Many astronomers express disdain when the moon is out; it's bright and it complicates the viewing and imaging of deep sky and other objects. However, the moon is an incredibly viable object for observing and learning. Enter the Lunar 100.
Created by planetary scientist Charles Wood, the Lunar 100 is a list of significant geological features on the moon's surface that can teach us something about its history and evolution over time. The features are numbered L1 through L100 in order of increasing viewing difficulty and includes regions, craters, basins, mountains, rilles, domes. While it can be compared to the Messier list, the main difference is that when identifying the Lunar 100, the emphasis is to be on understanding the moon's features and how they came to be rather than simply a hunt. Just because the moon is visible does not mean these objects are able to be seen, even under a full moon. They can require a specific angle of light or illumination or a special libration of the moon for them to be detectable. So even if you are keen, it's going to take some time to locate all of the features.
Here is a PDF of the original article from the April 2004 edition of Sky & Telescope where Wood first introduces the Lunar 100. It includes a list of the objects and their coordinates on the moon. Plenty of other resources are available online to identify these targets as well. Hopefully the next time the moon is out you can take the opportunity to enjoy it and learn something rather than lament its existence.
A new comet has been discovered moving through our solar system. First imaged between 2014 and 2019 at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile as part of the Dark Energy Survey, the object was discovered by University of Pennsylvania astronomers Bernardinelli and Gary Bernstein on June 19/2021. A few days later on June 22, the object was confirmed to have a coma surrounding it indicating that it was indeed a comet. In honour of its discoverers, this comet was named Comet C/2014 UN271 Bernardinelli-Bernstein.
C/2014 UN271 is believed to be an Oort cloud comet with estimates of its nucleus size ranging from 100 km to 200 km across, making it the largest comet and Oort cloud object ever discovered (at least three times larger than Hale-Bopp). The image below taken from shows its estimated orbit using several year of observations of the comet. It is estimated to reach perihelion (its closest approach to the sun) on January 23/2031 where it will still be outside Saturn's orbit. Its closest approach to Earth is scheduled to occur on April 5/2031. At this distance, its magnitude is estimated to be no brighter than Pluto or its moon, Charon, so this will definitely be a telescope object. This tool can be used to see how the comet will move through our solar system.
More information on the comet including its current location and distance from Earth can be found here.
This blog post was originally written back on July 20, 2021. Not much has changed, although I have since been out for one astro-imaging session, but that is a story for another day.
At the time, it had been quite a while since I had been out under the stars with my camera and telescope. Poor weather, traces of wildfire smoke and some nagging health issues had made real time stargazing a challenge over the past number of weeks. It all led to a serious case of night sky withdrawal.
Needing to somehow get my night sky fix, I thought it might be a good opportunity to try my hand at processing some images that were captured using remote telescopes in far away locations. For those who may not be familiar with remote telescope observation and imaging, it is quite literally just as it sounds. There are a few private, public and commercial observatories around the world who offer remote access (via internet) to some of their telescopes. A simple Google search will reveal a world of good information, but I will also include a few links at the end of this post.
For me the idea of capturing astro images with my own kit and from my own location still offers a much greater appeal, but under the circumstances I thought that the remote telescope option might be fun and might provide some additional value. After all, using remote telescope access provides a much wider range of location and equipment. It opens the window to additional observing and imaging experiences well beyond what I could access with my own gear and from my own urban backyard. I figured that from both an educational and artistic perspective, it should provide exciting new challenges and opportunities to practice and expand my observational and astro-image processing skills. I was right… good challenges and opportunities and lots of fun indeed!
I quickly learned that renting and programming remote telescope time can be an expensive endeavour; however some observatories also offer the opportunity to buy full astro-image data sets from their archive. These archived data sets are considerably less expensive and are a lot of fun to play around with. For those like me who also really enjoy the processing side of astrophotography, this seems to be a good opportunity to work on images outside our normal field of view, from darker sky locations and using equipment that we would normally not have access to.
