Starship Asterisk*

Jupiter, Mars, and the Moon together in the sky this morning just before dawn. (Mercury and Saturn were visible, as well, but outside this frame.)
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Chris Peterson wrote: ↑Wed Mar 18, 2020 4:32 pm Jupiter, Mars, and the Moon together in the sky this morning just before dawn. (Mercury and Saturn were visible, as well, but outside this frame.)
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Thank you for your great pictures, Chris. I have so enjoyed your "Moon over mountain range" images.

Ann

Ann wrote: ↑Thu Mar 19, 2020 7:45 am

Chris Peterson wrote: ↑Wed Mar 18, 2020 4:32 pm Jupiter, Mars, and the Moon together in the sky this morning just before dawn. (Mercury and Saturn were visible, as well, but outside this frame.)

Thank you for your great pictures, Chris. I have so enjoyed your "Moon over mountain range" images.

Thanks! Being as that's the view off my deck, I usually check the exact rising time and location of the Moon at and shortly before being full, so I can be prepared with a camera. I never know what I'll get- it's always different.

I've been following C/2019 Y4 the last week or so. Shot a long sequence that I stitched into a video, as well as a 30 minute exposure tracking on the comet itself.
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Thanks, Chris, very interesting!

The comet does not appear to grow any brighter.

Ann

This week I started shooting the Flying bat and the squid. It's so faint you probably can't get enough data so why not star earl. Clear skies!

Ann wrote: ↑Wed Apr 01, 2020 5:23 am Thanks, Chris, very interesting!

The comet does not appear to grow any brighter.

It's getting brighter, and could become a naked eye object in the next month or two.

I might try for color. This comet has a lovely green coma, but color (when made through separate filters) is always a bit of a challenge with a moving object.

Supermoon rising over Cripple Creek. Mt Pisgah just to the right of the Moon, and the gold mining operation at the far right.
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The Easter bunny!

Fred the Cat wrote: ↑Sun Apr 12, 2020 5:13 pm IMG_9401.JPG
The Easter bunny! :ssmile:

I see a baby lying on its back barfing into the air.

Chris Peterson wrote: ↑Sun Apr 12, 2020 5:20 pm

Fred the Cat wrote: ↑Sun Apr 12, 2020 5:13 pm IMG_9401.JPG
The Easter bunny!

I see a baby lying on its back barfing into the air.

That would be the result of eating bunny eggs.

Good seeing (well, for central Colorado- 2 arcsec) a couple of nights ago. Can definitely see lots of debris in the comet's tail near what's left of the nucleus, which itself looks cleanly split in two.
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Has anyone had any luck finding C/2020 F8, SWAN? I have read that it will reach its closest point in late May. It sounds like it will be very low in the horizon from where I am, and of course it is rarely better than partly cloudy (if not raining) this time of year in the Pacific NW.

Saw the ISS make a 10-minute pass right across the zenith, and then drop down and cross in front of the full Moon, still in sunlight. In this image, the ISS has a blue tint (it is just crossing the Moon's limb, at the top). I wonder if it's picking up the Earth's ozone layer, just seconds before it drops into Earth's shadow?

I also posted a short video sequence at https://www.cloudbait.com/20200604_iss-moon.php . Kind of interesting to see the ISS lit up brighter than the Moon as it passes in front of it. I'm used to seeing it as a silhouette during transits.
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Chris Peterson wrote: ↑Fri Jun 05, 2020 5:19 am Saw the ISS make a 10-minute pass right across the zenith, and then drop down and cross in front of the full Moon, still in sunlight. In this image, the ISS has a blue tint (it is just crossing the Moon's limb, at the top). I wonder if it's picking up the Earth's ozone layer, just seconds before it drops into Earth's shadow?

I also posted a short video sequence at https://www.cloudbait.com/20200604_iss-moon.php . Kind of interesting to see the ISS lit up brighter than the Moon as it passes in front of it. I'm used to seeing it as a silhouette during transits.
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You are magnitudes better than me at judging the normal appearance of the ISS against the Moon.

(Actually we shouldn't even talk about magnitudes here. A good friend of mine has a brilliant but lazy son, and when he got no more than a passing grade in German, she told him that he had to redouble his efforts. "You can't redouble zero", the smart boy deadpanned.)

So I know nothing about what the ISS should look like when it crosses the Sun. Clearly, of course, if it is brighter than the Moon during a lunar crossing, it has to be lit up by something, either the Earth or the Sun.


















The overall color of the ISS would seem to be yellowish rather than bluish, due to the color of the large solar array wings. But since the limb of the Earth is clearly bluish, it could be that the shininess of the ISS reflects the color of the Earth's limb.

The Moon, by contrast, is both reddish in color and very dark, with an albedo of somewhere between 0.12 and 0.14.

Ann

Ann wrote: ↑Fri Jun 05, 2020 7:20 am

Chris Peterson wrote: ↑Fri Jun 05, 2020 5:19 am Saw the ISS make a 10-minute pass right across the zenith, and then drop down and cross in front of the full Moon, still in sunlight. In this image, the ISS has a blue tint (it is just crossing the Moon's limb, at the top). I wonder if it's picking up the Earth's ozone layer, just seconds before it drops into Earth's shadow?

I also posted a short video sequence at https://www.cloudbait.com/20200604_iss-moon.php . Kind of interesting to see the ISS lit up brighter than the Moon as it passes in front of it. I'm used to seeing it as a silhouette during transits.
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E7_44088.jpg

You are magnitudes better than me at judging the normal appearance of the ISS against the Moon.

