Monthly Archives: November 2024

Post-Solar-Swing Comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan ATLAS 

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Comet C/2023 Tsuchinshan ATLAS looped around the sun on September 27, 2024 and started on its path back towards the outer solar system.  For a few days, it was not visible because it was too close to the sun.  But it was predicted to become visible again around October 11, and it would be the closest to the Earth on October 12, 2024. 

We were in Dell City at the time and staked out a sunset viewing spot with a long view to the west. 

We made our first attempt to see the comet on October 10, 2024.  The comet should have been barely above the horizon at sunset, and unless it was truly extraordinary, we were unlikely to be able to see it.  We were treated to a lovely sunset, but we could not spot the comet.  I had told myself this was a dry run, so I wasn’t too disappointed.  And, when we returned back to our B&B, we were treated to a rare viewing of the northern lights from Texas.

We made a second attempt to see the comet on October 11, 2024.  The comet was supposed to be higher above the horizon at sunset than the day before.  There were low clouds in the sky.  We saw a lot of “fake comets” – bright airplane contrails.  Eventually my husband found the comet with his binoculars – success!  I started taking pictures, but I hadn’t used the right settings, and when I discovered that later, I suspected that the data would not be usable.  I was right – I can see a moving smudge in the images, but it’s not good enough for PixInsight to comet align the images (and there aren’t enough stars in the images for it to star align them).

We made a third attempt – third time is the charm! – on October 12, 2024.  The comet was supposed to be more than 10 degrees above the horizon at sunset, and it had been the closest it would be to the Earth, 0.47239 AU or 70668538.14 km, just nine hours earlier.  This time there weren’t any clouds.  And this time we could easily find the comet and see that it had a huge tail!  Given my experience the night before, I made sure I was using good camera settings, and I could see the comet and its tail in single images.

I used PixInsight to stack 50 images (8.3 minutes of data) to make this final image – my first post-solar-swing image of C2023 A3.  Isn’t it beautiful?

Today, on this day of Thanksgiving, I am most thankful for my family and friends, near and far.  But I’m also thankful for all the wonder to be found in this universe we live in, and particularly for this comet.  Happy Thanksgiving!

Camera geek info:

  • Canon EOS 60D in manual mode, 4 second exposures, ISO 800
  • Canon EF 85 mm f/1.8 lens at f/11 manual focus at infinity
  • Intervalometer
  • Tripod
  • Dell City, Texas Bortle 2-3 dark skies

Frames:

  • October 12, 2024 
    • 50 10 second lights 
    • 31 0.01 second flats
    • 31 0.01 second flat darks
    • 30 10 second darks

Processing geek info:

  • PixInsight
  • BlurXterminator
  • NoiseXterminator
  • StarXterminator
  • NormalizedScaleGradient

Comet Hunting Tailgate Party: C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan ATLAS from Dell City, Texas

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Our last visit to Dell City, Texas ended with a fun event: going comet hunting with new friends. 

I knew from comet hunting with my husband the previous evening that C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS would be visible in the early evening sky.  But this time, I wanted to image it over the Cornudas Mountains to the west of town.  I also wanted to have a view over the flat fields to the mountains and the sky above – which I could find by driving just a few blocks north of the center of town.

I invited some new local friends to join us, and they came in a pickup truck loaded with lawn chairs.  It was a comet tailgate party!

We had a great time visiting while we watched the sky as Venus appeared, followed by some bright stars, followed by the comet.  We could see it naked eye!  We could even see the comet’s tail naked eye!  It was pretty impressive.

It’s taken me over a month to learn how to and successfully process these pictures.  Each picture used one set of images for the comet, stars, sky, and foreground/mountains, but each part was processed separately.  The earlier pink picture where the comet is higher in the sky was made from 120 4 second shots (8 minutes of data).  The later orange picture where the comet is lower in the sky was made from 75 10 second shots (12.5 minutes of data).

One of the things I tried to do while processing was to make sure that all the fuzz around the comet and the anti-tail were real and not processing artifacts.  You can use the sliders below to compare the final images with the comet-only portion to see that, if anything, the final images show less fuzz than what was in the data.  (The comet-only data was calibrated, blur exterminated, star exterminated, comet-aligned, stacked, dynamic background extracted, and stretched.)

Comet C/2023 A3 4 second Comet Only and Final images
Comet C/2023 A3 10 second Comet Only and Final images

This event is high on my list of “coolest astro things I’ve seen.”  And I’m glad I had such a great group of folks to share it with.