Whether you rent the telescope and program your own imaging session or purchase image files from the observatories’ archives, you will end up downloading a series of ‘raw unstacked’ or ‘stacked unprocessed’ FITS file. Depending on the equipment used, the files tend to include a series of images captured using a combination of high quality narrowband filters (e.g. red, green, blue, luminance, hydrogen alpha [Hα], sulphur [S-II] and oxygen [O-III]). The combination of these long exposure image files is usually referred to as a data set.
Normally I do my astro-imaging with a DSLR and a simple broadband light pollution filter so working with a wide variety of image files that were captured using multiple narrowband filters and a dedicated mono astro camera was a new experience for me. As with all astro-image processing there are many different applications and approaches that one can use to take the images from their raw unprocessed state to their more complexed final composition. For pre-processing I used Astro Pixel Processor (APP). This is where individual exposure frames are stacked (when they were not pre-stacked in the data set) and calibrated. I also used APP to combine and calibrate the resulting master images produced under each colour filter. After that, I switched over to Adobe Photoshop for post-processing to stretch dynamic range, tweak colour, reduce digital noise and make a final crop.
Here are the results … I am still very much a beginner at all this but am pleased with the process and outcome so far. I am looking forward to learning and practicing more and will always aspire to do a little better next time.
These examples of the Triangulum Galaxy, the Cygnus Wall and the Helix Nebula (as well as others as they are processed) will also be included on my website at www.bluespeck.ca.
I am also really looking forward to being able to get back out under the stars with my own camera and telescope very soon.
Here are some links as promised:
The nova in Cassiopeia is old news now. On June 12, a new nova (officially named V1674 Herculis) was discovered in Hercules by Seiji Ueda of Japan. When discovered, its magnitude was 8.4, and it continued to get brighter for the next several hours, maxing out around 6.0 (visible to the naked eye). Unlike the Cassiopeia nova, this one appears to be much more unpredictable with its magnitude fluctuating greatly. A couple days after discovery it was down to around a magnitude of 8.5, and it continues to grow dimmer. Current estimates peg its magnitude around 11.5. Here are a couple pictures taken from Sky and Telescope, the first showing its location and the second showing it glowing rose-red from hydrogen gas emissions.
You can read more about V1674 Her here.
Up just before the alarm blasted forth at 5:00 am … the sky in the north east was already quite light.
My eclipse day wardrobe included the celebratory shirt from my first total solar eclipse (viewed in the outback of Australia), my eclipse glasses with the super-protective filter material and my sun hat with all the souvenir eclipse pins, plus a pin from the transit of Venus in 2004 (viewed from an island in the middle of the Nile River in Egypt).
Dave drove to a mini-parkette on the west shore of the Sound. We sat, waiting … and giving the cloud in the eastern horizon a fierce scowl. I forgot to request that everyone I know do the ‘clear sky dance’ to ensure the optimum view of the eclipse. While we waited, another eclipse-chaser drove up and joined us; so we had a nice pre-breakfast chit-chat while waiting.
At 05:37 EDT, the magic moment of the sun peaking above an ocean or a lake horizon, I took a photo of the awesome sunrise, but not quite an eclipse, as it would be another couple minutes before the sun would show its face above the strip of land along the east side of the Sound.
The sun was soon above the land, but there was another obstacle - a narrow strip of cloud! Yuk! But we stood firm, with our trusty eclipse glasses in hand … then finally - the prize! Glasses up, we could see a very narrow sliver of a crescent on the right, like a waxing moon just a day or two after a new moon. As we were looking through a thick band of atmosphere, the crescent was orangy/red and not light yellow/white as it would have been had this eclipse happened a half hour or more after sunrise and was much higher in the sky, away from the thick atmospheric muck along the horizon.
