The Veil Nebula, sometimes called “The Witch’s Broom” is in the constellation Cygnus. Some 5,000 years ago, give or take, a star went supernova and this image is a piece of the remnant. The full circle of the remnant takes up about a three degree circle in the sky equaling a space about six times the diameter of the moon. With instruction manuals, trial and error and plenty of help from experts on amateur forums, I point the observatory telescope to a pre-identified place using sophisticated, automated equipment and capture the sub images. William Herschel, on the other hand, made his own telescope and found the object for the first time in 1784. No digital cameras were involved.
I wonder if she had bangs. The constellation Coma Bernices is named in honor of Berenices II of Egypt, who was the queen of Ptolemy III (246 – 221 BC). The queen vowed to sacrifice her acclaimed amber tresses in the temple of Aphrodite at Zephyrium following the king’s safe return from battle. After her golden locks mysteriously disappeared from the temple, the court astronomer Conon apparently made peace by convincing the royal couple that the lost sacrifice had been transformed by the gods and made into an eternal constellation. Perhaps kings then, like president trumps today, required constant creative handling. Trump might think it handy to have a blowdryer galaxy all his own for his special headdress.
M100 and NGC 4312 are members of the Virgo Cluster of galaxies in constellation Coma Berenices, 50 million light years from earth. M100, also known as the Blowdryer Galaxy, is the upper galaxy seen face on, NGC 4312 is a spiral galaxy seen edge on. There are several other small dwarf galaxies also in the image. Continue reading
I added four new shots to my astrophoto gallery this week. Continue reading
It is new moon early June and the nights are dark but short. Summer solstice is only two weeks off and it does not get dark enough for observing until 10:40 PM. It will start getting light again in just five and half hours. Dark enough for observing is known as astronomical twilight and technically starts when the sun is 18 degrees below the horizon or almost two hours after sunset. Before astronomical twilight comes nautical twilight, defined by the old mariners as when the horizon at sea is still barely discernible. Continue reading
I am able to get close enough to the heavens to take photos of deep sky objects from my driveway on the Colorado Plateau because I am standing on the shoulders of giants. This subtle jewel of a galaxy first picked up it’s nick name in February 1787 when William Herschel wrote in his observing notes, “A very remarkable object, mE. [much elongated], about 12′ long, 4′ or 5′ broad, contains one lucid spot like a star with a small black arch under it, so that it gives one the idea of what is called a black eye, arising from fighting.” Continue reading
“Star gazing is 50 percent vision and 50 percent imagination,” says my favorite astronomer, Chet Raymo. And maybe another 50 percent knowledge. The more you know, the more you can see. On a clear dark night in Salt Lake City, or Chicago, or Boston you can maybe see 50 stars, probably more like 25. The sky is washed out by light pollution and it is the sky most of us see if ever we look up. But we evolved under the stars of pollution free skies and on a clear dark night high on the Colorado Plateau there are still thousands of stars visible. Here the light of the Milky Way can be enough to cast a shadow. All the same, the stars we can see are a tiny fraction of the 100 billion in the galaxy. On nights like these the scene above seems to reach down to shake my sleeping natural soul awake and beg my mind to look up and see, to stand and see with imagination.
My friend and Torrey House author Brooke Williams has been thinking about awe lately. He is intrigued by how we seem to disappear in the wonder of the wild moment. He thinks that in a moment of awe we shift “our focus from our individual selves to the great and potentially powerful collective.” Brooke is intrigued by what psychology professor at University of California, Berkeley, Dachel Kelmet, in his book, Born to Be Good, calls the “pro-social” behavior that is often the result of experiencing awe. Brooke and I have been comparing notes about consciousness and our awareness of beauty, connection and self-awareness of our awareness, what Brooke calls “Homo sapiens sapiens” (they who know they know), for quite a while. You can see his blog on awe here.
I tell Brooke I have a growing sense that consciousness is probably an element in the Cosmos, something like time and space are. It is consciousness in quantum mechanics that “collapses the probability wave function” and brings a mere thought into material being. I am not the only one who supposes that consciousness is the elemental source. If it is, when we are in the most beautiful and wild places our whole evolved being is called to greater attention. Our realization of something beautiful is telling us we are looking at truth and AWE is the feeling of the connection to that universal consciousness, the source of all being. I think about this often and wonder. Starry nights like we had lately are a good thinking and experiencing catalyst.
And just in case I need a hint from above, there it is . Two fantastic nebulae about 7500 light years away in Cassiopeia are called the Heart and the Soul. Here is my cropped capture of a two by two mosaic. The conditions on the first night out were exquisite. It was cool, utterly clear, moonless and calm. It felt like I should be able to reach up and manipulate the constellations or scoop of a handful of stars to pocket and give to my kids. Kristen would think that was a cool wedding present. The second night had high clouds, not all that thin, but the photons made it to my telescope anyway.
These nebula are emission nebula where the red areas are glowing gas with dark dust bands interspersed. The gas glows from the radiation of the clusters of hot stars in the nebulae centers. In fact, in the center of the Heart nebula are, according to Wikipedia, two stars locked in orbit, accounting for the unique shape of the Nebula. The stars are doomed to fuse together and explode into a supernova in 700 million years. According to researchers, this discovery, reported in Nature in February 2015, was the first confirmation that giant white dwarf binaries exist, and the first record of a system with such a fate.
I posted more on the technical aspects of this capture, including the full un-cropped mosaic, on my astrobin site here.