Look to the Skies!

It seems to have been a while since we've had a good planet grouping in the evening sky, but the current show is starting now! While Jupiter and Saturn have been in the evening sky for a few months, they are slowly retreating towards the Sun as the Earth's more rapid motion appears to move them to the far side of the solar system. Meanwhile, Venus has leapt from behind the sun (again, its motion is more rapid than the Earth), and is about to join the other pair in the early evening. Tonight Venus was still well below Jupiter, but tomorrow (Saturday, 23 November) will approach within 1.5 degrees (3 moon-diameters), making a striking sight! Next week, on Thanksgiving night, the crescent moon joins the grouping, and finally on 10 December, Venus passes Saturn and the conjunction show will end for now. Here is how they looked tonight (Friday, 22 November) from near Cornville, AZ. The planets are about to set behind the Mingus Mountains, with the lights of Cottonwood, AZ in the foreground. In the labeled image at right, you can also see the "teapot" asterism of Sagittarius as it also moves behind the sun for the season.

Catch the show while you can!

After The Meeting...

Tonight was the monthly meeting of the Fox Valley Astronomical Society. An interesting meeting about Apollo 11's Moon landing 50 years ago. Part of the discussion was about the "where were you" stories. Some were deployed in Vietnam. I was a 15 year old working on my Grandparent's farm. It was a Sunday as I recall, so didn't have to do much work - I remember shooting hoops with my younger cousin. I think there is a photo somewhere. I also took photos off the TV of Armstrong and Aldrin with my Instamatic - was a space nerd even then!

After the meeting, my friend Mark was setting up the club's 12" Meade in the parking lot at Peck Farm Park where we met (shown at left). He asked if I'd seen Celestron's new cell adaptor, which quickly allows mounting of a cell camera to shoot through the telescope. I'd not seen it, but was quite impressed as it allowed 3-axis of motion - X, Y, and focusing motion too! Shown at right in their advertising, it would come in handy at the Grand Canyon as EVERYONE wants to take photos of what they see in the telescope...


Well, with the quarter-moon high in the west, it was a perfect opportunity to try it out. The only difficulty we had was in setting up and aligning the camera lens to the eyepiece in the dark. A little red light might have been handy, but we eventually found the light coming out of the eyepiece. A wide shot of the moon is shown at left. Note the bottom edge is clipped by the edge of the eyepiece, NOT the lower limb of the moon...

At left, with the addition of some digital zoom in the camera, more detailed close-up is shown. It was an impressive demonstration with the brightest thing we observe in the night sky!





A bit later we looked at Jupiter, and were easy to see and record the 4 Galilean moons. Shown at left, the overexposed disk of Jupiter is at center, and left-to-right are the moons Ganymede, Europa, with Io and Callisto on the right. I tried but was unable to reduce the exposure to more properly expose for bright Jupiter. A higher power might have helped, but I suspect there was too much black sky - not enough "bright" to trigger the auto-exposure... I would have stayed for Saturn, low in the SE, but the mosquitos had drunk enough of my blood, so moved on towards home to post these. All in all, I'm tempted to get one of these devices - looks like an easy way to at least document the moon and bright planets with a cellphone.

Kitt Peak Kraziness!

Late May and early June in the Southwestern Desert... Hot and clear! Again, I apologize in not posting for nearly 2 months! I continue to lack inspiration! But the clear dark skies here in AZ truly inspire! I had a couple friends visit that had never been under a dark sky - so the need for outings descended!


My friend Karen from Chicago was down and didn't know what all the astronomy fuss was about, so I scheduled a trip to Kitt Peak National Observatory for one of their "Nightly Observing Programs" (NOPs). It is a pretty cool program (literally, a temperature relief with nearly 20 degree cooler temperatures than Tucson), that allows you to be among the research telescopes at the National Observatory 40 miles SW of Tucson. One drives their own car to the site after it normally closes to the public. After checking in the program, it starts about 90 minutes before sunset with an orientation and a box dinner. Then we head out to watch the always-enjoyable sunset. We had Charles leading the group, who gave a fantastic tour of all we could see, both locally on the mountain, and phenomena in the sky to watch for. That is him at the left with the setting sun in the background. A few moments later, we all watched spellbound for an appearance of the "Green Flash" as the last rays of the sun set below distant mountains. I'm pretty sure I saw it, but was a second or two early with the photo at right for a pure green!