It is pretty amazing that, in spite of the 150,000,000 km between the Earth and the Sun, somehow, once in a while, the moon gets right in the line between the sun and earth, and provides earthlings with some spectacular eclipses.
If you watched a live-stream link to the live show you would have seen the view from the central line. If you missed the live-streaming, there will be plenty of videos available on YouTube.
The night was short as they generally are during the summer. Well before the sun came up, it was already very bright; driving up the peninsula at 04:00 EDT on June 10, the stars were already being washed out by the light of the impending sunrise. It was a cloudless drive for much of the pre-dawn morning until Mother Nature decided to throw a wrench in our eclipse viewing plans by bestowing upon us a plethora of low set clouds in the east about 20 minutes before dawn.
Depending on your location, the morning of June 10 marked the occurrence of a partial or annular eclipse of the sun by the moon. BAS members were up early (or in some cases not sleeping at all), decked out in their nerdiest astronomy gear (Brett Tatton, Joan Skelton) and present all over Bruce and Grey counties to view it. Beginning before sunrise and first visible as a set of "horns" just as the sun made an appearance at about 05:35 EDT, this eclipse did not disappoint.
This incredible set of pictures was taken by Julian Delf at Fred Raper park down by the beach in Meaford with a Sony SLT-A77V and a Sigma 170-500 zoom at 500 mm.
This next set of pictures was taken by Lorraine Rodgers at the Kemble Women's Institute lookout. Note the distortion of the sun in the first couple of pictures as it rises over the water.
This distortion is explained further by John Hlynialuk (also present at the Kemble lookout): "The images below show several stages of the most interesting part of the eclipse right at the moment of visibility to just before the Sun climbed into a more solid layer of cloud above the horizon. Temperature differences in the air layers under the clouds acted like a lens and converted the round bottom portion of the Sun into a flattened shape looking more like a canoe rather than the circle we expected. A much rounder Sun was in fact seen at locations elsewhere where the eclipse was not viewed over water. What we saw over the Owen Sound was closer to the mirages sometimes seen over water horizons like the Great Lakes or oceans (all five of them)." The following are a series of pictures John took of the eclipse (the last one is a composite).
Here is yet another contribution from Marian Ratcliffe taken near Durham. It is truly amazing that so many members were able to get such fantastic photos.
Next up is a contribution from Frank Williams from the Kemble lookout.
Finally, here are two photos from Ken Pituley taken on Grey Road 1. The first picture shows the "horns" on the sun as it rose. The second shows the sun peeking through a gap in the clouds.
It is truly amazing that so many members were able to get such fantastic photos. I am greatly anticipating our discussion of the eclipse during our July 7 meeting.
As noted in our sky events, we will not be able to see the May 26 total lunar eclipse from the Owen Sound area. However, all is not lost! Timeanddate.com has several different pages dedicated to eclipse information, eclipse mapping as well as a live stream for those of us not fortunate enough to be located in the correct area on Earth. Find eclipse information here, and click here for a Youtube stream. The eclipse is due to begin at 04:47 EDT so begin tuning in around then for the opportunity to see this lunar eclipse.
The term blood moon is thrown around when it comes to total lunar eclipses due to the red tinge the moon takes on. Why is this? During a total lunar eclipse, the moon travels through the Earth's umbra (the darkest part of the Earth's shadow where most of the sun's light is blocked); all direct sunlight from the Earth is blocked from illuminating the moon. While this is true, some sunlight is still able to reach the moon via Earth's atmosphere. As this light passes through the Earth's atmosphere, some of the colours in the light spectrum are filtered out by a phenomenon called Rayleigh scattering. Red wavelengths are least affected by this scattering, and the result is a preponderance of red light reaching the moon giving it its red colour.As for the June 10 annular solar eclipse, www.timeanddate.com has similar information on it as well including live streams. See here for more details. One of their live streaming partners is a "local" Ontario club, the North Bay Astronomy Club.
