Oct. 28, 2011 Meeting

Held our monthly busness meeting last evening @ FIT under the dome.Our next event ~ the Public Stargaze @ Erna Nixon Park in Melbourne was discussed (Nov 5th) as well as another possible Public Gaze at the Barrier Island Sanctuary just North of Sebastion Inlet after the first of the year. All officers were in attendence tonight as well as the SAS President and 2 SAS members as well as 3 guests.

Also mention'd was the possible "Harmony Dark Sky Festival" that may return in April. The attached picture is of our V. Pesidet at Harmony's last event before the "masses" started arriving.

Ron Netzley ~ MAS President

A Not-As-Deep HDF

While at a dark site in NM I took my deepest image ever. Naturally, I aimed at the Ursa Major location of the "Hubble Deep Field" image. Using my NP101is 4" refractor and ST-8300M camera I took 12 subexposures of 6 minutes each for 72 minutes of total exposure time.

The image is very cool for what it shows. I've annotated several very dim galaxies that are as faint at 18th magnitude. I could find distances for some of them... as much as 1.7 Gly away! There are dozens of additional faint fuzzies in the picture that I haven't identified yet.

But the image is even more amazing for what it doesn't show. As deep an image as it is, the HDF area is still virtually blank. The Hubble Space Telescope and its team are truly amazing.

Rick Young
June 24, 2011

Supernova in M51

The last few nights have been cloudy here in NM but it cleared out last night so I took a picture of Supernova SN 2011dh in M51, the Whirlpool Galaxy. The supernova was first detected on May 31st, so it was already a week old by the time I took this picture. M51 is about 37 million light years away and SN 2011dh is as bright as the foreground stars in our own galaxy. Now that's bright!

Last night's picture is a monochrome image taken with my NP101is 4" refractor and ST8300M camera using just an IR/UV blocking filter. It's a stack of thirteen 3-minute images for 39 minutes of total exposure. Since I had taken a color image of M51 a few months ago I made this composite picture showing the new and old images of M51 so they can be compared easily.

Rick Young
June 8, 2011

Omega Centauri with a Camera

Globular cluster Omega Centauri is a huge ball of millions of stars but it's difficult to observe because it's very low on the southern horizon. From my house on the NW side of Melbourne it's well into the MLB lightdome so I have to use a scope to see it at all. From a dark site in New Mexico I could see it naked eye even though it's only 9 degrees above the horizon.

For this picture I used a Canon 40D camera and its zoom lens set to 250mm on a tracking mount. The picture was not taken through a telescope! Omega Centauri is large enough that even the kit Canon zoom lens can resolve some of its details. The benefit from the dark skies is that this image is a stack of only 12 one-minute exposures and there is no light gradient to remove.

Rick Young
May 30, 2011

Unusual Planetary Alignment Underway

A rare four planet alignment has started in the eastern dawn sky and will continue to evolve over the next few weeks. Mercury, Venus, Mars and Jupiter will form interesting close groupings that will provide a different arrangement every morning.

The attached photo was taken with a point-n-shoot camera from my back yard on Sunday morning May 1st. It shows the very pretty arrangement of Venus, Mercury and the Moon visible that morning. Unfortunately, Jupiter and Mars were behind some low clouds near the horizon and were hidden from view.

Jupiter and Mars will rise higher in the sky each morning with Jupiter passing within 0.6 degrees of Venus on May 11th. That should be quite a site.

Take a look 20 to 30 minutes before sunrise over the next few weeks to catch this rare alignment in action.

Rick Young
May 1, 2011

A Dark Sky Comparison

I was recently in the Mayhill area of New Mexico and really enjoyed the dark skies there. The stars and winter Milky Way were just fantastic. While I knew it's much darker in NM than at my home in Melbourne, I thought I'd take dark sky comparison photos to see the difference.

My new Canon PowerShot S95 camera has their high performance low light HS System that would be great for this type of picture. I set the camera to full manual mode: ISO 3200, f/2.0 and 15 seconds. Using a photo tripod I took a series of images around
the horizon. To the eye, the horizon was completely black. But the camera revealed this low broad light dome from nearby Cloudcroft. But the sky darkens quickly up from the horizon. Also note part of the Milky Way is easily visible rising from the
horizon on the right side of the picture.



Returning to Melbourne I took a similar image from my back yard using the same camera and same settings. I shot the photo to the west, which is my darkest part of the sky. I live on the north side of MLB and it really doesn't seem too bad for this area. This is where I do all my astro imaging and I've taken some nice pictures from here. But this photo shows how not dark it really is! In fact, if it weren't for Orion in the sky, I'd think this was a daytime photo!



It's not surprising then that my better astro photos are the stacked images taken with really long total exposure times. Stacking many images reduces the noise to the low levels needed to pull details out from the very edge of our skyglow.

Rick Young
Feb 28, 2011

Newest Toy

I used these 15x70,s to find Comet McNaught last week,

(p.s. ~ the new banner looks GREAT!!!)

MAS Banner Arrives

The new MAS Banner was delivered to the club by Peter during the May meeting. The picture shows Peter and Phil holding our large banner during its presentation. The attractive banner is printed on both sides and is made with a heavy duty vinyl material that should hold up well in use. In addition to the dual MAS logos, the banner also includes SAS, FIT and BAS logos along the bottom. Thanks to Peter for getting the banner made for us!

Delta 4 Slices the Night Sky

Space Coast living has a unique benfit: we get to watch missile launches. They are always different and always impressive. Even though we're 20 miles south of Cape Canaveral we got a great view of the Delta 4 night launch on Dec-05. A great rumble really topped it off. The Delta 4 vehicle carried a WGS 3 satellite to geosynchronous orbit.

For this picture I attached a Canon 40D DSLR to my table top camera tracking mount to keep the stars from trailing during the long exposures. The missile trail was captured with a 4 minute exposure. ImagesPlus was used for most of the image processing. The constellation lines were added with Photoshop to make it easier to see the apparent path of the missile through the sky.

Milky Way Star Clouds

A few weeks ago my wife and I were visiting family in rural Iowa. The population is pretty thin in this farming area so they have fairly dark skies. I was fortunate to have a couple of clear nights and took this picture on that second night. The picture is looking across a hayfield to the south with the Milky Way arcing up into the sky. Sagittarius is near the horizon, with stars of Scutum, Aquila, Sagitta, Serpens and Ophiuchus visible. Many Messier objects are also visible.

This image is a stack of 25 one minute exposures taken with a Canon 40D. I used a Canon 17-85 EF-S zoom lens set to the 17mm position (28mm equivalent). That gave me a very wide field of view. Star tracking was done with a small unguided tabletop GEM with a battery powered RA drive motor attached. I carried all this equipment with me on the airplane. It kept the TSA inspectors busy. Processing was done with ImagesPlus and Photoshop.