Schierer Space

This image certainly doesn’t do it justice, with the fog and waxing 3/4 moon last night, but it is fading as the debris field spreads.

This image is considerably more processed than the others I’ve posted because of the relatively high level of moon-glow in the background. I stretched the contrast (the brightness ‘curves’ for the imaging folks) pretty significantly to keep the background dark while enhancing the comet itself.

The bright star is Mirfak, alpha Persei, at magnitude 1.82. Monday night, when it was cloudy here, the comet was actually visually overlaid onto the star. I’m sort-of curious whether anybody did any spectral analysis of the cometary debris with such a nice bright spectral source shining through the field.

Well actually, the visible debris field is much larger than Jupiter, but this image shows that it is visually as large as the moon. The full moon subtends almost exactly 1/2 degree of the sky. The inner orange circle (overlay from HNSKY*) is also 0.5 degrees.

How cool is that? From a little speck of space debris to a cloud of debris that’s this huge in about 2 weeks.

Excuse the wiggles in the long exposure (seen on the brighter stars), my setup was a bit weak tonight because all of the neighbors had their porch lights on. I was forced into a pretty non-optimal location for placing the tripod. The jiggle is probably mostly due to the shutter opening and closing causing the camera to move. This is a 10 second exposure at f/2.8, 200mm, 1600 ISO.

Wonderfully clear tonight. The stars are just beautiful.

Visually, 17P/Holmes doesn’t seem to be getting dimmer, the visual size seems to almost cancel out the lack of density. On the images though, the brightness is noticeably reduced.

At 400 ISO:

At 1600 ISO:

I took inspiration from the Bad Astronomer’s Halloween plans and set up my telescope right in the front yard. The viewing was pretty poor, what with all the front lights on, but it was worth it for every “Oh cool!” from every kid who saw the comet tonight.

If even one of those kids goes home and puts “telescope” on their Christmas list… score.

Unfortunately, the viewing wasn’t ideal with some high level clouds rolling in (it’s now completely overcast). I did get a couple more comet shots. Based on my limited data it appears to be fading pretty fast now. I took a shot at approximately the same setting as the last two (sorry, I keep forgetting to double check the aperture setting), and adjusted it to get it in the right ballpark.

I also took one with the ISO cranked up to 1600. This is approximately the full resolution image (it’s a little too large to fit in the post width):

In just a day there is a pretty distinct difference in the comet. This shot was also through a light cloud cover, so that will have some impact on the brightness also.

So Kristin bought me a sweet new lens for my birthday, so I had to take it out tonight and get another shot of 17P/Holmes. It was mostly cloudy, but I was able to get a shot in a clear spot.

The base image is approximately twice the magnification (per pixel) as the previous image. I’ll do a comparison of the two images at similar scale in a bit here*, but I wanted to post this before it was too late.

17P/Holmes is expanding rapidly after the outburst, and according to SpaceWeather is now covering a volume larger than Jupiter. That’s pretty impressive for a week’s worth of expansion.

This was a quick shot from my camera with a 105mm lens. No long exposure is required (this was 2 seconds at f/5.6)

Visually it appears just like the neighboring stars. This is obviously a pretty small crop of the original image, but it does show the spacial extent of the comet.

I can’t believe I didn’t hear about this sooner! Go outside as soon as you can an participate. Instructions are available at the Great Worldwide Star Count website (which I might add has a rather obnoxious colored website).

Thanks to SpaceWeather for bringing this to my attention.

Although these did not turn out as nice as I had hoped, they’re still interesting. There was a total lunar eclipse the morning of August 28th. I set up the camera in our guest bedroom window to shoot every 5 minutes starting at 4:51 AM. Unfortunately, there were some clouds, and I wasn’t quite pointing where I ought to have been for maximum resolution, but practice makes perfect. In any case, the following collage, and animation resulted:

Note: Both thumbnails are cropped, so click to see the full images.

Apologies in advance for the length of this post. This has been developing over the last two weeks, but I never got around to posting it. So consider this all of last week’s posts in one installment.

So the other day I broke down and walked into my local camera store, Johnson Camera (aside: they have a really crappy website). I had decided it was time to attempt to use my telescope, a Meade 127NT as a really long lens for my camera, a Canon 20D. My telescope, in camera lingo, would be a 1020mm f/8 “lens”. Technically, it’s not a lens at all, because it is a Newtonian reflector and has only mirrors.
To attach a camera body to a telescope, one needs a T-ring and a T-adapter. The T-ring has the correct flanges and features to connect to the camera body and is specific to the lens mount style (Canon EOS in my case). On the other side of the T-ring is a thread which allows it to attach to the T-adapter. The T-adapter is essentially a tube which mounts in the eyepiece holder of the telescope with threads on the other end to accept the T-ring. Sounds simple, right? And it should be… people have been attaching their cameras to telescopes pretty much since camera were invented. But it wasn’t.
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