Shortly after sunset, a glance to the east reveals one of the "often seen, but rarely noted" phenomena - the shadow of the earth rising into the sky! In the image at left with the McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope (now closed due to defunding), the dark line above it is the rising shadow of the earth, topped by the pink sunset line of the "Belt of Venus", where the still-shining sunset is tinted pink by sunlight going through massive amounts of atmosphere - just like how our viewed sunset colors are seen. Charles continued his monolog of post-sunset items of interest, then descended back to the Visitor Center. There our group was split into 3 groups - the "Dark Sky Discovery Program" went off to their own 16" telescope for the evening. The remaining 45 folks in the NOP was divided in half, one group to the 20" scope, the other for their orientation to observing with planispheres and binoculars. That is our leader Robert at right, the lights in the VC now using red lights to preserve dark adaptation...


Even though taking night-time photos was discouraged, I did not get permission, but rather, turned down the screen brightness, and the Canon 6D does NOT have a built-in flash, so the effect on nearby large telescopes was nil... I set up on the Visitor Center patio with an old Nikon 16mm fisheye taking in a large swath of the VC and sky, as well as the people out using their planispheres. At left is a single exposure, 15 seconds long at ISO 3200 with the fisheye at F/2.8.  I took these a good portion of the evening, perhaps to someday make a time-lapse, but not today! At the left of the VC is the dome of the fine 20" telescope that we used for our observing a little later. Be sure to click the image and see if you can make out the major constellations in the northern sky in June. For your convenience, I've done the work and labeled the same photo at left...


I let the camera run unattended while we went to the telescope to observe. With the large group of people (23) and only an hour to observe, we only had time for 4 objects. It's always an issue in a dark dome with big crowd as queuing up is always an issue without clearly defined pathways... And with a big telescope and fully-dark skies, I had issues with some of those 4 objects - a double star? Really? And the Beehive open star cluster? With a 20"? Both Karen and I LOVED the view of the M13 Globular Cluster and rising Jupiter (disks of moons could be resolved, even at its low altitude!), but the decision not to show ANY of the spectacular galaxies in the springtime sky is unconscionable! Oh well... Some may remember I used to help run this program a few years back, so I've got stronger opinions than most...

With the large amount of time we had sitting in the dark dome, I got permission to step downstairs to relocate my camera to the elevated catwalk of the dome and took few shots showing the rising Milky way over the mountaintop - shown at left. Still with the Fisheye, this is a 25 second exposure, still at ISO 3200.  A piece of the 20" dome at upper left, and along the mountain profile is the 2.1 meter, the 50", the WIYN 36" and the WIYN 3.5 meter. The red streaks are from folks walking back to the VC from the rest rooms... Jupiter is the bright object leading the Milky Way across the sky.


With the end of observing, we moved back downstairs. I sent Karen in for final instructions from the NOP crew. I knew there were shopping opportunities, so I had a few minutes to continue some projects on the patio. One of my thoughts was to try to shoot the rising Milky Way in the "new" sundial (likely now 20 years old!). Shown at left in daytime, the "crystal ball" effect provides a wide field visible in the polished sphere. Unfortunately, it isn't optimum for my application as the projection screen normally receiving a spot of the sun for telling the time, blocks a good chunk of the sphere and the image it transfers. My best effort is shown at right... Still, I liked the sharp little image contained therein, and also loved the out-of-focus stars that reveals their colors more intensely than when in focus! I might have to make my own ball for a repeat!


