of this lens. Overall though, I am really happy with it and the stars (when tracking is good) appear to be sharp across the field.
Large view: http://www.weatherandsky.com/main.php?g2_view=core.ShowItem&g2_itemId=1504&g2_imageViewsIndex=3

My setup with the Canon 100-400mm f4.5-5.6L lens.

You can see all these images at higher resolution in my latest images gallery. Just click on the individual image and then look for the size options on the right side.
http://www.weatherandsky.com/main.php?g2_view=core.ShowItem&g2_itemId=101

KerryLH