The horse's head

It has been a rough winter.  Storm after storm has battered the Stoneage Observatory and when the winds relented the clouds lowered over us for days on end.  However at the end of February we finally had a few clear nights with no wind and no moon so I decided to put the new Vixen telescope through its paces and image possibly the most famous dark nebula in the sky: The Horsehead nebula AKA Barnard 33 or b33.

This nebula has been made extremely famous thanks to the efforts of the Hubble space telescope but it has long been a target of interest to amateur astronomers like myself.  It is relatively easy to locate (just below the Easternmost star of Orion's belt - Alnitak) and one of the few objects in the sky that truly resembles it's namesake.   However it's popularity as an imaging target does not say anything about the level of difficulty involved in effectively photographing it!

The image above is a composite of four and a quarter hours worth of exposures through an eight inch telescope but there are just not that many photons to be collected!   So what are we looking at? Why is it so dark?

The first clue is its location: just below the belt of Orion... we know of some other nebulae just below the belt of Orion:

This is M42 (the Orion Nebula) and M43 (the Running Man Nebula) and we can immediately see a number of features that are also present in the Horsehead image at the top of this post.  First and most obvious is the red glow in the heart of M42, this deep red colour also forms the backdrop to the Horsehead and is the characteristic glow of Ionised hydrogen gas.  That is hydrogen atoms that are being so battered with ultra-violet light - produced by the young energetic stars being born within the nebula itself - that they are stripped of their electrons.  When the hydrogen atoms recombine with their dissociated electrons they emit red light.  It is this process that lights up many nebulae in the sky.   We can also see pervasive blue regions.  This blue is not so obvious in the Horsehead image but the big fuzzy blob in the lower left corner shows hints of it (it would show more if I hadn't over-exposed it in order to reveal the dark nebula).  This blue will lead us to the "darkness"... When white light passes through regions of gas and dust the different colour wavelengths that make up the white light react by diffracting around the particles of dust, red light tends to pass through in more or less the same direction it was going in the first place while blue light gets scattered and reflected all over the place, this is the same process that makes sunsets red and the day time sky blue (its called Rayleigh scattering), so where we see this blue colour we know we have enough dust to scatter starlight into its constituent colours; but what if there was more dust?  More matter between us and the stars lighting up the dust and the gas? Well then you get the dark lane at the top of M42,  enough dust completely blocks visible light and gives us the Dark Nebulae that Edward Emerson Barnard was so fond of cataloguing.

So now we have all the information needed to understand the Horsehead image: the horse's head is literally the shadow cast by dense billows of dust between us and the pervasive glow of Ionised hydrogen beyond.  But its not just a shadow, look at the base of the horse's neck and you can see billows in the dust, faint hints of variation in the darkness, pillow like structures of dark brown.  Faint though it is we can see the dust itself.  But we are not done yet!  I didn't just show you the Orion nebula picture because its pretty and gives me a chance to show you another of my pictures, I showed you it because the Horsehead nebula and the Orion nebula are both part of a much larger structure called the Orion Molecular Cloud,  this enormous structure encompasses the entire constellation of Orion and when imaged by better photographers than me is simply staggering: https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap161204.html  

Does Saturn have ears?

This year Jupiter and Saturn are fairly nearby in the sky so just a few weeks after Jupiter went past opposition so did his father.  As this would be the closest approach to Saturn this year (and also its highest position in the sky) I decided to take a picture... and just for a bit of fun I thought I would show you all why Galileo famously described Saturn as "As a planet with ears".

In the top image I used a high frame rate camera recording at 23 frames per second for 3000 frames, I then used software to select the best 300 frames and combine them to allow me to produce a relatively sharp image that clearly shows the rings as distinct from the planet.  You can also see the Cassini division which separates the darker 'A' ring on the outside of the disk from the brighter and wider 'B' ring.  Above the disk of the planet you can make out Saturn's shadow being cast over the rings and conversely where the rings cross the planet you can make out hints of the shadow of the rings cast on to the cloud tops of Saturns atmosphere.

But of course Galileo didn't have a high frame rate camera, or a computer capable of sorting and stacking the frames, he also had no prior knowledge of what he was looking at!  

The lower image is the same as the upper one but blurred to simulate the relatively poor optics and the effect of the atmospheric "seeing" that Galileo might have experienced at the eyepiece.  

The video clip below is an unprocessed export of part of the video I recorded through my telescope, keep in mind that this video clip is much sharper than the view through Galileo's telescope would have been due to the size of my telescope compared to his.  Its not hard to see why he was a bit confused!

Jupiter Posing

Neither of my telescopes are particularly suited to planetary observation, the focal lengths are a bit too short really but sometimes the planets are just to tempting to ignore, especially when they are at "Opposition" (the time in the year when a given planet is opposite the sun in the sky and therefore at its closest approach).  Such was the situation for Jupiter last month so I took this image of the King of the Planets:

I am very pleased with the outcome!

I should point out that this is not a single frame snapshot.   This picture was produced by combining several hundred frames extracted from a video and combined to produce a much sharper image than could ever be achieved with a single frame. 

First and most obvious thing to notice is the colour banding: the equatorial, tropical and temperate bands are all clearly visible along with the "Festoons" which are the the crenelations visible along the contacts between the light and dark bands.  These Festoons are essentially storm systems and occasionally they develop into full blown cyclone storms, the most famous of which is the Great Red Spot which I think is the dark spot in the upper left quadrant of the planet.

Some of you may be thinking that the GRS is in the southern equatorial belt, why is it in the upper section of the planet?  That is because my telescopes invert up and down, so Jupiter's South pole is at the top of the image! It would of course be very easy to flip the image over but I like to preserve the view through the eyepiece :) 

Taking Pictures of the Moon

Now that the observatory is working reliably I decided it was time to try out the cameras.   I decided to keep it simple for the first few images in order to avoid too many frustrations with remembering how to get all the equipment working so I took some greyscale images of the moon:

Here the prominent crater with the large central peak is Theophilus. I love the "pearls in space" effect of the sun on the mountain peaks below the main crater along the terminator (the line separating night and day) but I am most intrigued by the subtle relief features in the upper right.   The dark patches on the moon are known as Mare (latin for sea) as they were thought to resemble or even possibly be seas of water.  These days we understand them to be vast planes of volcanic lava, those relief features only become visible to us when the terminator is very close by and we can see shadows being cast across the surface.   What we are looking at here are volcanic domes and wrinkle ridges left behind as the lava cooled. I will be looking to find out more about those features and perhaps make more detailed studies at a later date.

I also took this image further along the terminator:

This is the western part of the sea of serenity with crater Posidonius prominent at the top of the frame (some of its rilles are visible too which I am pleased about), the striking snake like feature is "the great sinuous ridge" or Dorsa Smirnov.  This is an example of a wrinkle ridge which form when the lava that formed the Mare cool and contract, some of these features can extended for many hundreds of kilometres across the moons surface.

It is very easy when studying the moon to get distracted by the impact craters, they tend to be large, bright and dramatic but they don't tell you much about the moon itself.  The craters are the result of foreign objects hitting the moon but the volcanic features: the domes, the wrinkle ridges, the cinder cones and rilles tell the story of the dynamic moon that was, how she formed and cooled. So to me the more subtle features are the more fascinating to examine.