As we are not yet allowed to gather in groups, here are some relatively easy sky sights to view on your own over the next two weeks. Most of these are visual or binocular events that can be seen with a relatively low open horizon view. Use SkySafari, Heavens Above or any sky app you have to assist. Enjoy the challenge!!
Visible right now:Many Canadians have been directly involved with the Mars Perseverance project which launched on July 30/2020 and landed February 18/2021, but perhaps none more so than Farah Alibaby. Farah is a systems engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. While there, she has been part of three Mars missions: the InSight lander, its associated MarCO CubeSats, and the more recent Perseverance rover.
Born in Montreal, Farah is the French-speaking daughter of two Malagasy immigrant who met after they moved to Canada. Her father's work took Farah and her family to the UK when she was a teenager; there she attended high school and then the University of Cambridge where she earned both undergraduate and master's degrees in Aerospace Engineering. From there, she completed a PhD in aeronautics and astronautics engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); during this time, she completed three NASA internships which included two at the JPL. It was her internships at the JPL that inspired her to accept a permanent placement there following completion of her PhD.
If you were to ask Farah where her drive to pursue a career in the aerospace industry came from, she would give a couple different reasons. The first is how seeing the movie Apollo 13 when she was eight made her absolutely fall in love with space. In particular she was fascinated by the teams of engineers that came together to solve seemingly impossible problems. Watching these scientists imbued her with the drive to employ her knowledge and creative thinking in a teamwork settings to advance space exploration.
Farah's second great influence came from a well-known French Canadian engineer, scientist, former astronaut and former Governor General of Canada, Julie Payette. Coming from a similar upbringing as Farah, Payette's success in her field showed Farah that opportunities really were available to women like her and they were achievable.
Farah has a couple different jobs when it pertains to Perseverance. As part of the mobility team, she is responsible for making sure the rover doesn't get lost as it navigates Mars. She tests and operates the rover attitude, pointing and positioning systems that allow Perseverance to know how to "call home" (based on Earth's location relative to Mars). As part of surface operations, she is responsible for helping a team put together a list of tasks the rover will complete daily; this list is then communicated to the rover. This involves interfacing with several different science teams to determine priorities, making sure the proposed plan can be completed with available resources, and testing the plan prior to sending it to make sure everything will work. Finally, she is one of the main interfaces between the Perseverance rover and Ingenuity, the technological flight demonstration on Mars. In this role, she is responsible for performing testing on Earth as well as guiding the rover activities to give Ingenuity the best chance of success in its experiments.
Ignoring her contributions to NASA's projects for a moment, Farah is also incredibly active in outreach activities. She regularly gives talks, mentors students, and teaches at space camps, providing a tangible example to young girls of what goals they can achieve if they have the drive. She cites Julie Payette as one of her reasons for doing so; Payette inspired her, and she hopes to do the same for other young people. In addition to all of the above, Farah still finds time to volunteer as a Big Sister through the Big Brothers Big Sisters organization. All this and she is still in her early 30s! Incredible seems like far too weak a word when describing Dr. Farah Alibay.
SpaceX and NASA are targeting Friday, April 23 for Falcon 9’s launch of Dragon’s second six-month operational crew mission (Crew-2) to the International Space Station from historic Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A) at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The instantaneous launch window opens at 5:49 a.m. EDT, 9:49 UTC, with a backup opportunity available on Monday, April 26 at 4:38 a.m. EDT, 8:38 UTC.
Following stage separation, Falcon 9’s first stage will land on the “Of Course I Still Love You” droneship, which will be stationed in the Atlantic Ocean. On Saturday, April 24, at approximately 5:10 a.m. EDT, 9:10 UTC, Dragon is expected to autonomously dock with the International Space Station.
This is the first human spaceflight mission to fly astronauts on a flight-proven Falcon 9 and Dragon. The Falcon 9 first stage supporting this mission previously launched the Crew-1 mission in November 2020 and the Dragon spacecraft previously flew Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley to and from the International Space Station during SpaceX’s Demo-2 mission in 2020.
