Three Asteroids: Pallas, Vesta, and Ceres

In the April S&T (p49) I saw that Vesta and Ceres were both near opposition tonight.  The last few nights have been spectacularly clear although the sky has been a bit turbulent, so I've been wanting to haul out the 8" and see what I could see.  Tonight was another clear night but storms are predicted for the near future so I thought this had better be it before the moon comes back around for another visit.  Vesta was an old friend as I had spotted it by accident several years ago.  I've also seen Ceres on at least one other occasion, but tonight they were in the same FOV of my 9x50 finder so that was a big plus.  When I consulted my SkySafari Pro iPad app I noticed that (2) Pallas was also in the vicinity so I decided to try for all three in one night.  I wasn't disappointed.  Pallas was already high so I went after it first.  It was conveniently placed just West of Regulus in Leo and easy to find.  At mag 8.2 it was easily visible in my 9x50s.  Nearby Omicron Leonis was even visible unaided which made it even easier to find.  Next I went after my old friend Vesta and her neighbor Ceres.  Both were near bright Mars and easily visible Zeta Virginis in Virgo. Both were nice and bright and easy to see even in my 9x50 finder.  I polished off the night with a glimpse at good old familiar Jupiter (all four moons were easy to spot), and super bright Mars.  I saw two storm bands on Jupiter but have never been able to see any kind of marking on Mars.  Tonight was no exception.
It was a wonderful night to be out though, just warm enough to be comfortable with a cap and sweatshirt, a bit breezy but not bad, and very very dark.

Total Lunar Eclipse April 2014

Talk about a long dry spell.  This was a very bad year for astronomy in the valley.  It was cloudy nearly every Saturday when I was able to do outreach in the park!  One Saturday was possibly ok but we were on our way back from Padre Island running late so I called that one off.  We are back in Missouri now and the weather finally cooperated very well for a change.  It has been miserable wet and overcast the past several days but last night it cleared off perfectly by 9:00 or so and was just right (although quite cold) for the big total eclipse of the moon of the year.  I grabbed a couple hours of shuteye and set the alarm for 12:30.
At 00:52 (according to WWV) Spica was just to right (sw) of the Moon about 1.5 moon widths, not visible unaided but visible in 7x50 binocs. At 00:56 the partial has started on eastern limb. At 01:39 the moon was half lit and spica barely visible unaided. At 01:56 spica was clearly visible, moon looking reddish. At 02:31 the moon was fairly dark. It was hard to see features with either my 8" dob or 7x50s. I saw mars and saturn which were both nice. I had not seen either in quite awhile. Jupiter had set.  I took no timings. Temp was about 27F no wind.
From the images I took, Spica is much brighter than the full eclipse. Spica is magnitude 1.0. Spica appears in most of my pictures, but not in IMG_0950 which was shot at 1:46:40 according to the camera clock which is about 1min fast. This was just after midpoint of partial.  Midpoint of partial was my first shot at 1:36:57 by the camera. My last partial was shot at 2:01:40, first total shot was at 2:10:35.

Bloodmoon and Spica

The picture on the right shows the moon at total eclipse just after the beginning of totality at 02:14 CDT from my backyard observatory in Rolla Missouri. It was shot with a Canon Powershot SX150 IS on a tripod with self timer. Exposure time was 1/2s at f/5.6 60mm focal length ISO 80. Spica is clearly visible at lower right and appears to be illuminating the Moon!
I quit shortly after this picture was taken as it was just too darn cold. It was nice while it lasted though and the stars were brighter than I had seen them in a long time with the full moon out of the way.  My 'sign' (scorpius) was rising in the east and good old familiar Corvus was hanging low in the south. Ursa major was high overhead.

Sunspot AR1944

It was clear today so I hauled out the scope to checkout the buzz about sunspot activity. I got it all set up and aligned and found the sun without problem. The sun almost fills the 10mm eyepiece FOV and I was able to spot AR1944 pretty quickly. As the sun moved in and out of some high mr's tail clouds i was able to pick out 3 more groups: AR1946, 1948, and 1949. The AR numbers are assigned by Noaa sequentially per year to Active Regions (AR). Comparison with photos at spaceweather.com was very good. There was only one ar that I could not see. AR1944 is several times the size of Earth. The largest spot in it is twice Earth's size.

Six Constellations

Last Christmas I purchased a new camera to replace my old Sony that died suddenly.  This one was a low cost Canon SX150 point and shoot but had manual settings which I wanted.  I've been trying to take night sky photos without a great deal of luck.  Last Wednesday 30 Oct 2013 I teamed up with El Caballero (an Austrian guy living in Guatamala) to watch the ISS pass over.  We were both on the same ground track and managed to log an ISS waypoint from our adventure.  We also got pretty good pictures of the pass.
Tonight I decided to try to get some decent star pictures with my newfound knowlege of the SX150.  It worked out pretty well and the picture is included here.  If you look carefully at the photo you should be able to see at least parts of six constellations.  Delphinius (lower right) the Dolphin and Equuleus are both entirely visible along with most of Pegasus, parts of Andromeda, Cygnus, and Lacerta.  The latter is a very dim constellation and I could only make out Alpha Lacerta a magnitude 4.6 star.  Stars brighter than that are easier to see.  The foliage at the bottom (facing south) is the top of my grapefruit tree which catches street light (ugh).  By the way, the grapefruit is looking very good this year after lots of rain this summer.  The settings on my camera are included in the photo properties but are: 15s exposure, f/3.4, ISO400 taken 11/2/2013 at 20:54 CDT.  I put the camera on a 2sec self timer, clicked the shutter, and laid it down lens up on a small stool.  I'm pleased with the results! The field is about 40°x40°.

