Amateur Astronomers Group

11/02/2024

Copying over from our sister site.

The Sun Today (2 Nov 2024)

The Sun is at solar maximum and is dominated by two large sunspots in its northern hemisphere, AR3878 and AR3879. The Sun has 11 numbered active regions facing the Earth today.

Today (2 Nov) both are quiet, but AR3878 spewed out a blast of plasma resulting in an X.2 flare on 31 Oct. A Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) did not result from the blast. The pulse of extreme ultraviolet ionized the Earth's upper atmosphere resulting in a shortwave radio blackout (below 25 MHz) over the Pacific Ocean.

The Sun is generating a few minor M-class flares today producing a few shortwave blackouts in the Indian Ocean basin. Earth's magnetic field is relatively quiet today (so far).

Image captured from Alamogordo, NM on 2 Nov 2024 at 11:02 MT (1702 UT) using my trusty Astro Tech 102mm f7 refractor, Lunt B1200 calcium-k filter (393.5 nm) and ZWO ASI174MM camera. Approximately 200 images were captured and I used the bext 75% to create the final photo.

10/14/2024

my first attempt at Comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS

Comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS over Alamogordo

Comet C/2023 A3 reached its perihelion — the closest it gets to the Sun — on Sept. 27 (0.391 AU) and came closest to Earth on 12 Oct 2024, passing about 44 million miles (71 million km) or 0.47 AU distant.

C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS) is a comet from the distant Oort cloud discovered by the Purple Mountain Observatory in China on 9 Jan 2023 and independently found by the ATLAS telescopes in South Africa on 22 Feb 2023. The comet last past Earth some 80,000 years ago on its highly elliptical orbit.

Image captured with a Canon T2i at ISO 800 with a single 25-second exposure (dark applied by the camera) using a 24mm f3.5 lens from South Scenic Ave in Alamogordo on 13 Oct 2024 shortly after sunset.

10/08/2024

A post from our sister site🤓

I went out a few days ago to photograph Comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan–ATLAS but it was already in the glare of the rising morning sun. However all is not lost, I pulled this image from the ESA/NASA SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) today (8 Oct 2024).

The Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph (LASCO) instrument on SOHO is a prolific comet catcher from its postion at the L1 Lagrangian point. Operating since 1995, SOHO has imaged over 5,000 comets rounding the Sun.

C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS) is a comet from the Oort cloud discovered by the Purple Mountain Observatory in China on 9 Jan 2023. It will begin to appear in our evening sky after sunset in mid-October. Tsuchinshan–ATLAS is expected to make its closest approach to Earth on 12 Oct at a distance of 44 million miles (71 million km).

Stay tuned for more updates!

10/01/2024

Sharing a post from our sister site. 🤔This finally appears to be the real deal.

One of the sun’s closest neighbors, Barnard’s star (5.96 light years distant), appears to have at least one planet orbiting it, as well as another three possible planets that need further confirmation.

Using an instrument called ESPRESSO on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile, the newly found exoplanet completes an orbit in just over three Earth days. This also means its surface is way too hot for liquid water or life, with a temperature of around 125°C (257°F).

Barnard's Star is a small red dwarf star and can be found in the constellation Ophiuchus, however it is too dim (mag +9.5) to see with the naked eye. Its stellar mass is about 16% of the Sun's, and it has 19% of the Sun's diameter.

This isn't the first time that a planet has been supposedly spotted around Barnard's Star. Being so close to Earth, it has been a frequent target of exoplanet searches for over a century and has a long history of false positive planet detections (most recently in 2018).

09/22/2024

Jupiter from Alamogordo, NM on the morning of 22 Sep 2024 using my 180mm Maksutov at f15 (2700mm) and ZWO ASI224MC camera.

09/17/2024

Tonight's (17 Sep 2024) partial lunar eclipse will turn the moon a murky red-brown color when Earth's shadow crosses the lunar surface. For Alamogordo, the eclipse will begin at 8:44 PM MT and extend through 10:47 PM MT.

In this partial lunar eclipse, only 3.5% of the moon's visible surface will be covered by the darkest part of Earth's shadow, creating the appearance of a hazy "bite" taken out of the lunar surface. The shadow will darken the side of the moon facing Earth.

