astroblog

With the constellation Lyra high near the zenith this time of year, I will be targeting a few galaxies in the vicinity. These are very small and faint objects – should be a challenge for amateur equipment. Look for results here throughout the Summer.

M56, an globular cluster at 19h16m36s

The following are in the same area between Vega and e1 & e2 Lyr:

NGC 6675 18h37m24sec at magnitude 13

NGC 6663 18h33m30sec at magnitude 15

IC 4772 18h39m54sec at magnitude 15

NGC 6686 18h40m6sec at magnitude 15

NGC 6695 18H42M42sec at magnitude 14

Full Moon tonight, so faint deep space objects were out of the question. Had some tracking issues with the LXD75 mount – I had to park the telescope, turn it off, and then power on and re-align a couple of times. Here is an image of Deneb in Cygnus, and the Pinwheel galaxy (also known as Messier 101 or NGC 5457) in Ursa Major. This is a first attempt at capturing the image of M101: taken in monochrome (and yes, the lense was a little dirty). This galaxy has a low surface brightness and the default magnification of the Meade DSI CCD made it difficult to find. Using the DSI is like trying to find faint objects while using a 9mm eyepiece! I have an Opticstar F0.5 Focal Reducer for standard 1.25″ focusers on order from Scope City to help out with this. The Moonlight did not help either…

The MIR was a Russian space station that operated from 1986 to 1996 and was the first continuously inhabited station. After a long successful life, it was manually de-orbited in 2001 and allowed to reenter the Earth’s atomosphere and burn up, as it was becoming obsolite and expensive to maintain. See the article at WikiPedia for a history of this important step in space science.  

“The station currently holds the record for the longest continuous manned presence in space, at eight days short of ten years, and was occupied for a total of twelve and a half years of its fifteen-year lifespan. Mir had the capacity to support a resident crew of three but could also support larger crews for short-term visits, the largest crew simultaneously aboard the station being six” (WikiPedia, 2010).

Good attendance at the 7/16/2010 star party. The Celestron 14″ Cassegrain was used, and people brought thier own scopes also. A couple of pics of the moon are included: These shots were obtained during my testing of the camera. They had to be sightly edited, as they were over exposed on the edge.

Great night. It was clear and the Milky Way was very visible. We had a great turnout of members and had about seven telescopes brought by the members. My quest for a better image of the Whirlpool galaxy (M51) is being realized: using long exposures of about 40-50 seconds, the spiral is showing through. These two images were patched up with Photoshop to get rid of some random noise from the CCD, and the more experienced John O’ Neal from the Black River Astro Society is going to do some more edits on these – stay tuned.

Due to the bad images obtained of M51 on the last session, I targeted it again tonight, but the light over in that area of the sky is just too much. Forget Ursa Major until I am out in a dark area, such as the Nielson observatory. Anyway, here is another shot of…

The ring is 50 images at .77 sec. Vega at 4sec. with Photo Shop saturation maxed. Notice the absense of spider vane effect in the image of Vega, due to the design of the Schmidt-Newtonian – a corrector plate holds the secondary mirror instead, giving a sharp image. Whispy clouds started to roll in when these exposures were taken.

I’m no Photoshop expert, but here is a cleaned-up faint image of M51: the Whirlpool galaxy in Ursa Major and another image of the Ring Nebula (M57) in Lyra. At the time, the Whirlpool was in the brightest area of the sky-towards downtown, hence the grainy quality of the image due to light pollution. I had taken images both filtered and non, with an Orion light pollution filter, and the non-filtered image was a lot brighter. I then turned again to the Ring nebula and took an image of it, consisting of 50 stacked images with 0.775 sec exposure. Next taget: the constellation of Cygnus.

Clear skies and steady seeing tonight. Bootes, Corona Borealis, and Hercules were at the zenith allowing good views of the large globular cluster in Hercules, M13. Later the camera was trained on the Ring nebula (M57) and the star Vega, in Lyra. The last image is an enhanced black and white image showing the nebula’s central star. The nebula images are 40 exposures unfiltered with the Meade DSI color CCD. Previous to obtaining these exposures I had to take a series of dark frames. This requires covering the telesope with the dust cover so no light enters the tube, and then taking the dark frames – this will calibrate the CCD and reduce noise in the images. The result is images with a clear, black background. I will slightly increase the exposure times at the next observing session to try to bring out more color. Click on images to enlarge.

From Newsgroup: alt.astronomy
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-239
All images are copyright(c) NASA.

Video Camera Will Show Mars Rover’s Touchdown
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
July 19, 2010

Image 1. Installing the mast on Curiosity. Retrieved July 27, 2010 from
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-245

A downward-pointing camera on the front-left side of NASA’s Curiosity
rover will give adventure fans worldwide an unprecedented sense of
riding a spacecraft to a landing on Mars.