Neptune and a tale of two asteroids

We got home from our squaredance workshop in St. Louis last night about midnight so early this morning about 1:00 I hauled out the 8" to show Judy what Neptune looked like.  It was easy to find out east of Capricorn and made a pretty blue sight.  Before quitting for the night I swung around to the Andromeda Galaxy.  It was visible unaided, a ghostly smudge above Andromeda's two familiar arcs of stars north of Pegasus' square.  It took a bit of gymnastics and rolling around on the deck to get the scope pointed but what a sight it was.  I was able to easily see all three Messier objects: huge M31, medium size M32, and tiny little M110.  M31 didn't all fit into my 25mm's FOV.  It was quite chilly, down into the 50's, so I quit early and went to bed.
Tonight I decided to check out two of the brighter asteroids that are near opposition this month: 7Iris and 324Bamberga.  I had never heard of 324 since it has such a high number and they are usually out of range of my 8" let alone my 7x50s.  It was featured in the September S&T along with Iris so I thought I'd check them both out since they are in the same neighborhood.  Iris was high at 11:00pm and easy to find in Aquarius' arm which lies above Capricorn. It lies just above a line drawn from Beta to Epsilon Aqr.  It was a very dim 8 mag in my 7x50's but easy enough to see with averted vision.  The hard part was determining which mag 8 point was the asteroid and which were stars!  There were several stars nearby but Iris was just below HD202221 in a line of about 5 8th magnitude stars near (7)Iris.
By the time I was finished playing with Iris, the circlet of Pisces was peeking out above the oak tree in back.  That blasted old pin oak is smack in the middle of my eastern sky but the birds like it.  324 was about a third of the way along a line between Gamma and Theta Psc.  It's the only thing nearby so it was easier to pick out than Iris.
Seeing wasn't as good tonight as this morning.  The sky seemed hazy and dim stars were coming and going in the unstable atmosphere.  All in all though, two dim asteroids in binocs in a single night wasn't a bad haul.

Gamma Ophiuchi neighborhood

Another cool, clear night in the Ozarks with no moon.  It was a bit humid and dew was falling but I thought I should take advantage of the night as there won't be too many of them left before we hit the road again and/or the moon comes back out.  I saw Ophiuchus high in the south so I thought I'd revisit Gamma Ophiuchi's neighborhood with the 8" dob.  IC4665 was nice in binocs the other night so I snagged it first after setting up.  Hauling out the dob and assorted paraphernalia is sure harder than grabbing 7x50's and a star chart!  At least it doesn't need alignment.  The open cluster is a bright one that I can just make out unaided resting above Beta Oph.  At first glance it looks like a ring of fairly bright 9 blue stars with a kind of fish hook appendage of 4 more blue stars, and a central star in the ring that goes out when I look right at it.After staring at it for awhile I began to notice that the fish hook closed on itself with two more very dim stars into a kind of tear drop shape with HD161603 at the pointy end of the drop.  Inside the drop were several other very dim stars including a mag 12 GSC-424-0179!  That has to be one of the dimmest stars I've seen.
Emboldened, I next went after Collinder 350, another open cluster in the Gamma Oph neighborhood.  It looked nice in my 25mm ep and I explored some of the dimmer groups of stars.I thought I might have found an asteroid near SAO122777 but after checking another star chart it appears to have been just another star. Finally I went after globular cluster NGC6426.  I wasn't able to verify it for certain but I believe I caught a glimpse of a faint fuzzy where it should have been.  Not bad for a mag 13 surface brightness!  I'll have to go after a brighter globular next time just to satisfy my delight in finding these curious objects.
It eventually got too dewey for good viewing so I decided to quit for the night and feed the coons.

Neptune, Nova, Scutum, etc

Tonight was another great night for observing.  It was muggy but not dewey and quite clear.  After my eyes dark adapted I was able to make out dim Scutum just off the 'beak' of Aquila.  It holds a pretty (and bright) open cluster I hadn't noticed before as well as a Messier object I've seen but didn't really pay a lot of attention to.  After scanning the sky around Scutum, I checked out Nova Del 2013.  It actually looked a bit brighter tonight.  I read earlier at AAVSO that these Novae tend to hang around for awhile and can be surprising.  The little tricycle asterism really helps to spot the Nova.  Next I rolled over and located Capricornus.  It was low and dim off the east wing of Aquila and below Aquarius but I was eventually able to make out its bat-wing shape.  Heading north from Cap I star hopped with my 7x50's over to Neptune.  There it was, very dim but unmistakable.  I'll have to try catching it in my 8" dob tomorrow night when company is here.