The Sun and the Moon in Motion and Jupiter too!

 This fall I have been on a sabbatical from my teaching and focusing on lots and lots of backyard astronomy. 

One of my early observing goals was to capture the Sun every day for an extended period to show its rotation. I was able to image it every day for 17 consecutive days - from August 20th through September 5th. I then aligned the images to produce this animation showing the Sun's rotation:

Another interesting way to look at this is to add the images together, which produces this:

This nicely shows that sunspots occur in parallel stripes on either side of the Sun's equator.

I have also been able to shoot the Moon on consecutive nights to show its changing phases and the effect of lunar libration (a kind of tilting and rocking). Here's how the Moon looked from October 7th through the 15th, as it went from a waxing crescent to nearly full:

You should be able to see that the Moon looks to be somewhat growing in size - not just the amount illuminated by the Sun, but larger. This is because the Moon's orbit is not a perfect circle and over the nights I shot these the Moon was moving towards Earth.

And then after a few nights of clouds I was able to capture the Moon again from October 18th through the 27th, showing it moving through its waning phases:

Again, I think you can also see here that the Moon appears to be getting smaller. That was because it was moving away from Earth in its orbit.

I don't usually have the opportunity to stay up late (or get up early) enough to shoot the waning phases, so this was a treat.

I had another stretch of clear nights again in November and I was able to capture the Moon from November 6th through the 14th as it moved from a waxing crescent to full.

Finally, here's Jupiter and its moon Europa as they looked the night of December 14th.

This is about an hour and 20 minutes of motion showing Jupiter's Great Red Spot rotating out of view to the right, along with other cloud features in Jupiter's atmosphere. Europa is the spot of light to the left of Jupiter.

April 8th's 'Smart' Total Solar Eclipse

This post comes about three months later than it should but, as they say, better late than never. I had an amazing trip to Hamilton, Texas to witness the total solar eclipse. I did my best to both capture the eclipse and to travel light. The photo is me with my Unistellar Odyssey Pro telescope and a DSLR camera at left.

 

 

The Odyssey Pro is Unistellar's newest 'smart' telescope. It's a small lightweight telescope, with a primary mirror just  3 1/3", but it takes super images. Last fall Unistellar improved their software to make solar observing much better but this was going to be the first time anyone had tried using a 'smart' telescope for observing a total solar eclipse. So how did it do? 

All-in-all, it did pretty well. 

Thankfully, during the first half of the eclipse the weather was mostly cloudless. The telescope had no trouble finding, focusing (it has auto focus) and tracking on the Sun. But as the eclipse progressed and the Sun began to take on more of a crescent appearance the tracking wasn't very good and I had to manually correct the tracking to keep the Sun in view. 

My biggest concern was totality. How would the telescope and its software handle seeing the Sun when the Sun didn't look like it normally does? Would the exposures be okay? Color was a big concern too. As I have mentioned before the color that the Unistellar telescopes and app give when imaging the Sun is artificial. The telescope's sensor sees farther into the infrared than our eyes do and that adds extra red to the image making the uncorrected image look sort of lavender in color. The app changes the color pallet to give the Sun a more pleasing yellow color. How would it look during totality?

Yellow. Very yellow.

Thankfully, this yellow color cast was easy to correct in Photoshop and I was able to get images like the two below. 

Visually, the eclipse was amazing. Ethereal, even. The large red prominence seen at the bottom of the image above was very easy to see with unaided eyes and the corona was fantastic. 

There was no way for the Odyssey telescope to capture much of the Sun's corona as its field-of-view is far too small. That's why I brought my DSLR. 

I have now seen two total solar eclipses and I don't really feel that any image can adequately capture the beauty of the corona, but I am happy with this image.

After totality, I was so euphoric that it was difficult to remember to keep taking images of the Sun to complete the time-lapse sequence I was shooting, but then the clouds rolled in and it no longer mattered. Still, I was happy to get the entire first half of the eclipse plus totality and that's all that mattered. 

I would rate the experience as a total success. Using a 'smart' telescope allowed me to travel with far less gear than most people who photographed the eclipse and I am happy with my results. The next total tolar eclipse isn't until 2026 and I am sure that by then the technology will be even better.

Disco Sunspots!

 Back in October I posted about using a disco ball to observe a solar eclipse. It turns out that you can also use a disco ball to safely observe sunspots too. Here's how I did so earlier today.

Really all you need is a disco ball, a place to secure it in the sunlight and a shadowed area to project the image of the Sun. Here I have my disco ball sitting on a tripod for a Unistellar telescope. I aligned the disco ball so that it reflected an image of the Sun into my house and nearly 70 feet down a dark hallway on to a sheet of white paper. Here's the result:

It's not a great image, but you should notice a definite gray smudge-like area on the projected image of the Sun. That's a big sunspot that is visible on the Sun today. I also imaged the Sun with a Unistellar Odyssey Pro telescope and solar filter. I got this image which I rotated to match the orientation of the projected image above.

As you can see, that's the same sunspot group in both images. This is another confirmation that a disco ball is an excellent tool for safely observing the Sun.