What cool things have you shared with friends recently?

Camera geek info:

  • Canon EOS 60D in manual mode, 4 second and 10 second exposures, ISO 800
  • Canon EF 85 mm f/1.8 lens at f/8, manual focus at infinity
  • Intervalometer
  • Tripod
  • Dell City, Texas Bortle 2-3 dark skies

Frames:

  • October 13, 2024 
    • 120 4 second lights for pink image with higher comet
    • 75 10 second lights for orange image with lower comet
    • 30 0.01 second flats
    • 30 0.01 second flat darks
    • 30 4 second darks
    • 30 10 second darks

Processing geek info:

  • PixInsight
  • BlurXterminator
  • NoiseXterminator
  • StarXterminator
  • NormalizedScaleGradient

Comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan ATLAS with M5

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Comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan ATLAS put on quite a show after it rounded the sun and passed by the Earth on its way likely out of our solar system.  With an orbital eccentricity greater than 1, its orbit appears to be hyperbolic, meaning it’s not coming back unless something perturbs its orbit.

In this picture, you can see the comet’s bright nucleus and coma, its long dust tail, and its anti-tail, but not a separate ion tail.

When comets travel close to the sun, solar radiation heats up the comet nucleus, and it outgasses. Outgassing delivers both gas and dust to the region around the nucleus, forming a coma, a (temporary) atmosphere around the comet.  The solar radiation and solar wind act on this coma to push the gas and dust away from the sun to form a tail.  Three separate tails can be visible: the ion tail, the dust tail, and the anti-tail. The ion tail, also called the gas tail or type I tail, is the tail formed by the ionized gasses pushed away from the comet, and it points away from the sun.  The dust tail, also called the type II tail, is the tail formed by the dust pushed away from the comet, and it stays more in the comet’s orbit and appears to curve away from the gas tail.  The anti-tail consists of the larger dust particles that were not pushed as much and remained in the comet’s orbit.  The anti-tail appears to point towards the sun, and it is only visible when the Earth passes through the comet’s orbital plane near the time when the comet passed by the sun.  Because of these special conditions to see the anti-tail, it is not observed with most comets.

Another item visible in the image is M5, a globular cluster in our galaxy.  It is the large bright “star” to the right of the comet nucleus.  Because this image was taken with an 85 mm lens, and M5 was sorted to the “stars” image in my processing, it just appears to be a large bright star.  I suspect with some additional processing, I could have made it look fuzzier, though there aren’t a lot of pixels at this scale.  The Messier objects are “fuzzy” objects that comet-hunter Charles Messier made a list of because they weren’t comets – so it’s fun to see one next to a comet.  M5 is 24,500 light years away from Earth and has an angular size of 23 arc-minutes, making it about 165 light years across.  It’s thought to be one of our galaxy’s older globular clusters, at 13 billion years old.

Processing this image was tricky for several reasons: 1) it was made from images taken with a camera on a tripod, so the sky was moving in each frame, 2) the comet was moving relative to the sky, and 3) the images were taken at dusk, when the sky gradient is also changing in every image.  I benefited greatly from following the methods and advice in Adam Block’s Comet Academy.  One additional trick I used was to run BlurXterminator in correction only mode on all the registered images as my first step since the 4 second tripod images had visible star trails. 

Getting to this image has taken almost a month of watching videos, learning new tools, and trying various tool combinations and settings.  Some of these steps had to be run on each individual image – all 233 of them – meaning some processing steps took many hours.  After all that work, I am happy with the results.

I started with this image because I thought it would be the easiest of my set of C2023A3 comet images to process … the other images are from darker skies in terms of light pollution but closer to dusk and include a foreground.  But the comet was brighter!  I’m really looking forward to processing them and sharing the result!  Hopefully they won’t take a month each to process!

Camera geek info:

  • Canon EOS 60D in manual mode, 4 second exposures, ISO 1600
  • Canon EF 85 mm f/1.8 lens, manual focus at infinity
  • Intervalometer
  • Tripod
  • Pearland, Texas Bortle 7-8 dark skies

Frames:

  • October 15, 2024
    • 233 4 second lights
    • 30 0.0025 second flats
    • 30 0.0025 second darks

Processing geek info:

  • PixInsight
  • BlurXterminator
  • NoiseXterminator
  • StarXterminator
  • StarNet2
  • NormalizedScaleGradient

M31 Andromeda Galaxy Astrophotography Learning Curve

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The first object that I got a satisfactory image of with my tracking mount and telescope and DSLR was M31, the Andromeda Galaxy, from the dark skies of Dell City, Texas in October 2022.  My first image, above, was a 3 minute long exposure.  I was so excited to have a good image that I took a picture of my camera’s viewfinder to send the picture to people.  

