Nice naked eye comet. I hadn’t dusted off my gear since the eclipse and it took me a bit to set up. I just threw the Canon T4i on the small iOptron tracker and used a 50mm lens. It didn’t track well though, so my best exposure was a short one: 3.2s, f/3.2, ISO 400. I might try again tonight.
Corona and I travelled 3800 miles over 7 days with 60 hours in the car to get to Conway Arkansas and back to see her eponym.
With the addition of my photography gear, we had a lot to unload and load from the car at every hotel. Cory developed a system.
We were prepared to flee the clouds on eclipse day, but I decided to polar align the mount the night before just in case we stayed put. There was a field next to the hotel parking lot. We ended up staying, and 30 people or so joined us in the field. The NAM, Euro, and HRR models had the cirrus clearing before totality, but things still looked dicey after first contact.
As usual, things got a bit flustered before totality. I forgot to get my distance glasses ready. I misplaced my binocs. Cory asked if we had eclipse glasses with pinholes in the cardboard, but I didn’t have those. It reminded me I _did_ have something from a previous eclipse though.
With a few minutes to go I remembered to get the mylar filters off the cameras and start the camera scripts. And then it started.
I’ll have a few posts on this eclipse, including some background. Long story short, daughter Corona and I traveled to Conway Arkansas. The weather was good for the eclipse and we were in the umbra for just shy of four minutes.
I shot with two cameras mounted to plywood on an equatorial mount, scripting exposures in Lua using a Canon hack called Magic Lantern. Sadly the 400mm scope ended up falling out of focus, but the 200mm lens (Canon 100-400L ii; Kimra’s birding lens) did well. This lens was mounted to a Canon T3i at f11 and took 86 exposures ranging from 1/4000 to 16 seconds.
Solar “prominences” are filaments or loops of red plasma coming off of the sun’s photosphere. They are relatively small eclipse features, but since the sun itself is over 100 earth diameters, some of the ones in the below pictures are considerably bigger than the earth.
They are bright, and you capture them by shooting fast so the inner corona doesn’t get too much exposure. They are seen best just after second contact and before third contact. The large one at the bottom was visible the entire time and we noticed it by eye 2-3 minutes into totality. People near us were asking about it. It was pretty striking.
All of these are f/11 200mm.
I thought today would be a good compromise of the proximity and altitude of the comet with the moon not being too bright. Had to wait until midnight for the moon to set. It was probably some of the coldest astronomy I’ve done: 16 degrees out! I didn’t spend a lot of time on alignment but it tracked pretty well for a 3 minute exposure at 400mm.
This one’s processed to keep the coma from being too overexposed. It is a pretty comet, if not a spectacular one.
This one (same picture, just processed differently) brings out the tails a bit more, at the cost of overexposing the coma:
Both photos: 400mm ISO 1600 173 seconds. Thanks for prodding me on this one, Eric. I probably wouldn’t have gone to the effort otherwise.
I’ve published it as a Kindle print replica eBook. It’s free through Monday 8/16. If intetested, choose “Buy Now for Free” (skip past the Kindle Unlimited “Read for Free” button). Focus is on named stars. More info can be found at this website.
Last year my daughter Cory and I started learning star names during our nightly family soaks in the hot tub. We got pretty serious about it, at least when the sky was cloud-and-moon free and the nights weren’t too warm for the spa. We have identified about 100 stars with their names, which is about a third of what’s possible from our latitude and light pollution level (limiting magnitude of 5-ish).
Stars have been gathering names for thousands of years from different cultural traditions, and passed from one generation to the next orally as well as through published charts and catalogs. The International Astronomical Union (IAU), long the naming authority of newly discovered objects like comets, has been officially adopting star names only over the last five or so years. Initially inspired by the desire to name the stars that host exoplanets, the IAU Working Group on Star Names was also formed to ensure “that astronomical heritage is preserved.”
The IAU has approved 449 star names as of January 2021. About 300 of these are visible to the naked eye, perhaps 340 or so in the best of conditions. All but one of the brightest 49 stars (to mag. 2) have approved names (γ Vel at magnitude 1.7 is the lone holdout).
For a number of reasons, I wasn’t satisfied with the apps and charts I had available to find the named stars. Having played around with making star charts in the past, I decided to make my own which had the sole purpose of identifying IAU named stars. This eventually blossomed into a rather large project of cartography, statistics, database management, astrometric calculations, literature review, and some narrative. I’m about four-to-six weeks from completing the guidebook, but with some prodding from my dad I do have a nice cover finalized:
The cover uses a mashup of three images: The night sky was taken near Flagstaff using the 6.5mm fisheye at f/4 ISO 1600 for 10 minutes, tracked. This image was registered and aligned to a star chart in ArcGIS Pro, and this chart was captured separately. The figure in the bottom left is me in front of the Clark Refractor dome at Lowell Observatory, taken by Kimra in the daytime with an iPhone.
We’re heading out to dark skies in Arizona next week, and a tour of Lowell Observatory. I got a new fisheye for the occasion, and tried it out tonight. 6.5mm f/3.5 iso 800 120s tracked. Maybe I’ll be able to get something like this with the Clark Refractor Dome in the foreground?
Close enough to fit in the frame with a 1.6x Barlow today (12/20/2020).
Tomorrow if clear I’ll try video stacking, but I’m up against the limits of my skill and scope. It’d sure be nice to get some storm bands on Jupiter.
With the moon out of the way, I’ll work on improving my pictures through the Celestron C8, a 2032mm f/10 scope. The last two nights I took some quick pictures through it that were out of focus. Tonight went a little better. Here is a low exposure shot to bring out Saturn’s rings:
And here is a longer exposure to bring out the moons better. In order from top left, we have Titan to Saturn’s right, and then Callisto and Io to the left of Jupiter, and Ganymede and Europa to the right. I’d love to get Phoebe, another moon of Saturn that’s directly above Jupiter, but it’s 17 magnitude. Maybe I’ll do a really long exposure in the coming days.
Keep in mind Saturn is about twice as far from us as Jupiter, about 90 light minutes vs. 50 light minutes, and the sun is only 8 light minutes from us. So while it’s pretty neat to see them together, they are not close to each other.
I borrowed Kimra’s birding lens (100-400 EF L) to get the moon in the frame with Jupiter and Saturn. Jupiter is the lower of the two, with a couple of Galilean satellites visible. The two planets are in the field of view of my 8″ SCT, but the quick shots I got off tonight and last night were out of focus. Hopefully we’ll have some clear evenings between now and Monday, when they are closest.
Scott's Sky Shots 