The Mars Descent Imager, or MARDI, will start recording high-resolution
video about two minutes before landing in August 2012. Initial frames
will glimpse the heat shield falling away from beneath the rover,
revealing a swath of Martian terrain below illuminated in afternoon
sunlight. The first scenes will cover ground several kilometers (a few
miles) across. Successive images will close in and cover a smaller area
each second.

The full-color video will likely spin, then shake, as the Mars Science
Laboratory mission’s parachute, then its rocket-powered backpack, slow
the rover’s descent. The left-front wheel will pop into view when
Curiosity extends its mobility and landing gear.

The spacecraft’s own shadow, unnoticeable at first, will grow in size
and slide westward across the ground. The shadow and rover will meet at
a place that, in the final moments, becomes the only patch of ground
visible, about the size of a bath towel and underneath the rover.

Dust kicked up by the rocket engines during landing may swirl as the
video ends and Curiosity’s surface mission can begin.

All of this, recorded at about four frames per second and close to 1,600
by 1,200 pixels per frame, will be stored safely into the Mars Descent
Imager’s own flash memory during the landing. But the camera’s principal
investigator, Michael Malin of Malin Space Science Systems, San Diego,
and everyone else will need to be patient. Curiosity will be about 250
million kilometers (about 150 million miles) from Earth at that point.
It will send images and other data to Earth via relay by one or two Mars
orbiters, so the daily data volume will be limited by the amount of time
the orbiters are overhead each day.

“We will get it down in stages,” said Malin. “First we’ll have
thumbnails of the descent images, with only a few frames at full scale.”

Subsequent downlinks will deliver additional frames, selected based on
what the thumbnail versions show. The early images will begin to fulfill
this instrument’s scientific functions. “I am really looking forward to
seeing this movie. We have been preparing for it a long time,” Malin
said. The lower-resolution version from thumbnail images will be
comparable to a YouTube video in image quality. The high-definition
version will not be available until the full set of images can be
transmitted to Earth, which could take weeks, or even months, sharing
priority with data from other instruments.”

Image 2. Curiosity. Retrieved July 27, 2010 from
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-245

The Mars Descent Imager will provide the Mars Science Laboratory team
with information about the landing site and its surroundings. This will
aid interpretation of the rover’s ground-level views and planning of
initial drives. Hundreds of the images taken by the camera will show
features smaller than what can be discerned in images taken from orbit.

“Each of the 10 science instruments on the rover has a role in making
the mission successful,” said John Grotzinger of the California
Institute of Technology in Pasadena, chief scientist for the Mars
Science Laboratory. “This one will give us a sense of the terrain around
the landing site and may show us things we want to study. Information
from these images will go into our initial decisions about where the
rover will go.”

The nested set of images from higher altitude to ground level will
enable pinpointing Curiosity’s location even before an orbiter can
photograph the rover on the surface.

Malin said, “Within the first day or so, we’ll know where we are and
what’s near us. MARDI doesn’t do much for six-month planning — we’ll
use orbital data for that — but it will be important for six-day and
16-day planning.”

In addition, combining information from the descent images with
information from the spacecraft’s motion sensors will enable calculating
wind speeds affecting the spacecraft on its way down, an important
atmospheric science measurement. The descent data will later serve in
designing and testing future landing systems for Mars that could add
more control for hazard avoidance.

After landing, the Mars Descent Imager will offer the capability to
obtain detailed images of ground beneath the rover, for precise tracking
of its movements or for geologic mapping. The science team will decide
whether or not to use that capability. Each day of operations on Mars
will require choices about how to budget power, data and time.

Last month, spacecraft engineers and technicians re-installed the Mars
Descent Imager onto Curiosity for what is expected to be the final time,
as part of assembly and testing of the rover and other parts of the Mars
Science Laboratory flight system at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
Pasadena, Calif. Besides the rover itself, the flight system includes
the cruise stage for operations between Earth and Mars, and the descent
stage for getting the rover from the top of the Martian atmosphere
safely to the ground.

Malin Space Science Systems delivered the Mars Descent Imager in 2008,
when NASA was planning a 2009 launch for the mission. This camera shares
many design features, including identical electronic detectors, with two
other science instruments the same company is providing for Curiosity:
the Mast Camera and the Mars Hand Lens Imager. The company also provided
descent imagers for NASA’s Mars Polar Lander, launched in 1999, and
Phoenix Mars Lander, launched in 2007. However, the former craft was
lost just before landing and the latter did not use its descent imager
due to concern about the spacecraft’s data-handling capabilities during
crucial moments just before landing.

Guy Webster 818-354-6278
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
Guy.webster@jpl.nasa.gov

Magnificent shot. Creation of a solar system seen first-hand. See article at http://uanews.org/node/32352.

“By coupling both Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea in Hawaii with a specifically engineered instrument named ASTRA (ASTrometric and phase-Referenced Astronomy), Eisner and his colleagues were able to peer deeply into protoplanetary disks – swirling clouds of gas and dust that feed the growing star in its center and eventually coalesce into planets and asteroids to form a solar system” (Stolte,2010).