This was one of those "well, duh!" moments for me. I've seen so many transit images where the ISS is a silhouette, that's just what I was mindlessly expecting. I had a moment of surprise when I saw the bright dot against the Moon, and then I realized how obvious that should have been. After all, we know that the albedo of the Moon is very low, and of the ISS very high. And both are being lit by the same source.

The overall color of the ISS would seem to be yellowish rather than bluish, due to the color of the large solar array wings. But since the limb of the Earth is clearly bluish, it could be that the shininess of the ISS reflects the color of the Earth's limb.

I've seen the ISS hundreds of times, and it always appears somewhere between white and a warm, unsaturated orange/yellow. Last night it looked white to my eye, against a still blue sky as it wasn't long after sunset. And I didn't see the blue tint visually, only in the photos. First I thought it might be reflecting light from the Earth, but from its vantage the Earth was almost entirely in shadow, and it was receiving orders of magnitude more light from the Sun. But I recall all those lunar eclipse pictures that show blue at the edge of Earth's shadow, from atmospheric ozone. And, of course, from the other direction as in the image you posted. So I do think there's a good chance that's what I caught here.

Noctilucent clouds outside my window tonight!

Ann

A pretty crescent Moon setting in the west just after sunset.
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I was out doing some narrowband imaging last night (because of the bright Moon) and decided to take a quick peak at C/2017 T2 (PANSTARRS), which I've been following on and off for a few months. Fired off a quick shot and - surprise! - it was just sailing past a peculiar pair of interacting galaxies, NGC4490 and NGC4485, neither of which I've looked at before. I managed to get some decent unfiltered shots despite the Moon. This is about an hour on the star field and an hour tracking on the comet. You can see the motion of the comet in the annotated image (which is just the star field stack), but in the other image I processed the two stacks separately and composited them, so neither field was blurred.

Fun to stumble onto these kinds of things from time to time.
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Chris Peterson wrote: ↑Thu Jul 02, 2020 12:08 am I was out doing some narrowband imaging last night (because of the bright Moon) and decided to take a quick peak at C/2017 T2 (PANSTARRS), which I've been following on and off for a few months. Fired off a quick shot and - surprise! - it was just sailing past a peculiar pair of interacting galaxies, NGC4490 and NGC4485, neither of which I've looked at before. I managed to get some decent unfiltered shots despite the Moon. This is about an hour on the star field and an hour tracking on the comet. You can see the motion of the comet in the annotated image (which is just the star field stack), but in the other image I processed the two stacks separately and composited them, so neither field was blurred.

Fun to stumble onto these kinds of things from time to time.
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Nice, but - oh, Chris! You took black and white photos of the two galaxies that were pointed out to me way back when as "two of the bluest galaxies in the night sky".

I just had to post a (saturated) color picture of them that does "more than a good job" of showing off their cerulean hues (interspersed with pink sapphires of emission nebulas among the stunning wealth of blue sapphire stars)!

Ann

Ann wrote: ↑Thu Jul 02, 2020 5:53 am

Chris Peterson wrote: ↑Thu Jul 02, 2020 12:08 am I was out doing some narrowband imaging last night (because of the bright Moon) and decided to take a quick peak at C/2017 T2 (PANSTARRS), which I've been following on and off for a few months. Fired off a quick shot and - surprise! - it was just sailing past a peculiar pair of interacting galaxies, NGC4490 and NGC4485, neither of which I've looked at before. I managed to get some decent unfiltered shots despite the Moon. This is about an hour on the star field and an hour tracking on the comet. You can see the motion of the comet in the annotated image (which is just the star field stack), but in the other image I processed the two stacks separately and composited them, so neither field was blurred.

Fun to stumble onto these kinds of things from time to time.
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panstarrs annotated.jpg

NGC 4490 (bottom) and NGC 4485. They are two very blue galaxies. Photo: Jschulman555.

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Nice, but - oh, Chris! You took black and white photos of the two galaxies that were pointed out to me way back when as "two of the bluest galaxies in the night sky".

I just had to post a (saturated) color picture of them that does "more than a good job" of showing off their cerulean hues (interspersed with pink sapphires of emission nebulas among the stunning wealth of blue sapphire stars)!

Ann

Yeah, it's challenging enough just to get a single channel when you want both the comet and the stars to be unstreaked. Trying to do that with color is beyond the capacity of my scope size. The comet is just moving too fast. Maybe I'll revisit just the galaxies at some point in color. Not now while the Moon is bright, though!

Nice picture of the comet, Chris! And the top black and white picture of the galaxies shows their outlines and brightness distribution really well.

Ann

Lots of fireworks last night and a string of planets but the Earth's shadow across the moon was difficult to detect as it rose.

There has been a massive display of noctilucent clouds over Malmö this night. I got my bike to go down to the waterfront to get an uncluttered view of the horizon, and on my way I stopped by a nearby school and got what a thought was the best kind of picture I can get with my extremely simple little camera.

When I got down to the waterfront, the noctilucent clouds had partly faded. I didn't find them as impressive any more, but I liked the weirdly angular, dark little foreground clouds that flitted past the luminous clouds in the background like mysterious letters.

On my way back home I saw the full Moon rise from behind a cloud bank with illuminated edges. Almost right above the Moon, quite close to it, was Jupiter. I tried to photograph this magical scene, too, but I won't torture you with the terrible result I got.

Ann

P.S. Those of you with smaller screens than mine, should I edit my post so that it is easier to read? The text looks perfect on my screen, but I really don't know about yours.

If you were unable to read my text because it was too scrunched up between the two pictures, or if you could only read it with difficulty, here is my text again:

Ann's text showed up fine on both my IPAD and IPHONE.

To everyone, has anyone been able to see the new naked eye comet NEOWISE yet?