Mike's Astro Photos

Congratulations to Robert Ward who found the first fragment from the April 22nd, California fireball earlier today. A meteorite recovery in just under 2 days is miraculous and a brilliant display of skill and knowledge. Credit is due also to Marc Fries who successfully identified and published the radar return on his blog. For more info, visit Marc’s Radar Meteorite site.

Here’s a long exposure photograph of the spiral galaxy Messier 100. I collected the data for this picture over several nights in late February this year.  Exposure times were 2 hours each of Red, Green and Blue color channels and 2 hours 40 minutes of Luminance. Total exposure time: 8 hours and 40 minutes.

Messier 100 - February 26, 2012

Click the image above for a larger picture, or download this high res version of m100 3630×2420.

Located roughly 55 million light years from Earth, Messier 100 is a grand design spiral galaxy estimated to be 160,000 light years wide.

Here’s a picture of Venus and the Pleiades tonight along with a satellite shooting through. The satellite was captured over the course of two frames and the gap of light in the satellite train is the quick second between exposures. The oblong shape of the planet is caused from clouds floating through the shot.

Venus, Pleiades and Satellite - April 3rd 2012

I tried finding the satellite on calsky but wasn’t able to locate it. The picture was taken at 9:45 from Freeland MD, if anyone is interested in tracking it down.

Here’s Venus with the Pleiades from about 30 minutes ago. Its still up if you want to check, look west. Tomorrow night they will be even closer.

Venus and The Pleiades - April 2nd, 2012

Photo details: 8 second tracked exposure using WO FLT 98 APO, April 2nd 2012 @

An amateur astronomer discovered a supernova in the galaxy Messier 95 on March 16th, 2012. Two weeks later, the supernova continues to shine bright. Here’s a picture of M95 I took earlier this week. The supernova is the star to the lower right of the galaxy core. No one knows for sure when the supernova first erupted, but this object is not seen in pictures of the galaxy taken before March 20th.

Super Nova in M95 - March 26th 2012

Messier 95 is an estimated 38 million light years away from Earth, which means the star in this galaxy would have exploded over 38 million years ago. A supernova is the most powerful release of energy in the Universe. This supernova from a far distant galaxy outshines some of the other stars in the picture, which are all in our local Milkyway Galaxy. This gives you a relative idea about how bright and powerful supernovas are.

Here are a few photos of an interesting conjunction with the Crescent Moon, Venus, Jupiter and the Pleiades earlier tonight.

Moon, Venus, Jupiter - March 26th, 2012

A close up as they set behind the trees…

Moon, Venus and Pleiades - March 26th, 2012

The Moon and Venus at full zoom on the telephoto camera lens.

Crescent Moon and Venus - March 26th, 2012

March has been an amazing month for planet viewing. Jupiter, Venus and Mercury are visible in the west just after sunset while Mars is rising in the east. By 10 PM Saturn is also visible in the east. These planets are the brightest objects in the night sky and the experience can be greatly enhanced with binoculars or a low powered telescope

Here’s a photo from March 14th of Jupiter, Venus and a meteor. Venus is the bright object in the lower side of the picture. Jupiter is to its right. The Pleiades is also visible in the upper left.

Meteor with Jupiter and Venus - March 14th, 2012

Here’s a photo of Mars taken from Freeland  MD on the night of March 6th, 2012 at 12:13 EST.

Mars - March 6th, 2012 - 04:13 UT

I am still learning how to do planetary photography and this is one of the first Mars photos I’ve ever taken. I’m using a DMK astronomy video camera with RGB filters and registax software to capture, process and stack the video. This data was collected using a RCOS 14.5 telescope without a barlow lens. I do not have my procedure down quite yet.

Last night was the first fully clear night we’ve had in weeks and with only a crescent moon popping out after 3:30, it was the perfect night for some astrophotography. I am still fine tuning aspects of my system and spent the first few hours of the night running tests, measuring various things and tweaking knobs in an effort to make improvements to polar alignment, PEC & collimation. I’ve gotten a new software suite from CCD Ware that really lets you fine tune these things. I didn’t want to waste the entire night tinkering so I moved on after making a little progress. Also on my list of procedural improvements, is mastering CCD Auto Pilot, which I’m getting better at, but still not entirely there. Last night I actually had a CCDAP5 session going great, but it lost the guide star after 2 frames and then lost the ability to plate solve. Not wanting to waste the night’s opportunity with tinkering, I rolled back to my non-automated procedures and started imaging the spiral galaxy Messier 106.

Messier 106 - February 17th, 2012

There was a big fireball in texas last week. Some people estimated the mass at ‘bus sized’. The meteor had a shallow entry angle, a low speed and triggered a window rattling sonic boom that was heard and felt by 100s of people. These are all positive signs that suggest a meteorite dropping fireball. The meteor was captured on 3 all sky cameras: one in Coleman TX, one in Oklahoma City Oklahoma and one in Mayhill NM. The NM camera located at New Mexico Skies Remote Observatories and operated by NASA’s Meteor Office runs a software program called ASGARD which outputs all of the azimuth and elevation angles required to compute the trajectory in a very nice email. The other two cameras are part of the Sandia Sentinel All Sky Camera network. No predetermined values were distributed with the videos so I had to reduce the solutions by hand. This process is something I accomplish with a sky mapping program and photoshop. Its not perfect, and the far away cameras have a larger margin of error. This is a version one cut of the solutions so take it with a grain of salt. I will continue to make improvements to the trajectory and fold in witness data.