This partial lunar eclipse is extra special as it also falls during a "supermoon", the second of four supermoons in a row for 2024. The Moon will reside some 222,122 miles (357, 471 km) from the Earth.

08/26/2024

Researchers using Georgia State University’s (GSU) Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy (CHARA) Array have identified new details about the size and appearance of Polaris, also known as The North Star. The most remarkable finding was the large bright and dark spots on the star’s surface.

Polaris is a kind of star known as a classical Cepheid variable where its true brightness depends on its period of pulsation - brighter stars pulsate slower than fainter stars. According to Gaia data, Polaris lies some 448 light-years from Earth.

Using the CHARA optical interferometric array of six telescopes at Mount Wilson observatory, California, the GSU team's investigation was to map the orbit of the close, faint companion that orbits Polaris every 30 years. The MIRC-X camera provided the first glimpse of what the surface of a Cepheid variable looks like. CHARA images revealed large bright and dark spots on the surface of Polaris that changed over time. Ahh, additional research is forthcoming.!

The team successfully tracked the orbit of the close companion (called α UMi Ab) and measured changes in the size of the Cepheid as it pulsated. The orbital motion showed that Polaris has a mass five times larger than that of the sun. The images of Polaris also showed that it has a diameter 46 times the size of the sun.

The National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory (NOIRLab) deserves a shout-out as well. The new observations of Polaris were made and recorded as part of the open access program at the CHARA Array, where astronomers from around the world can apply for time through NOIRLab!

If your interested, The Astrophysical Journal published the new peer-reviewed research on August 20, 2024. Here's the link, https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ad5e7a

08/20/2024

There are two types of (astronomical) Blue Moons - but neither has anything to do with color.

A seasonal Blue Moon is the traditional definition of a Blue Moon and refers to the third full moon in a season that has four full moons.

The second definition is the monthly Blue Moon, referring to the second full moon in a single calendar month.

The Blue Moon that will occur tonite (19 Aug 2024) will fit the first definition and will also be a supermoon - being slightly bigger in our sky. .

07/23/2024

Look east before midnight on July 23 and 24 to see a waning gibbous moon close to the ringed planet.

07/16/2024

Who doesn't like these amazing JWST pictures?

These galaxies, collectively known as Arp 142, are informally named the Penguin Galaxy, although to me it looks more like a hummingbird. Webb’s observations, which combine near- and mid-infrared light from Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) and MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument), respectively, clearly show that they are joined by a thin haze (represented in blue) that is a mix of stars and gas, a result of their cosmic dance.

Per NASA, Their ongoing interaction was set in motion between 25 and 75 million years ago when the Penguin (individually cataloged as NGC 2936) and the Egg (NGC 2937) completed their first pass.

At a distance of about 23 million light-years, these two galaxies are roughly 10 times farther away than our nearest major galactic neighbor - Andromeda - and well withi nthe range of amateur telescopes.

07/04/2024

On these hot summer days you really don't want to be out in the New Mexico daytime taking images of the Sun. This was done with a tiny Astro-Tech AT60ED, Lunt B1200 CaK filter, ZWO ASI290MM on a Skywatcher. Whole setup takes less than 5 minute to setup, align and capture images!.

With the summer sun high in the sky, I set up my portable solar setup to capture this Calcium-K (Cak) image yesterday (1 Jul 2024).

While we are still approaching solar maximum perhaps later this year, these sunspots have relatively stable magnetic fields and pose little threat for strong solar flares.

Image captured from Alamogordo, NM on 1 July 2024 (1850 UT) using my AT60ED f6 refractor, Lunt B1200 CaK filter (393.4 nm) and ZWO ASI290MM camera on a Skywatcher SolarQuest mount.

06/21/2024

The full moon of June occurs tonight (21 June). The June full moon is known as the Strawberry Moon because it's appearance in the sky meant strawberries were likely ripe or soon to be ripe. An added treat tonight will see the Moon closely passing the bright reddish star Antares, however those located in a swath of the Pacific Ocean (i.e. Fiji) will see the moon pass in front of the star, which is the brightest in the constellation Scorpius, the Scorpion.

In case you didn't notice, summer officially arrived in the Northern Hemisphere yesterday (20 June, 4:51 p.m. ET) , the earliest start to the season in over two centuries.🤓 Summer solstice is the day with the longest period of daylight and shortest night of the year (in the northern hemisphere), when the Sun is at its highest position in the sky.