When I came home to Friendswood, Texas, I did some experiments to see if I could get the same results.  It was not a surprise when the answer was “no” – my home skies are much more light polluted – I expected to get a completely white screen and was surprised when I could still see a hint of the galaxy.

I started to learn how to use PixInsight, a powerhouse astrophotography processing tool, in the winter of 2022.  I learned enough to be able to stack 18 3 minute images to make my Christmas card photo and the picture I am still using as my computer background at work.

I’ve learned a more about astrophotography processing since then, most notably adding Russ Croman’s excellent BlurXterminator, NoiseXterminator, and StarXterminator tools to my toolbox and learning a ton from Adam Block’s videos.  So I reprocessed the data above using my current knowledge and toolset.

Finally, in October 2024, we were back in Dell City, and I collected new M31 data using an astrocamera and red, blue, green and hydrogen-alpha filters.  I had to learn more in order to be able to merge the Ha data into the RGB data.  Luckily, there are Adam Block’s videos!  One new trick I had to use was “continuum subtraction” – removing the background red from the stars from the Ha data.  

Sometimes, when other things aren’t working out (comet processing), it’s good to step back and see how far you’ve come. I’ve learned a lot over two years … and I’m looking forward to learning a lot more!

What are you learning about?

Celebrating 100 years of understanding galaxies with M31, the Andromeda Galaxy

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When we travel to the fabulous dark skies of Dell City, Texas, I try to pick a combination of challenging targets and targets that I’m confident I’ll get good results with.  In October, one of my picks for the “good result” target was M31, the Andromeda Galaxy.

It seemed fitting to image the Andromeda Galaxy now because we are approaching the 100 year anniversary of Dr. Edwin Hubble’s November 23, 1924 New York Times article confirming that some objects classified as nebulae were, in fact, “island universes” – galaxies separate from our own.  Hubble used the Cephid variable stars in the Andromeda Galaxy and in M33 to measure the distance to those two galaxies and determine that they had to be outside of our own galaxy – on the order of 1 million light years away.  Based on that distance and its apparent size, Hubble calculated that the Andromeda Galaxy’s diameter was 45,000 light years.

100 years later, the Andromeda Galaxy is known to be 2.56 million light years away.  Its apparent size is 3.167 degrees by 1 degree, giving it a diameter of 141,000 light years.  So even further and even bigger than Hubble calculated!

It is amazing to me that we’ve only understood that there were other galaxies for 100 years!  And I think it is cool that we keep learning more and more about the universe around us.

This image of the Andromeda Galaxy was captured using red, green, blue and hydrogen-alpha filters. Although Ha actually is in the red part of the spectrum, it is frequently mapped to purple-pink so it stands out, and I have used that mapping here.  These Ha regions are star-forming nebula in the Andromeda Galaxy, similar to our own Orion nebula and Eagle Nebula. 

So while Hubble proved that Andromeda was a galaxy and not a nebula … it also contains its own nebulae. And we can see them!  How amazing is that?

Camera geek info:

  • Williams Optics Zenith Star 73 III APO telescope
  • Williams Optics Flat 73A
  • ZWO 2” Electronic Filter Wheel
  • Antila RGBH filters
  • ZWO ASI183MM-Pro-Mono camera
  • ZWO ASiair Plus
  • iOptron CEM40
  • Dell City, Texas Bortle 2-3 dark skies

Frames:

  • October 8, 2024
    • 196 60 second Gain 150 Ha lights
    • 30 0.5 second Gain 150 Ha flats
    • 168 60 second Gain 150 R lights
    • 30 0.05 second Gain 150 R flats
    • 174 60 second Gain 150 G lights
    • 30 0.02 second Gain 150 G flats
    • 173 60 second Gain 150 B lights
    • 30 0.02 second Gain 150 B flats
    • 30 0.02 second darks
    • 30 0.05 second darks
    • 30 0.5 second darks
    • 30 60 second darks

Processing geek info:

  • PixInsight
  • BlurXterminator
  • NoiseXterminator
  • StarXTerminator
  • NBColourMapper