A Night Under the Stars

Time has been in short supply for me for the couple month. Between helping clean out my mother-in-laws home and some other commitments that I have I haven't had a lot of time to relax or do anything fun outside of my normal bike rides. Even thought the weather is turning colder I am still getting out with posse for some rides. Last week we went to Lahaska and this Saturday we did a short ride to Millstone from Cranbury. We are settling into our winter time routine where we let the weather determine where and how far we ride. This means shorter rides and more rides on the trails. 

This time of year brings longer nights which I plan to use to spend more time looking at the stars. Back in July I purchased a Dwarf 3 smart telescope. This is not your normal telescope where you look through the eye piece to see the stars. This is a smart telescope which has a camera made for astrophotography along with electronics to find and track any object in the sky. Technology has come a long way in the last few years. It use to cost $10,000 to $20,000 to get a setup where you could get photos of some deep sky objects, now for $500 to $600 you can get similar results. 

The way these smart telescope work is that they use multiple short 30sec to 60 sec exposes over hours and integrate them together. This helps gather more light and improve the signal to noise ratio. There is also sophisticated software built into these scopes that remove noise and improve the color and clarity of the image. The image at the top of the post is of the eastern veil nebula. About 15 years ago I have a friend who had a large 15inch dobson telescope and we got a view of the veil nebula. It was very faint and hard to see. Even in his big telescope the best I could see was some cotton like fuss against the dark sky. Now with my Dwarf 3 I can see it in full color and see the twist of gasses caused by the super nova explosion.

Although I have taken some good photos of the sun and moon through my small telescope and camera I never was able to get any good images of any deep sky objects like galaxies and nebulas. Now I can. (See Trifid nebula below)

 

This Dwarf 3 is easy to use. You just install an app on your phone and tell the Dwarf 3 what you want to take a picture of and it scans the night sky and finds it. In my old telescope I use to have to go through an alignment process to get it orientated before I could point it at a target. The alignment process usually required me to manually point the telescope at 2 to 3 different bright stars so the telescope could calculate its position. The Dwarf 3 doesn't need any help with alignment it uses a thing called "plate solving" to align itself. Basically it just looks up at the sky and knows the distant between all the stars in the sky so it can stare at a small piece of the sky measure the distant between the stars it sees then then through some extremely complex calculations know exactly where it is and does a precision alignment. 

The advantage of this way of doing an alignment is that you only need a small part of the sky to do an alignment. This also allow the Dwarf 3 to precisely track a target which is important as it takes a least an hour or two to get a good image. 

I spend August learning how to use the Dwarf 3 and it didn't take too long before I got some pretty good images of the some deep sky objects. Here is lagoon nebula with just over an hour of imaging time.

It's good but with more time I could get even more detail and color out of the image. The thing that impressed me about this image is that I took it from a field wasn't that dark and had a lot of stray light reflecting to the sky. 

At the end of September I got a chance to go to Belleplain state park down toward Cape May. The southern Jersey astronomy club has a weekend each year where they hold a star party. It's not really a party where you eat and drink and dance under the night sky it's more where a bunch of astronomy geeks sit in and open field under dark skies and look through telescopes and talk about astronomy. It's my kind of party which speaks to the geekness of my nature. 

I got to the field in Belleplain state park about 6pm. There were 10 other people already there most of them had some type of camper or tent set up to stay overnight and next to the tent was some type of telescope set up. One of members of the club actually had a small camper with a tent next to it. In the tent he had a couple of laptops set up like a mini mission control center. From the laptops there were bundles of cables going to a large telescope. I talked to him about his setup and it was impressive. He showed me a few pictures that he took. One was the shadow of the moon IO on Jupiter which was as good as any picture I had seen from NASA. 

My setup was not as impressive.

 

It was just my Dwarf 3 which is just he size of a book on a tripod. But this was all I needed. I spent the entire night taking pictures of different objects. Including the Andromeda galaxy 

 

The Helix nebula

and lastly the Orion nebula. 

 

I spend about two hours imaging each one and Dwarf 3 track and imaged perfect. It was a good clear night which helped. For the first few hours I hung around with the other astronomy geeks talking about the stars and just staring at the night sky. It was very relaxing. I'm glad there were other people with me in the dark field because if I had been by myself I would have worried about some animals or the Jersey devil coming out to get me. As the night wore on and it was past 1am I took a nap in my car between setting up the Dwarf 3 to image the next object. By 6am in the morning the sun came up and I was done. I spent another couple hours napping in the car which actually was pretty comfortable so I got about 5 hours sleep. 

One of the interesting discussion I had with the other astronomy geeks is the fact that some people don't think that these smart telescopes are as good as an experience as looking through a real telescope and seeing the object live. I will agree that looking through a telescope and seeing the rings of Saturn live is cool and it feels more real. I look up at the sky then through the telescope and see the rings of Saturn and I feel more connected to it. When you use a smart telescope you just see an image on your phone or computer after the fact so it does seem as real. However smart telescopes allow you to see a lot more of the night sky in a lot more detail. I can see details I couldn't see before. It's not only the fact that I can get some cool picture it's that I can see reflections of the star light in the nebula or the structure of a galaxy. This helps me understand how these structures formed and gets me thinking of the physics and processes that caused these formation. As I tell people who want to observe the night sky you have to look with you mind as well as your eyes because what you see is cool but the reason for all those object you see is something that will feed your curiosity for years.  

The picture I got at the star party were good but I have barely scratch the surface of what can be done with the Dwarf 3. Some people on the Dwarf 3 forums, I follow, have imaged objects for 8-10 hours and then done a lot of post processing to produce some images that rival the Hubble telescope images. Since we have more dark hours in the winter I plan to work on getting some more images during night with clear skies. With the Dwarf 3 I now have the tools I need to explore the night sky in a new a different way so expect some more pictures of the sky in this blog over the winter.