I computed 3 total trajectory solutions: 1) TX & OKC 2) TX & NM 3) OK & NM.  These solutions were created using the intersecting planes formula published in the Fireball Working Group by Rob Matson. Last summer with Rob’s help, I translated his tutorial into an excel spread sheet and then converted the formulas into a perl script. Its very handy for computing 3D fireball trajectory solutions. My preferred solution is the TX & OKC combo and is shown on the map in red. Here’s a map of the 3 cameras and the three unique solutions from way up high.

Texas Fireball - 2012-02-01

Here’ another view a little closer in.

Texas Fireball - 2012-02-01

And here’s a close up of the current preferred termination point. If this were correct there would be meteorites along or near this red line, closer to the side favoring the wind, most likely the southeastern side. Residents living near Greenville should be on the look out for small black rocks.

Texas Fireball - 2012-02-01

Here’s an overhead view of the preferred trajectory.

Texas Fireball - 2012-02-01

This trajectory model is based on estimated information and should be consider as just an estimate. I am willing to share my source information, so if you would like to know the underlying values used for these calculations or you would like a google earth KMZ version of these solutions, send me an email with “TX 2012 KMZ” in the subject and I will send you the KMZ.

It is my understanding that other scientists are also working on the trajectory for this fireball so there should be at least 1 more trajectory model published in the next week or two.

UPDATE 2012-02-08

Bill Cooke of NASA’s Meteor Office published his trajectory solution and also gave me the AZ / EL values he calculated for all of the cameras. I also added values for a camera from Austin thanks to Pat Branch. This input data yields five unique solutions using all possible camera combos. All five solutions are near identical. WOW.

TX Fireball Trajectory V2

You can download the Google Earth KMZ file here. (unzip and then open file with Google Earth).

Here’s a recent astrophoto of NGC 2175, an open cluster centered in the Monkey Head Nebula. Found in target rich Orion, this nebula is a huge cloud of hydrogen gas covering an area larger than the full moon. The star cluster is visible to the aided eye and was first discovered before 1654 by  Giovanni Batista Hodierna.

NGC 2175 & The Monkey Head Nebula - January 24th, 2012

Click the picture above for a larger image, or download this huge full resolution desktop wall paper version.

Here’s a picture of Jupiter with 3 of its moons from earlier tonight.

Jupiter - January 18th, 2012

Here’s a picture of Jupiter and one of its moons. I think the moon is Ganymede, but I’m not 100% sure. I am just getting into planetary work and this is my first serious re-attempt at photographing Jupiter. Planetary photography is a bit different than deep space and requires different cameras, software and techniques. I’ve still got some work to do, but this turned out better than I expected.

Jupiter - January 8th, 2012 7:43 PM EDT

Photo Details
RCOS 14.5 Telescope
Paramount ME Equatorial Mount
DMK41AU02 Astronomy Camera
1000 frames of RGB
Stacked in Registax 5

We had near perfect conditions in Freeland MD for the peak of the Quadrantids meteor shower on the morning of Jan 4th, 2012. Here is a composite image containing 6 Quadrantid meteors captured between 2 and 4 am EDT.

Quadrantid Meteor Shower - January 4th, 2012

I had a multitude of cameras setup to capture the show including: 2 DSLRs, 3 security cameras and a new Orion all sky camera. I’m glad I had a wide variety of instruments because some didn’t work at all and others worked better at some things and worse at others. It was my first night using the all sky camera and I’m disappointed to admit that it captured ZERO meteors. I’m hoping I had a error in my operation. One of my DSLRs filled up the memory card after only 2 hours and I didn’t realize it till the morning. By far the security cameras picked up the most meteors, totaling 53. I found that most of these meteors were detected between 2-5 am. I also captured the most meteors in the southern skies at low elevations.

Here’s a compilation video of all the meteors captured on the security cameras.

While reviewing the DSLR photos I was disappointed to find most of the meteors caught on the security cameras did not get caught on the DSLR. The DSLR only captured about 8 meteors total, compared to 53 on the security cameras, so clearly the DSLR lens is not catching everything. I did find this nice fireball that left a persistent train that last for a few minutes. Here’s a full zoom image.

Quadrantid Meteor - January 4th, 2012

Here’s a single exposure that caught two meteors within a 30 second period. This DSLR exposure was also caught on video and both meteors happened at the same exact time! I repeated the sequence 3 times in the video.

Double Quandrantid Meteors - CLICK TO ENLARGE

Overall, a strong performance for the Quadrantids IMO and a very great way to start 2012!

Here’s a photo I took from my observatory of Messier 51, the famous Whirlpool Galaxy.

M51 - The Whirlpool Galaxy - December 28th, 2011

At an estimated 23 million light years away, M51 is one of the most famous galaxies in the sky and a popular target for amateur astronomers. M51 is an interacting, grand-design, spiral galaxy. Interacting means, the galaxy is merging with another galaxy resulting in a disturbance of both galaxies because the gravitational fields of each are ‘interacting’ with each other. Grand-design is a designation for a special type of spiral galaxy that has prominent, well defined continuous spiral arms. Less than 10% of all spiral galaxies are designated grand-design.

Earlier this year in June 2011, a super nova was discovered inside M51 bringing renewed attention to the galaxy. I don’t think the supernova is still visible in last night’s image. I did look to see if it was there though.

Happy New Year!

Astro Photo Details
30 minutes RGB & 60 minutes of L / 150 total minutes (2.5 hours)
SBIG ST8300 Camera
MMOAG & SBIG 402 Guide Camera
Paramount ME Mount
RCOS 14.5
The Sky X / CCDStack / CCDSoft