Show Your Astrophotos

[Missourian]

Conjunction this evening:

 

 

Same view, two days apart:

 

 

FYI, my conjunction images are good/best frames taken from iPhone videos.

[Wrangellian]

3 hours ago, Top Trilo said:

I take a video and then screenshot later, my hand is no where near still enough but it works.

 

If there are any I have no idea, this is the first time I've had this happen, and its the first time I've uploaded a photo with my new phone but I don't think the photo through the eyepiece looks any different.

I wonder if your phone is compressing your pics or making auto adjustments that it thinks they need, before you post them. I gather they do this, and you have no control over it, at least in certain (newer?) models, but I wouldn't have thought they'd do it quite that severely, so maybe there are human factors too, but that could be part of it. I wouldn't know as I don't use one of those things - I would not want any gadget that I could not control the output quality of my pics. I can see how cellphone cameras are useful for many casual purposes, but not if you want quality. Portability and ease of mounting on a telescope would be in the Plus column...

[snolly50]

Ablaze, turning her face to the Earth, Selene admires the signs of Persephone's passing among the trees.

 

 

Selene revealed...

 

[snolly50]

M108, the Surfboard Galaxy in Ursa Major...

 

[snolly50]

Tonight's Pink Moon, Selene blazes through a bank of cloud...

 

[minnbuckeye]

My daughter, as some of you know, is obsessed with the night sky. Around the first of December, she announced she wanted to visit a site in New Mexico that is world renowned for its dark sky.  Unfortunately, there were no openings at the site she had discovered and the subject was then put on the back burner. But as Christmas Day arrived and she opened our gift to her, she couldn't believe her eyes!!!! A trip to Animas, New Mexico with lodging at DARK SKY NEW MEXICO, An astrophotographer's sliver of heaven. Fast forward to mid March. Brooke asked us if we could detour on the way to Animas. She wanted to visit the VERY LARGE ARRAY RADIO TELESCOPE. Since our family makes it a tradition to watch the movie "Contact", based on Carl Sagan's only novel, at least twice a year, we excitedly agreed to it. What we didn't realize, Brooke wanted to video when the sky was moonless. That occurred at 3am!!! Then delays to our flight, snow advisories in the mountains, and elk all over the roads found us arriving at the site at 2 am with NO SLEEP! But it was worth it.  Her time lapse video is stunning but here is a still shot from it.

 

 

After the filming session, the rest of the family slept in our compact rental car until our tour of the facility took place at 9am. I tried but couldn't so. Did some walking and picture taking instead as dawn approached.

 

 

The facility has 27 dishes similar to the one  pictured above. They are set on three tracks in the shape of a Y with each segment 13 miles long!

 

 

 

So after a tour of the Very Large Array, the weary crew headed south to Animas. As we approached our destination, a reminder  of a childhood song  "Oh give me a home, where the buffalo roam" came into view.

 

 

A few more miles down the road and our destination, Dark Sky New Mexico was before us.

 

 

It is comprised of 24 observatories (sheds), two guest houses, and a deck for evening get togethers, out in the middle of NOWHERE, housing hundreds of telescopes, some costing over $100,000. The telescopes are connected to extremely high speed internet so that they can be remotely controlled by owners from all over the world. As evening sets in, the roofs of the sheds slide off on a track, giving access to the beautiful skies above to all who are lucky enough to house a scope at this facility. The shed below is typical. the tracks for the retractable roof can be seen to the right.

 

 

We had the pleasure of meeting the owner of Valley Vista Getaway. He has his own observatory 5 miles away and gave us a daytime tour and a night time lecture on the night sky. Being just an amateur astronomer, he has much of the sophistication as the more high powered telescopes at Dark Sky. The telescope is controlled by the computer and images are projected on the screen to the right.  

 

 

Here is two views of one of his sheds with the roof partially retracted.

 

 

 

It is hard to describe how dark the night is here. Psalm 104:20 says "You appoint darkness and it becomes night, in which all the beasts of the forest prowl about." Thank goodness there is no forest around!!! In spite of the darkness at ground level, the sky is lit with stars to the point that it is hard to see constellations, so many stars  filling the dark sky between the constellation's stars.

 

Perhaps the most enjoyable event to this trip for me was partaking in Dark Sky's' evening ritual of cocktails on the deck. 

 

 

 
     

 

Strange looking deck, isn't it? A little historical background is needed to appreciate this structure. Actually the deck was constructed around the superstructure built by an astronomer to house his self built pride and joy, a 16 inch refractor telescope. It took a ton of steel to complete and was so sturdy, the astronomer decided to forgo a dome or sliding roof. The telescope simply stood outdoors braving the elements!

 

Who was this astronomer. It was Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto, the planet! Yes I continue to believe Pluto is a planet and always will! Anyways, to sit on the deck sipping Moscow Mules, watching the sunset, waiting for the night's starry show, in the midst of Clyde Tombaugh's creation was sublime!!!!!!!

 

Anyways, a few pictures of the Milky Way from Animas, New Mexico.

 

 

 

Edited April 13, 2023 by minnbuckeye

[Coco]

Hi,

 

Thank you for this wonderful report !

