If you enjoy astronomy then you are always on the look out for clear night skies. We haven't had that many this summer so when we get a few like we did this past week you stay up late trying to get a few good photographs of things in the night sky. I got a Dwarf 3 smart telescope last year and have been using it during clear nights to take some pictures of some of the more interesting things in the night sky. I have been really impressed on how well the Dwarf3 works and how much detail it can get from the light polluted New Jersey skies. The image at the top of this post is a mosaic of three different nights of imaging that shows the Veil Nebula. The Veil nebula is the gaseous remnants of a super nova explosion that happen some where between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago. This nebula is about 2500 light years away.
To get this images I set up the Dwarf about an hour after sunset, on my back patio, and then program it to follow a specific target in the sky for a certain about of time. It then takes a long exposure picture of 60 seconds and keeps stacking them to create the image. Stacking each picture helps bring out more detail and improves the signal to noise ratio. I can monitor the progress on my phone while I sit inside. I usually end up trying to image a target for around 2 hours if I can. The house and the woods behind the house limit what I can see so I have to pick a target that is high in the sky and something that won't move behind the house or trees for 2 hours.
The fact that I can get an image like this of something so far away and dim with just a few hours of imaging is a testament how far the technology has come for smart telescopes. Five or six years ago you would have had to spend at around $10,000 on a telescope, electronics and sensor to get similar results. And it would have taken a lot more time both imaging and processing the data. Now in an hour or two you can get a very good image of any Messier Object you want like this image of M27 the Dumbbell Nebula
This nebula shows what our solar system will look like in 5-8 billion years when the hydrogen is exhausted from our sun and it blows off it outer layer (and kills off all life as we know it). The diameter of this nebula is 2 light years so that gives you some scale to how violent the explosion was.
These are interesting and decent pictures but don't rival the Hubble telescope or more dedicated astrophotographers who get a lot more detail that I can. However what I enjoy as much as taking the picture is gaining insight and knowledge about the object in our universe. It's interesting how many strange phenomena are happening in our night sky.
Of course some of the things happening in the sky are man made. After staying up a few hours late taking pictures with my Dwarf, I got up early the next morning to see a rocket launch.
SpaceX is in the process of launching a series of Starlink satellites. Sometimes the launch trajectories take them up the east coast and if those launches are in the early morning they can be easily seen. So I got up this past Tuesday morning at 5am to see if I could get a picture of the rocket as it went by. When I got up I checked the Space Launch Schedule site to make sure the launch was still on. I then headed to the park near my house that had a good view of the south eastern sky. The rocket launched at 5:33am in Florida and I saw it fly by just before 5:40am. It took about 5 mins to cross the sky. I did not know how big or bright it would be so I kept scanning the sky. When it came by it was much bigger and brighter than I expected. Since the rocket was high in the atmosphere it was backlit by the sun while I was still in darkness so looked like a steam train going across the sky. They call this the jellyfish effect for the pattern it makes. It was definitely worth getting up early to see so I will have to keep and eye on the launch schedule to see when the next time this will happen.
Later that same day even though I was a little sleep deprived I decided to go down to the Edwin Forsythe wildlife refuse to try and get pictures of some birds. The refuse is a very scenic place especially early morning or late in the day
This is a good time of year to go as the place is filled with all kinds of different birds especially egrets and herrings. I spent a good about of time trying to get pictures of the terns grabbing fish and managed to get this picture of one with a fish in its mouth
However the best picture I got was this one.
Until I studied this picture and did some research I didn't realize that terns shake like a dog sometimes after they dive into the water. I got this one mid shake. If you click on the picture you can see the water droplets flying off the bird. My brain had a hard time making sense of this picture when I first saw it. This is another example that sometimes the knowledge learned from taking the picture is as interesting as the picture itself.
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