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
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
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
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
