Tonight's Moon

Tonight's Moon as it approaches last quarter.  This image was taken with my Canon 6D attached to my Celestron EdgeHD 8 inch telescope with an exposure of 1/500 seconds at f/10, ISO 400.

Comet Lovejoy

Comet C/2013 R1 Lovejoy is still visible in the morning sky, slowly moving into conjunction with the sun and slowly fading as well.  The image above was taken from Kitt Peak with my Canon 70D and my 50mm lens at f/1.8 with an exposure of 10 seconds at ISO 3200.  The image below is the same image with some curves adjusting - you can see the comet a little better near the center of the image.  If you know where to look, you can even find the globular cluster M-13 - the western half of the constellation is near the bottom just left of center.

Comet Lovejoy (C/2013 R1) over Tucson

Comet ISON (C/2012 S1) got all the press in the last month as it skimmed over the surface of the Sun on Thanksgiving, but all the while, comet C/2013 R1 Lovejoy was lurking in the morning skies just minding its own business.  It's been a naked eye comet for more than a month, though it won't blow your eyeballs out and you'll probably need binocs to be sure you saw it.  This image was taken from Kitt Peak with my new Canon EOS 70D with my trusty old Sigma 24mm f/1.8 lens set to f/1.8 at ISO 1600 with a 20 second exposure.  Tucson lights up the sky rather brightly and you can see it at the bottom behind the mountains that are silhouetted against it.  At the top near the center of the image is comet Lovejoy - a small greenish coma with a faint tail pointing up and to the left.  You can also spot the constellation Hercules just above Tucson a little left of center and if you know where to look, you can even see Globular Cluster M-13.

Jupiter

I dropped my sweetie off at the Catalina Observatory with some students for a weekend education program held there at the 61 inch telescope. This view of Jupiter was made with eyepiece projection from the 61 inch (1.54-m) Kuiper Telescope on Mt. Bigelow north of Tucson. The exposure of 1/200 seconds. you can clearly see the red spot, a giant storm that has persisted on Jupiter since it was first recognized in early telescopes. It was difficult to focus the image while hand-holding the camera to the eyepiece. Best image quality was hit and miss as you tried to align the camera with the eyepiece in the dark while focusing the camera lens or telescope.

Leonid fireball train

In the next exposure, you can still see the train blowing in the winds in the upper atmosphere. The meteor left this trail behind which I could trace out in images stretching over about half an hour! Must have been pretty neat to see. This image was taken with my 10mm fisheye lens with an exposure of 2 minutes at f/2.8, ISO 800.

Leonid Fireball

I took 99 exposures overnight from my light polluted back yard hoping to catch some bright Leonid meteors. In this frame taken over 2 minutes starting around 04:55:49 AM MST, a bright fireball flashed across the sky in the south part of Orion on the right side of this fisheye image of the night sky. Leo is on the left part of the frame (trace the image of the fireball back towards the left and you'll pass through Leo - hence the name of the meteor shower). It must have been spectacular to watch. I was asleep at the time as the camera kept its vigil outside with a timer remote faithfully exposing image after image. This image was taken with my 10mm fisheye lens with a 2 minute exposure at f/2.8, ISO 800.

Satellite, domes and Milky Way

A Satellite speeds along its orbit paralleling the summer Milky Way in this fisheye image of the sky taken at the end of June from Kitt Peak. The dome faintly lit by light from Tucson and from the sky near center is that of the Spacewatch 1.8-m telescope. This image was taken with my 10mm fisheye lens with an exposure of 30 seconds at f/2.8, ISO 400.

Moon, 2008 May 10

I took this picture using eyepiece projection looking through a 4.5 inch refractor. I'm tempted to flip the image around so that the Moon looks like it would in the sky (a telescope flips it backwards on both axes and a right angle prism was used for ease of viewing which flips one of the axes back so this is flipped east for west). This image was taken with the lens at 54mm focal length and at f/8 with an exposure of 1/125 seconds, ISO 200. The exposure was a bit short, so I had to do some tweaking in Picasa to make the image look brighter (mostly).

Mt. Graham at work

Here's a view from Saturday night with both the SMT in the foreground and the LBT in the background at work on a moonlit spring night. The constellation of Bootes lies on its side as it rises behind the two telescopes. The LBT doesn't look as big as it is from this vantage point - but when one stands beside the behemouth, or looks at the telescope itself from inside the building, one gets the right impression of just how big this telescope really is with 2 - 8 meter diameter mirrors working in tandem. The Gregorian secondaries are about the size of the telescopes I am used to using! This image was taken at 18mm focal length with an exposure of 60 seconds at f/3.5, ISO 400.

Night-time on Mt. Graham

The SMT is busy while the LBT remains closed (though it and its dome moved during my timelapse sequence that this frame is taken from) as the Moon lights up the scene on Mt. Graham looking east from the VATT. This image was taken at 18mm focal length with an exposure of 1 minute at f/3.5, ISO 400.