Thusly inspired by the colors of out-of-focus stars, I purposely took a set of exposures both in-focus, then intentionally out. The rising constellation Scorpius seemed a suitable target, and these are both 2-frame vertical mosaics with a 50mm lens, each frame a combination of several exposures (stacked), 15 seconds each at F/2 to minimize trailing (no tracking device this night!). I love the details seen in such short exposures - the dark nebulae against clouds of Milky Way stars especially!

And while I love the exposure at left of sharp stars, I also love the defocused star images at right that more intently shows the star colors! When in focus, the star colors turn to white as they are mostly saturated in brightness. Defocused, they retain the true star colors. And of course, you know what you can derive from their colors - anyone??? Yes, you in the back - YES, you can tell their temperatures! Well, at least the blue ones are hotter than the yellow or white ones!



The last image taken was just barely seen, but looks much more impressive in the photo as levels adjustments can be made! The Milky Way was rising behind the solar telescope, partially diminished by the lights of Green Valley and Nogales. Pretty amazing what the 6D and 50mm lens can do in 15 seconds!

With that, the crowd was leaving, so packed up the tripod and camera and headed down the mountain, the first mile with headlights covered. Were back home by 12:30 with what I can now confirm were pretty nice images!




BUT! While tripod shots can be fun, Tracked shots are even more fun with the depth, details and colors they can record. I was looking for another opportunity to go photograph with a tracking mount. I've had an AstroTrac for a few years now (may no longer be available). While it seems fine with a 200mm and 300mm lenses, I've not really found the upper limit, so wanted to try the 500mm F/4 camera and lens on it. So 4 days after the above Kitt Peak trip, I returned to the Mountain, this time to a pullout to set up my own gear with friend Susan who claims to have never been under a dark sky. Well she got an eyeful as the Milky Way made an appearance. The 500mm seems to work well with the mount, though I think polar alignment is a bit dodgy! There was slight trailing, but acceptable if the sub-exposures were kept to 90 seconds or so. This required an ISO of 4,000 and shooting at F/5. My target with the 500 was a 3-frame mosaic of the dark cloud commonly called the Pipe Nebula. From a wide-field image, it looks like a smoking pipe with curling smoke rising to form the "Prancing Horse". Shown at left is the mosaic with about 2 hours of exposures with the 3 frames, flat fields and darks subtracted with Sequator and mosaic assembled in Photoshop.


Similarly, with the night winding down on a "school night", I pointed it to a popular field of Messier 8 and 20, the Lagoon and Triffid Nebula (bottom to top). Only 7 minutes of exposure, it is a nice field to shoot quickly before closing down for the night. Susan was impressed with the sky, and I found a new tracking mount easier to set up than the AP1200 that can handle the 500mm lens! So a useful night. Well, any night under clear, dark skies is worthwhile unless Mr. Murphy makes an appearance!

Look West!

Finally, some clear skies in Tucson! And for the first time, I could go out after sunset and look for Mercury in the evening sky. Almost due west about 45 minutes after sunset, it is the brightest star-looking object just above the horizon! At left is how it looked from the cul de sac in front of my house... It will continue to be visible for about another week before it starts diving between us and the sun towards inferior conjunction on March 14th.

To the casual observer, it would seem there haven't been any planets in the evening sky, but you would have been wrong! Mars, the next planet out from us, is still in the western sky, but is fading and far from striking, other than the orange glow it still maintains. Passing opposition and at its best over 7 months ago (!), it is a shadow of its former self. At right is a wide shot showing both Mars and Mercury, both well below the Pleiades star cluster a good 45 degrees or more up as it gets dark.


But as they say - But wait, there's more! The planet Uranus is also in the right photo above! It is MUCH fainter than Mars or Mercury, and less obvious too when shooting from town in a 10 second exposure! The cropped portion of the above shot shows the center part of the image, and shows Mars and Aries, and what I THINK is Uranus, just above the limits of detection... It is so faint that the normal green glow it sometimes displays isn't visible. But then, it is almost 2 BILLION miles distant from us at the moment...