Read more about it here. Also tune into this Youtube link for a live feed beginning at 01:30 April 23.
Normally requiring a trip to the USA, the 2021 NEAF expo is being offered virtually this year. See the image below for a summary of the event. Additional details can be found at NEAF Expo.
On March 18, a nova (Latin for new) was discovered by Yuji Nakamura of Japan in the constellation Cassiopeia; this nova is known as Nova Cas 2021. Initially its magnitude was about 9.6, and as of March 19 it had brightened to magnitude 7.5. Once discovered, astronomers from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan started to analyze the nova and determined it is of the classical variety.
Classical novae are thought to be created in a close binary star system consisting of a white dwarf and a main companion star. When the orbital period falls in the range of several days to one day, the white dwarf is close enough to its companion star to start drawing accreted matter onto the surface of the white dwarf, creating a dense but shallow atmosphere. This atmosphere, mostly consisting of hydrogen, is thermally heated by the hot white dwarf and eventually reaches a critical temperature causing ignition of rapid runaway fusion. The sudden increase in energy expels the atmosphere into interstellar space creating the envelope seen as visible light during the nova event and in past centuries was mistaken as a new star.
Novae are unpredictable in terms of how long they will be visible, so try to get out with a pair of binoculars or a lower power telescope to see this one while you still can; the following picture from Astronomy Now shows where you can find it.
For more reading see this link.
March is a great month to hunt for Messier objects. It is common to challenge oneself with a Messier marathon on any moon-free night in March. From our mid-northern latitude, it is the only time when it is possible to view all 110 Messier objects in a single night; another option is to split it up into a few nights. You will need a dark location with few obstructions on the horizon. The idea is to start with the brightest objects in order to gauge visibility in the darkening sky (items 1-11). M77 and M74 are very challenging dusk objects. You will need to work from west to east, since objects setting in the west will disappear/set first. Over the course of the night, new stars will rise. By early morning you can attempt to view the final objects on the list. Dusk and dawn objects are the most challenging ones since the sky is not truly dark. Included here is a list that was designed specifically for our club. Binoculars are great for many of the objects, while others are only visible with a telescope. Enjoy the challenge!!
Two visual phenomena will begin to be visible on the moon on March 20 at about 18:03 EDT (in Kincardine). These are the lunar X and V, two Clair-Obscur visuals that are created due to the interplay of light and shadow on the moon. These shapes are visible generally a few hours before the first quarter moon which hits us on March 21. There is an oppportunity to see these every month depending on Earth's location using a low power telescope or set of binoculars. The X is caused by light illuminating the rims of three craters, Blanchinus, La Caille and Purbach, and can be seen slightly below the lunar terminator; the V is caused the light illuminating the crater Ukert along with several lesser craters. The following image from Optics Central shows what to look at on the moon.
This article by David Chapman gives more details on the lunar X phenomena for those interested. Some future dates where the lunar X may be visible in our area as calculated using the Lunar Terminator Visualization Tool (LTVT) are April 19 07:09 EDT, May 18 19:35 EDT, June 17 07:27 EDT. Note that these dates roughly correspond to that of a first quarter moon. One could also expect the lunar X and V to be visible several hours after a last quarter moon.
Also on this day is the spring equinox (in the northern hemisphere at least). In its apparent motion on the equinox, the sun crosses Earth's horizon directly at the east when the sun rises and at the west when it sets; there is an approximately equal amount of day time and darkness. This day also marks the first official day of spring.
In her most recent minutes, Lorraine challenged us all to find the new crescent moon on March 14/2021. The opportunity was small with the sun setting at 19:30 and the mooon setting at 20:50 and especially with the extreme wind of the day. I went down to the beach in Kincardine and managed to capture this snapshot with my phone of the moon about a half hour before it set.