Lunar Eclipse

This image of the Moon was taken about 2-3 minutes after it entered the Umbra. This image was taken at 1/100 seconds at f/6.3, ISO 100.

GIMPed Lunar Eclipse

We got to watch the first part of tonights Lunar Eclipse before the clouds moved in (thanks Murphy!) just before the start of the total phase. Anyway, this is a combination of two photos taken in quick succession at 70mm focal length and f/8, ISO 100. The first was a 5 second exposure that was exposed for the UofA campus, the 2nd was a 1/100 second exposure to get the exposure of the Moon itself just after first contact of the Umbra. And if you look just above the trees, the star there is actually the planet Saturn.

Clouds and comet and dome

This image was taken on Wednesday morning and shows comet Holmes which has continued to stay bright while it expands - if you could condense all the light from the comet back into a point, it would still be one of the brightest objects in this section of sky. The comet is just left of center. The Spacewatch 36 inch dome is in the foreground with a bank of clouds that are slowly moving into the area. This image was taken with my 24mm f/1.8 lens with an exposure of 30 seconds at ISO 400.

The Orion Nebula

The Orion Nebula, also known as M-42 is a bright and easy target that you can see with the unaided eye (though seeing it as more than just a little fuzzy is a challenge) and is a decent binocular and great small telescope target. This image was taken on my way back to survey regions after looking at 17P/Holmes. The image was taken at 190mm focal length with an exposure of 60 seconds at f/6.3, ISO 400. This image was cropped significantly from the full frame and a little stretching to bring out the faint outer nebula without blowing out the central region too much.

17P/Holmes

Comet 17P/Holmes is still putting on a good show. I mounted my camera on the front of our 36 inch Spacewatch Telescope again last night and took this image of the comet. The camera was in a spot I had lots of trouble getting to, so I had a devil of a time centering and checking focus, but I managed to get the focus right. I had to crop this image so that it appears more like an image with about a 500mm focal length since the comet ended up in the lower corner of my frame. Did I mention that the camera was mounted in a spot that I had trouble getting to? Oh, yeah, I did..... Anyway, the comet sits right next to the brightest star in Perseus - Alpha Perseus (Mirfak) which is to the upper left of the comet in this image. The comets nucleus is visible to the bottom right of the almost but not quite circular coma. To the upper left of the nucleus is a complex dust structure that is slowly blowing away from the comet, pushed by solar wind and if the image were deep enough, we would see a complex tail structure of fine dust and gas extending off the frame to the upper left. This image was taken at 190mm focal length with an exposure of 60 seconds at f/6.3, ISO 400.

17P/Holmes

This image of comet 17P/Holmes was taken last night using my 70-300mm lens with the camera mounted on the front of our Spacewatch 36 inch telescope - in essense, using our big telescope as a glorified guide scope. This image was taken at 92mm focal length with an exposure of 2 minutes at f/5, ISO 400.

17P/Holmes in Perseus

Anyone familiar with the constellation Perseus will notice an interloper in this image taken on Wednesday night from my front yard. Even with a nearly full moon nearby, comet 17P/Holmes is an easy naked eye object as it burst in brightness by about 14 magnitudes over its recent brightness estimates of just a few days ago! In this image, Perseus is near center with Cassiopiea in the upper left corner of the image. The brightest star in Perseus - Alpha Perseus - is near the center. The comet is immediately below it making a sideways right triangle with the star just below and right of Alpha Perseus. To help find the comet in my image and in the sky, here is a Sky & Telescope website with that information. This image was taken at 24mm focal length with an exposure of 30 seconds at f/4, ISO 400.

VATT at work

This shot of the VATT at work in moonlight was almost a great shot. When I first brought it up on my computer, I instantly exclaimed "D'Oh!" - The handle of my tripod is jutting out into the field of this fisheye view! The dark cylindrical object at lower left is the silhouette of the handle. I often mount my camera on the tripod with the vertical tilt handle in front of the camera so I can tilt the camera and tripod up to vertical for astrophotography. That's normally not a problem, unless you use an 8mm fisheye as I did here..... This image used an exposure of 120 seconds at f/3.5, ISO 400.

SMT & LBT

Another view from Thursday night shows the SMT building in the foreground with the red light at its base and the LBT in the background. An airplane is also visible just above the SMT building. The Moonlit scene also shows the Milky Way overhead. This image was taken with an 8mm fisheye lens with an exposure of 120 seconds at f/3.5, ISO 400.

Fisheye VATT

This fisheye view of the VATT building also shows the glow of the Moon behind the dome at left as well as the Milky Way and the forest. The building is lit by some red lights on the SMT entrance but doesn't affect the observing inside the building. This image was taken with an 8mm fisheye lens with an exposure of 120 seconds at f/3.5, ISO 400.