 

Coco

[Missourian]

16 hours ago, minnbuckeye said:

 

It's amazing how the combined starlight illuminates the ground

 

[minnbuckeye]

4 hours ago, Missourian said:

It's amazing how the combined starlight illuminates the ground

 

 

@Missourian, As mentioned in my report, the ground is DARK while the heavens are ablaze.  It is only through long exposure times that the foreground becomes visible.

[Missourian]

5 hours ago, minnbuckeye said:

 

@Missourian, As mentioned in my report, the ground is DARK while the heavens are ablaze.  It is only through long exposure times that the foreground becomes visible.

 

Yes. Still amazing.

 

It's nice to experience zero light pollution

[Missourian]

If anyone has the opportunity to travel to southern latitudes, don't miss a chance to see the stars under a dark sky, especially when Gould's Belt, spanning from Orion to Scorpius, is visible. Imagine what you can see in the north, and then double or triple the number of brighter stars. Plus, you have the magnificent southern Milky Way, with its clusters and nebulae, and the Magellanic Clouds in the south.

[snolly50]

Mutable Selene, waning, but shamelessly abroad mid-afternoon...

 

 

A short span later, she is but a phantom in the early morning sky...

 

 

Only to return in full, as her magical cycle decrees. 

[snolly50]

M82 Cigar Galaxy...

 

[snolly50]

M51A, the Whirlpool Galaxy and its smaller companion M51B...

[Top Trilo]

Its unbelievable that actually exists!

[snolly50]

36 minutes ago, Top Trilo said:

Its unbelievable that actually exists

As the Earth at our feet, the sky is also filled with wonders. The object pictured above is 31 MILLION light years from Earth - a distance difficult for me to fathom. As you can see, it has a smaller companion, M51B. Reportedly, the Whirlpool contains 100 BILLION stars - again, an immense size, difficult for me to find a meaningful mental comparison.

[Top Trilo]

17 minutes ago, snolly50 said:

As the Earth at our feet, the sky is also filled with wonders. The object pictured above is 31 MILLION light years from Earth - a distance difficult for me to fathom. As you can see, it has a smaller companion, M51B. Reportedly, the Whirlpool contains 100 BILLION stars - again, an immense size, difficult for me to find a meaningful mental comparison.

Exactly, I feel like our appreciation of fossils allows us to somewhat comprehend those massive numbers as it becomes clear how long ago the Paleozoic or Pre-Cambrian was and how relatively recent Cretaceous dinosaurs are let alone, Pleistocene megafauna or our own species. Space is a whole other ball game though, 1 light year is hard to comprehend, 31,000,000 even harder. It is difficult to wrap my mind around the fact that that galaxy 31 million light years away is how it looked in the Oligocene since its taken light that long to reach us. And that far away galaxy has 100,000,000,000 stars! Each with their own solar systems and geologic histories. 

[digit]

1 hour ago, snolly50 said:

The object pictured above is 31 MILLION light years from Earth

Meaning that the photos emitted from this galaxy started their journey back in the middle of the Oligocene.

 

 

Cheers.

 

-Ken

[snolly50]

Selene tonight..,with the wonderful Judy Collins

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[snolly50]

"Drink in the Moon as though you might die of thirst."...Sanober Khan

 

Selene turns her full face to mortals and her radiance lights the darkest night...

 

 

Photographing the full Moon is an especially daunting task. The brilliant surface washes out detail and a camera's built-in exposure program is thwarted by the extremes of contrast. The image below was derived from a stack of 20 separate images in RAW format. They were taken in rapid sequence with an intervalometer. In shutter priority mode, a fast shutter speed of 1/800sec. was employed.

 

 

 

[Bobby Rico]

I enjoy this thread thank you all. 
I thought I share a print that is on our bathroom by a great artist called James Brown.

 

A3 screen  print on paper.

 

and a song from one of my many heroes Tom Waits.

 

 

 

Edited May 5, 2023 by Bobby Rico

[snolly50]

3 hours ago, Bobby Rico said:

Tom Waits

A great tune from his catalog I like best - albums, Heart of Saturday Night and Closing Time.  

[Bobby Rico]

5 hours ago, snolly50 said:

A great tune from his catalog I like best - albums, Heart of Saturday Night and Closing Time.  

Stick Rain Dogs in front of them and you got of top 3 .

[snolly50]

The waning Moon at morning...

 

 

A song about the Moon

 

 

[Missourian]

On 4/29/2023 at 8:02 PM, snolly50 said:

As the Earth at our feet, the sky is also filled with wonders. The object pictured above is 31 MILLION light years from Earth - a distance difficult for me to fathom. As you can see, it has a smaller companion, M51B. Reportedly, the Whirlpool contains 100 BILLION stars - again, an immense size, difficult for me to find a meaningful mental comparison.

 

For extreme distance and age, an object to check out is the quasar 3C 273 in Virgo. It is estimated to be 2.443 billion light years distant. Its magnitude of 12.9 brings it within reach of modest telescopes. I've seen it visually in my 10-inch reflector.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3C_273