And just one more... As I turned to go back into the house, There riding high was mighty Orion, and how could I leave without a quick shot of it too? So at right is my front yard with Canis Major and the brightest star (visible from Earth besides the sun) Sirius is Orion with its prominent 3 belt stars. We've had so many clouds lately that I've needed to catch up with what the sky looks like again!

Eclipse!

Some of you heard we had a lunar eclipse Sunday night (20 Jan, 2019)... Of course it was hyped by the Internet to be the Super-Blood-Wolf Moon, as if just calling it a lunar eclipse wouldn't be as exciting! Well, you will get no embellishments here... Total lunar eclipses are always fun to look at, and lead once upon a time to my second published image - in the Des Moines Register no less, way back in 1975!

So I'm back in Arizona again, usually the bastion of clear blue skies, but in the week here the sun has only made rare appearances, and the forecast for eclipse evening was depressing to say the least! At least the high temperature that day was 79! It was perfectly clear at "Ketelsen East" should I have observed it from there, but the temperature at eclipse time was -5F! Blue sky and thin clouds thickened as sunset approached in Arizona, but always willing to take a chance, drove out to a dark-sky site that the Tucson astro club used to use a couple decades ago - Empire Ranch, about 40 miles SE of Tucson. I wasn't much interested in the partial phases, but sky looked to be mostly clear with only about half of the moon showing.


I set up my Polarie tracking mount - a simple tracker for camera-only use - no tracked telescopes for this eclipse. I did set up my big binoculars for a visual look occasionally. With the moon still partially lit by the sun, a 44-degree halo was apparent and I took a few shots of that before totality started. Totality finally came and while impressive visually, the slightest magnification showed the effects of thin clouds. The photo at left shows the view with a normal lens - the overexposed pink spot is the eclipsed moon, and M44, the Beehive Cluster is to its left and constellation Gemini above in a 30 second exposure. The thin clouds made the stars misty - showing the color differences more clearly. The two bright stars above the moon - Pollux, the lower, is cooler and more yellow than Castor, the upper one...


I tried a couple lens combinations, but again, the clouds made getting anything worthwhile difficult, so decided to stick with wide-angle lenses, finally choosing my relatively new-to-me Sigma 15mm fisheye lens, taking a 30 second exposure every 40 seconds... The exposure was perfect for showing the Winter Milky Way when the clouds parted enough to show it! And all the grand constellations - Orion, Gemini, rising Leo to the far left were visible, as well as the brightest star Sirius (other than the sun) to lower center, and the Hyades and Pleiades star clusters in Taurus at upper right are evident. The yellow light glow are reflected from the cities of Sierra Vista to the lower left, and Nogales, AZ to lower right. I ended up with about 40 frames, extending from about 15 minutes before the end of totality to about 15 minutes afterwards, so decided to put them in a little time lapse using Moviemaker, after minimal processing of each frame. The 7 second loop was repeated 3 times, and the result was then uploaded to Youtube for you to look at here:





If you want any more than that wide-field view, please refer to the last eclipse visible from here, back in September of 2015! Like I said, you don't need to hype it any more than what it really is - a lunar eclipse! The next one fully visible across the country isn't until March of 2025 (some partly visible before then), so a good long wait for the next one to be high in the sky!

Far and Near...

As my time at "Ketelsen East" winds down, I still keep my eyes open for photo opportunities even in the midst of Winter. And while I tell people I can't really do astronomy with the skies so bright from the light pollution of Chicago, I still look up. After all, a month ago I did manage to shoot a comet next to the Pleiades in the back yard! Unfortunately, the bane of astronomers in the Midwest are mosquitos in the Summer and in Winter, temperatures can get frigid! Even so, one of the prettiest views in winter are the prominent constellations seem through the naked trees. Shown at right here is Orion visible through the bare oak trees just a few steps from my front door. This is a single 13 second exposure with the kit zoom lens set to 28mm and F/4.  Any longer of an exposure and the sky was way overexposed...