Image of the Moon captured from Alamogordo, NM on 27 May 2024 using my Takahashi refractor and new ZWO ASI585MC-Pro camera.

05/30/2024

Here is an image I posted on our sister site of the Coalsack Nebula.

Here is another astrophoto from my southern skies program- this time of the Coalsack Nebula region against a rich Milky Way starfield. Bright blue star Acrux (the 13th brightest star in the night sky) is at the top of the image. To the naked eye Acrux appears as a single star, but it is actually a multiple star system containing six components.

The first observation of the Coalsack was reported by the Spanish navigator and explorer Vicente Yáñez Pinzón in 1499 while exploring the South America coast, however it was recognized by ancient cultures far earlier.

The Coalsack Nebula covers nearly 7° by 5° and extends into the neighboring constellations Centaurus and Musca and is one of the best known dark nebulae in the night sky, The dark cloud of cold gas and dust lies at a distance of 600 light years from Earth and is about 30 to 35 light years across.

This image was captured back on 12 Dec 2023 from Namibia, Africa using an ASA H8 f/2.9 Hyperbolic telescope and Moravian C3-61000 camera. Total integration time was 20 minutes (5 min each RGB and Lum).

05/19/2024

Members of the Amateur Astronomers Group doing public outreach in the community!

If you look at the Moon through a telescope, you can see that it is covered by impact craters of all sizes. Students, teachers and parents from Mountain View Middle School in Alamogordo had an opportunity to view our celestial neighbor up close on 15 May 2024.

In this image we are looking towards the lunar south pole with Clavius crater (right center) the most prominent feature. Measuring some 144 miles across, it is one of the larger craters on the nearside of the Moon and resides in the heavily cratered lunar highlands. The floor of Clavius forms a convex plain that is marked by some other interesting crater impacts and a remnant of a central peak (massif).

The lunar highlands consist of silicate rocks called anorthosites that are common on Earth. They are made of relatively low-density rock that solidified on the cooling Moon like slag floating on the top of a smelter. Because they formed so early in lunar history, between 4.1 and 4.4 billion years ago, the highlands are also extremely heavily cratered, bearing the scars of all those billions of years of impacts by interplanetary debris.

Other notable nearby craters include Blancanus, Klaproth and Morteus to the south. The craters Rutherfurd and Porter lie entirely within the rim of Clavius.

Image captured from Alamogordo, NM on 18 May 2024 using my 6-inch Schmitt Cassegrain telescope and ZWO ASI290MM monochrome camera with a Baader 685 nm near-infrared filter. Images were stacked with Autostakket3.1 and wavelets applied using Registax 6.

05/11/2024

Published on our sister site🤓👨‍🔬👩‍🔬

05/05/2024

I posted my image of Active Region 3663 over on our sister site, but I also wanted to show AR3664 in the southern hemisphere on the Sun. While AR3663 is currently firing off X and M-class flares, AR3664 is no slouch either. Its about 2.5 Earth diameters in size but is developing a delta-class magnetic field, so it may start exploding soon as well.

Image captured from Alamogordo, NM on 5 May 2024 (1400 MDT) using my Coronado SolarMax II hydrogen alpha telescope operated at f17.6 and ZWO ASI174MM camera.

04/24/2024

Look to the east shortly after sunset to see the full Pink Moon of 2024 rise above the horizon. The next few nights is an opportunity to focus solely on the Moon. That's because the full moon's brightness will make spotting other cosmic targets quite difficult when they are in the sky.

The name of April's Full Pink Moon is believed to come a pink flower known as the ground phlox, which commonly blooms in North America around this time. Other names for the celestial event include the Sprouting Grass Moon, Egg Moon and Fish Moon.

Moon image captured from Alamogordo, NM on 16 Sep 2021 using my tiny AT60ED f6 telescope and Atik 420C color camera.

04/08/2024

While Alamogordo, NM was not in the path of totality, and the weather was not cooperating🌥 for good imaging in the morning, the skies cleared shortly after maximum coverage. I was able to capture this Calcium-K image (393.4 nm) showing Active Region 3628 emerging from behind the Moon at 13:13:46 MDT using my Astro Tech 60ED f6 refractor🔭, Lunt B1200 CaK module and ZWO ASI174MM camera.

