smithplanet.com » Astrophotography

Double Iridium Flare

Jared Smith — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 15:28:36 +0000

Iridium class communication satellites have large solar panels, which can occasionally reflect bright sunlight onto your location. Very rarely, you can see two of these satellites pass over in close succession to one another. Such an occurrence is captured here.

The blurry looking ‘star’ just below and to the right of the flares is actually the Andromeda Galaxy – the most distant (2.5 million light years) object visible to the naked eye.

2 minute exposure, Nikon D70, 18mm at f/8.

Jupiter… and friend

Jared Smith — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 21:07:53 +0000

Last night, in preparation for tonight’s astrophotography presentation, I set up the telescope for the first time in… well, way too long. The Perseid meteor show is peaking and I saw around 30 bright meteors. When I turned the telescope to Jupiter, I noticed the Great Red Spot moving across Jupiter’s surface. While the GRS can be seen 3 times per day, I had never seen it with my bear eyes. I quickly attached my CCD camera and captured some video. Jupiter is pretty low in the sky at this latitude, so the video was pretty fuzzy, but after processing it looked… alright. Nothing to write home about, but you can tell it’s Jupiter and can see the GRS.

After processing, I noticed the ‘dot’ above the top red band. I checked some software and realized that it is Ganymede, the largest of Jupiter’s 63 moons. Ganymede is about 1/3 the size of Earth and is bigger than the planet Mercury. This photo gives you some perspective of the size of massive Jupiter – 318 times bigger than Earth.

Southeastern Sky

Jared Smith — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 04:48:21 +0000

I photographed two very cool, yet very different things in my southeastern sky this week. The first is a double rainbow from a very mean, fast approaching storm. The brightest rainbow is caused by the sunlight from the setting sun reflecting off rain drops. The second, double arc is caused by a double reflection of sunlight inside those rain drops. Notice that the colors of the outer rainbow are inverted (purple on top and red on bottom)? The storm knocked out our power and it remained out for 6 or 7 hours.

The second image is of the International Space Station and the Space Shuttle Endeavour racing across the sky and setting over my neighbor’s roof. The brightest streak on the left is the space station with two Russian cosmonauts and one U.S. astronaut on board and the dimmer streak on the right is the space shuttle with 7 people on board. The space shuttle had undocked from the space station a day or so earlier and landed the next morning. Both are moving about 17,500 miles per hour or 5 miles per second and are 211 miles up.

The shorter streaks of light in the image are stars. They appear streaked because the Earth rotated a small amount during the 30 second or so exposure.

Milky Way

Jared Smith — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 17:50:07 +0000

It’s been a crazy summer and I have had few chances to get the telescope out. The night before last was a nice night and the Perseid meteor shower was just picking up, so I took the time to go out and observe for a while and take the picture below. This photo of the Milky Way covers about 80% of the distance from horizon to horizon. This image is looking outward across the disk of the galaxy we live in. The bright portions at the bottom are looking toward the center of our galaxy, where the majority of the stars are at. The other ‘glowing’ regions throughout are the residual glow of billions of stars throughout our galaxy. The dark areas are where dust is blocking the light from the stars behind. The small, red, glowing areas are mostly nebulae.

View a larger image with labels

The Brightest in the Sky

Jared Smith — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 00:51:25 +0000

I haven’t taken any astrophotos in way too long. But tonight I got out for a few minutes to capture some of the brightest objects in the heavens. Today, the brightest objects in the sky at my location were:
1. The Sun (duh!)
2. The Moon
3. An Iridium Flare
4. Venus
5. The International Space Station docked with Space Shuttle Atlantis

I photographed #5, #4, and #2 tonight.

Here you see the International Space Station and the Space Shuttle Atlantis careening across the sky at almost 18,000 miles per hour. It’s a bit hard to believe, but 10 people are currently living in that bright light that makes its way around the Earth every 48 minutes.

What is it that is lighting up the dark portion of the moon? No, it’s not my neighbor’s very bright street lamp. Instead, it is the reflection of sunlight off of the earth and onto the Moon. The sun had set just a few hours before, so the moon is almost directly between the sun and Earth, allowing it to catch a lot of the reflected sunlight. The bright ‘star’ in the upper left is the planet Venus.

You can see a bit more in the Earth/Moon section of my Astrophotography Gallery.

M101 – The Pinwheel Galaxy

Jared Smith — Mon, 26 Jun 2006 22:24:10 +0000

Two clear nights in a row! This is the Pinwheel Galaxy, a face on spiral galaxy located near the handle star of the Big Dipper. It’s a very dim object that needs much more exposure to capture more fine details, but it was nice to bag another of my Messier list items.

M8 – The Lagoon Nebula

Jared Smith — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 18:05:28 +0000

I got out last night with the telescope for the first time in a few months. It was nice to spend some time under the stars without freezing to death. It was a rather frustrating night – nothing seemed to go right and I fought equipment all night long, but did get a good shot of the Lagoon Nebula.

More details in my Astrophotography Gallery.

M51 – The Whirlpool Galaxy

Jared Smith — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 01:12:00 +0000

After a LONG winter, I was finally able to get out with the telescope and get some imaging in. Here’s M51, The Whirlpool Galaxy. As you can see, it’s actually two galaxies colliding. Eventually the smaller one will merge with the larger, spiral galaxy. M51 is located about 37 million light years away and is very near the end handle star of the Big Dipper.

Many more details are available in my Astrophotography Gallery