That very night, while it was under freezing, it wasn't really frigid. But I did note on the weather forecast that evening that there was likely going to be morning fog. Well, for some reason I didn't sleep well that night, so got up at the crack of 8am and stepped out to find a very impressive display of frost on the downed oak leaves in the yard. So dutifully I got out my newish "super macro" lens, the Canon MP-E 65mm with the ring flash mounted in the front for some hand-held focus-stack images.

Now I often mention "focus-stacking". The depth of field of macro lenses are quite narrow, so to extend the part of the field that is in focus, several-to-many frames are taken with slightly different focus settings, or lens positions, and Photoshop or other software can combine only the parts of the frame that is in sharp focus. For example, at left is a 7-frame focus stack, and at right is a single frame from the sequence that shows how narrow the depth of focus actually is! See how only the upper part of the frame at right is sharp. Photoshop does a great job at combining all the sharp parts of the frame as seen at left.


Some of the frost photos were quite astounding! There was about a 3-meter square patch in the center of the yard that showed needle structure. I DO NOT know how they form - I guess I need to look around on crystal formation! In some of the frames the "needles" appear tubular or hollow, and in some they have a general hexagonal hollow form. Those are visible at left.

And at right one of the stunning images of spikes emanating from a single point, and quite large - over a centimeter in diameter!



I first stopped at a moss patch that never gets much Summer sun. While not as impressive as the larger spikes I found a few minutes later, they are interesting in their own way.

All of these are combinations of 7 to 11 frames to extend the range of focus, and are all "focused" manually by hand-holding them. It was my first time attempting this and as you can see, came out ok! Some I used some combination of flash and the rising sunlight.

Of course, as soon as the rising sun cleared the horizon, since the temps were barely under freezing, all the crystals melted quickly, and the show was over!

I present the rest without comment, other
than I will certainly keep an eye out for such events in the future!

They Move!

Last week a FB friend of mine forwarded a list of December sky happenings and I noticed that the planet Mars happens to be passing the outermost planet Neptune (that is if you believe in the demotion of Pluto as a planet). Shown at left is the plot of the characters in this scene. Mars is relatively close to the earth, and Neptune very distant But from our vantage point Mars appears to be zipping past Neptune. At best, Neptune is visible in a very good pair of binoculars or small telescope, but I've been watching reddish Mars for a few months in the evening sky - now almost due south just after sunset. I really didn't have any interest in actually SEEING Neptune, I've seen it many times in a telescope - appears as a featureless tiny bluish disk. But what I was HOPING to record, was its motion over a day or two. All planets move around the sun, and of course, the earth's motion also contributes to their apparent motion in the sky.



Monday night when I was photographing windmills, I took a set of exposures of Mars with my 200mm lens, using my little tracking platform. I took a half dozen exposures of 20 seconds each that I stacked to minimize the noise in a single image. As shown at right in the stacked image (also some cropping), Mars is the reddish brilliant object below Lambda Aquarii (seen in the inset in right diagram). Oh - hopefully Neptune is in there too!




We've had a stretch of cloudy weather since, but Wednesday night there was a brief break of clear sky between storm systems, and I headed west of town in hopes of providing a second "epoch" to demonstrate 48 hours of motion. I again took a series of 20 second identical exposures. After completion I headed back to town and later in the evening stacked those exposures too. Putting the two data sets together shows the motion over the time gap between them. Now realize that Mars was about 1 AU (astronomical unit - mean distance of sun to earth, about 93 million miles) from us, and Neptune was 30 AU away - 2.7 BILLION miles away! As a result Neptune moves pretty slowly, and I didn't expect much of a shift for Neptune, but I was in luck - it was clearly seen - do you see it at left? Clearly seen in this cropped image is the doubled image of brilliant Mars, with its considerable motion over the 48 hours. But Neptune is harder to spot...

But the right image shows the labeled position and the doubled position of Neptune over the 48 hour gap. Neptune moved a tiny, but definite amount. Well it takes 165 years to orbit the sun, so it isn't in much of a hurry...

In Search of Foregrounds!