There was a large prominence on the limb of the Sun visible in my hydrogen-alpha telescope but I was not configured to capture that image.💥

We hope everyone had a great time hanging out with the Amateur Astronomers Group solar party🎉 at the NM Museum of Space History event.

03/28/2024

Super huge active region 3615 is rotating out of view in the Calcium-K (393.4 nm) image of the Sun taken yesterday (27 Mar 2024) from Alamogordo, NM using my 80mm Celestron Onyx f6.25 refractor and ZWO ASI290MM camera. The sunspot has been producing multiple flares that have impacted shortwave communications here on Earth.

03/19/2024

Aonther southern hemisphere gem, NGC 3576 (also known as "The Statue of Liberty Nebula") is a bright emission nebula in the Sagittarius arm of the galaxy a few thousand light-years away in the constellation of Carina. It is approximately 100 light years across and 9,000 light-years away from Earth. It was discovered by John Frederick William Herschel on 16 March 1834.

The southern Sagittarius arm of the galaxy is rich in star clusters, emission and dark nebulas that cannot be seen from viewers in the northern hemisphere. I have undertaken a personal southern sky imaging program to capture some of these images. This image was captured on 13 Jul 2021 from Namibia, Africa using an ASA H8 f/2.9 Hyperbolic telescope and Moravian C3-61000 camera. Total integration time was 20 minutes

03/13/2024

The James Webb Space Telescope has blown us away AGAIN!😍

This is an image of NGC 604, a star forming region not in our galaxy, but in our neighboring Triangulum galaxy (M33) some 2.73 million light years away! The nebula is HUGE, about 1,500 light-years wide. To put this into perspective, if you put the Orion Nebula next to it- you'd have a hard time even finding it. Our Orion Nebula is about 25 light-years across- NGC 604 is so big it would actually stretch from Earth to the Orion Nebula, with lots of room to spare.

Sheltered among NGC 604’s dusty envelopes of gas are more than 200 of the hottest. (baddest☺️), most massive kinds of stars, all in the early stages of their lives. These types of stars are B-types and O-types, the latter of which can be more than 100 times the mass of our own Sun. It’s quite rare to find this concentration of them in the nearby universe. In fact, there’s no similar region within our own Milky Way galaxy.😮

02/18/2024

47 Tucanae (also designated as NGC 104 and Caldwell 106) is a globular cluster located in the southern hemisphere constellation Tucana. It is about 15,000 light years away from Earth and measures some 120 light years in diameter!

Due to its far southern location only 18 degrees from the southern celestial pole, it wasn't cataloged by European astronomers until the 1750s, when the cluster was first identified by Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille from South Africa. 47 Tuc is the second brightest globular cluster after Omega Centauri, and telescopically reveals about ten thousand stars, many appearing within a small dense central core. The cluster may even be hiding an intermediate-mass black hole.

This image was captured using an ASA H8 f/2.9 Hyperbolic telescope and a Moravian C3-61000 camera from Namibia Africa as part of my southern hemisphere observing program. Another down many more objects to go!

10/31/2023

A pumpkin colored Sun just in time for Halloween🎃

When I image the Sun, its done in monochrome, and during processing I colorize it - who likes a black & white image?- but also to highlight subtle differences in the chromosphere.

This Sun☀️ image was taken today (31 Oct 2023 10:37 AM MDT) from Alamogordo, NM using a Coronado 90mm SolarMax II hydrogen-alpha telescope and ZWO ASI 174MM camera. Active Region 3474 is seen in the lower center of the image and several snake-like filaments are seen across the solar disc. When this week began, sunspot AR3474 didn't exist. Now it is 50,000 km wide with 2 dark cores bigger than Earth.

The current solar cycle 25 is declining more quickly than forecast and the Sun may reach the peak of its current activity cycle in late 2024, one year ahead of official predictions. Recent updated predictions indicate the Sun will reach about 185 monthly sunspots during its maximum and thus be somewhat milder than what was originally forecasted.

10/27/2023

10/15/2023

Our view of the partial annular eclipse. We partnered with the New Mexico Museum of Space History and hosted thousands of visitors.