A Facebook friend of mine, Paul Schulz, posted a spectacular photo a few weeks ago - the Milky Way rising past an old windmill in the foreground. As any photographer will tell you, sometimes the foreground adds more to a composition than the subject, and in this case, makes a superb Milky Way shot even better. Shown at left, it is a single exposure with a fast, wide angle lens, exposure short enough that the stars don't show appreciable trailing as the earth rotates beneath. But to record decent detail, lens must be used wide open and at the risk of noise appearing with a very high camera ISO.

At my request he told me where he found it - in a canyon on the southeastern slopes of the Graham Mountains, about a 15 minute drive from his home in Safford, but a nearly 2 hour drive from Tucson! There might well be country windmills closer, but this one was proven to have NO light pollution in the area. My thought was to photograph the constellation Orion rising past the windmill - something everyone would recognize... So I drive out there, arriving about sunset and wouldn't you know, someone was camped beneath it! I figured it was a hunter as deer season had just started, but no, it was Kevin from Iowa, just camping for a few weeks. We had a nice long chat and I ended up taking a few photos anyway, even though he had a solar panel and electricity, lighting up the bottom half of the windmill like a Christmas tree - not suitable for dark-sky imaging!

But we had a great time, talking about our lives in Arizona and past lives in Iowa and once he figured out what I was doing, let the campfire die down and turned the lights on the windmill out as well.  I eventually took a few test shots, leaving any real effort on Orion for another time!  At left are the star clusters the Pleiades at center (Seven Sisters) and Hyades between Pleiades and tree below (Vee shaped) rising in the east.  Orion would be just below them an hour later...

I didn't wait that long - I needed to return to do some training with night staff at work, but before leaving, I noticed that the setting Summer Milky Way was making a nice "V" in the western sky with the Zodiacal Light! Shown at right, the Zodiacal Light is a cone-shaped white glow extending to the left behind the windmill, appearing in the western post-sunset sky December into February, and the eastern pre-dawn sky September into November. It is sunlight being reflected from meteoritic dust in the plane of our Solar System, mostly released from Comets and asteroidal collisions... It needs a dark sky to be really apparent, and in fact, many of my Midwestern amateur astronomer friends have never seen it! This is a single 40-second exposure with a fisheye lens - the one shot that didn't have a lot of airplane in it to edit out! That is Kevin being illuminated faintly by the embers of his campfire!

So yes, will likely return someday to so more shots similar to Paul's. It is a nice spot to camp out, in a little valley near a small stream - even now running likely from melting snow from higher elevations. Not a productive night, but they always turn out fun and interesting!

Post-Thanksgiving Outing

I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving! I spent a quiet day with a friend up in Phoenix, but was home later in the evening much to my cats' relief!

But Friday dawned pretty darned nice, though still some thin clouds in the sky. But I had visualized a photo op of the nearly full moon rising over the Tucson valley. Where is the best place to observe such a thing? My immediate thought was to shoot it from Kitt Peak, the moon rising over the profile of the Catalina Mountains and the city lights.

That is about the way it worked out - an uneventful ride to arrive at sunset, and set up 2 tripods for 2 lenses (500mm and 200mm) and 2 cameras (Canon 6D and XSi). Pretty much as soon as it got dark enough to take some exposures of the city lights with each lens, the glow identifying the moonrise position came into view! In making these images, I combined the long-ish exposures of the city lights with a shorter exposure properly exposed for the moon. So it is sort of an High Dynamic Range (HDR) exposure to record details much different in brightness. At left is the slightly wider view with the 200mm lens, and at right the 500mm, taken a few seconds later.

It was amazing how fast the moon rose above the profile of the Catalinas, but the clouds really add to the images. In the end, it pretty much turned out like I had envisioned... And with that image the only one on the program, with packing up of gear, I was back in town before 8pm! An early night!

Chiricahua Bound!

Have been back at "Ketelsen West" for nearly a month now... Still suffer from lack of inspiration to blog, though I've got loads to put up! Case in point is this trip to Chiricahua National Monument, that I visited 2 weeks ago now! My friend Laurie needled me to get out and observe that Saturday evening and since the Chiricahuas are a favorite of us both, we hit the road early afternoon for the 2 hour trip.

We got there a little before sunset, and drove up "Rhyolite Canyon" along some beautiful scenery. Fall colors were a little past peak among the sycamores along the canyon bottom, but still the rock formations formed of compressed ash from a long-extinct volcano were quite spectacular! Rock formations at left, and that is Laurie at right...


I hustled to set up the mount at Echo
Canyon parking lot - the plan was to mount the 500mm Canon camera lens to do some astrophotography for part of the night. Once set up, we both adjourned to Massai Point a half mile south for another project. I've always had a "thing" for the rock formation 5 miles to the north - the perfect profile of the Indian chief Cochise. While I've shot it many times before during the day, I was hoping to use the 4-day old moon's illumination to make it stand out a bit in the dark. At left is a shot right about sunset. Then after aligning the mount to Polaris and taking some sky flats, I returned to shoot Cochise with stars wheeling overhead. I found out that the moon was way too dim to even assist with locating the rock formation in the dark! I persevered and managed to take a passable frame.


Returning to Echo Canyon, Laurie worked on some wide-field shots of the sky, and I took three series of exposures on 3 objects of interest (to me, anyway!). First up was a dark nebula along the Milky Way in the constellation Cepheus. Shown at left, the dark nebula is known as the Seahorse Nebula, from its distinctive shape. Its catalog name is Barnard 150.  Also at left is a spiral galaxy NGC 6946, unusual for being located so near the Milky Way. It is relatively bright, and only 23 million light years distant - relatively close! And not to be forgotten, at lower left is a star cluster, NGC 6939, well within our own galaxy, a mere 4,000 light years distant.  This frame is about an hour of stacked exposures with the 500mm lens and like all exposures here, north is up.

The next object was a "bright" comet, almost directly overhead. If it wasn't so close to Beta Andromeda (itself a guidepost to finding the Andromeda Galaxy) it might be harder to find. But being just north of Beta, I just put the bright star in the lower edge of the field and shot away - there it was, glowing green! This comet is 64P Swift-Gehrels, making a close appearance to the earth - only 43 million miles from the earth, and 130 million miles from the sun (the earth is about 93 million miles from the sun). The green glow is caused by solar radiation dissociating carbon molecules from the comet's nucleus, which glows green in the vacuum of space... The sharp-eyed among you might note a fuzzy spot just upper left from Beta Andromeda at the lower edge. That is NGC 404, long a test object to see if your telescope reveals it so close to a bright star. This is 10.5 minutes of stacked exposures.


My last object for the night was a pair of "bright" nebula (as opposed to dark, seen by silhouette), also adjacent to a bright star. In this case, the bright star is Gamma Cassiopeia - the bright "W" currently on its side in the northeastern sky. Gamma is the center star of the "W", and the photo at left reveals some diffuse glows near it. The intense radiation of the star excites the gas to glow by fluorescence, as well as the radiation pressure pushing back the gas to form "sharp" formations pointed towards the star. I've seen photos of these (IC 63 and IC 59 left and right) thru big telescopes, but didn't know if it was possible in a "mere" telephoto lens.  This is 16 minutes of stacked exposures...

With the early sunset, we got in all the above observing, packed up and hit the road for the Tucson return about 10:30, hitting home about 12:30 - a productive night for the limited time on-sky!

Addendum!
I asked Laurie to send along her photo of
the wide-field shot of comet 65P Swift-Gehrels that also included the Andromeda Galaxy. Shown at left is a stack of 6 frames of 4 minutes total exposure taken with her T3i APS sensor camera with my 200mm lens. Please ignore the magenta halos around stars - they can sometimes be removed by adjusting focus slightly, but harder to remove in post-processing!

And at left is a labeled version - north is approximately at upper left... Note how obviously the greenish tint of the comet makes it so apparent! Unfortunately, it doesn't work when finding it visually as our eyes aren't sensitive enough to see colors on faint objects!