Lakeshore stargazing
A few weeks back, I wrote about a new telescope I’d bought. I’ve been traveling and skies at my place have been mostly overcast lately, so I didn’t have a chance to do much with it since then. This weekend, though, was dark and mostly clear, so I was able to get it out and point it at some interesting stuff.
The Seestar wants long exposure times to capture the distant galaxies, nebulae and other objects it photographs. That means you need to have an unobstructed view of those objects as the cross the sky over several hours. I’m on a lakeshore with pretty dense trees on the property, but I can set the Seestar in the gravel on the shoreline, above the wave action, and have a clear view through almost 210 degrees of the compass (azimuth), from the northeast through the southwest, and from ten degrees above the horizon through vertical, 90 degrees of altitude. I got me a good-sized sky.
There are lots of good websites for finding stuff to look at and figuring where it will be in the sky at what times. I used Sky Tonight, told it where I am and what time zone I’m in, and told it I liked galaxies, nebulae and planets.
For Saturday night’s session, I settled on IC 4895, Barnard’s Galaxy. It was in the right direction and would be more than 30 degrees above the horizon for a few hours in the darkest part of the night. It’s our near neighbor, and a tiny little thing — only ten million stars or so. Don’t get too excited about “near neighbor,” though. It’s 1.6 million light-years distant. Eukaryotes were just turning into multi-cellular organisms on Earth when the light I photographed left IC 4895. It’s far too remote, small and dim to see with the naked eye.
Here’s what ESO’s wide-field imager in Chile — a pretty spendy telescope! — caught in 2009:
I set up my Seestar to image IC 4895 on Saturday night. At my location, it’d be a bit above 30 degrees in altitude between 11pm and 3am, and visible from the shoreline. I set up the Seestar to image it for the full four hours. The final image used only a bit more than an hour’s worth of observations. Here’s what it got:
There are reasons to be grouchy about that picture. Resolution is much lower than what the pros got. I don’t show nearly as much detail or color. On the other hand: cheap consumer-grade robot telescope I left out on the lakeshore overnight! Able to see distant galaxies!
The next night, I set up the Seestar to image two different globular clusters that were well-positioned in the sky, M10 and M15. These are clusters of stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way. They’re much closer than Barnard’s Galaxy is, only 14,300 and 35,700 light-years away, respectively. I wanted to see how much better the image quality would be than I got of the distant galaxy the night before.
They turned out great!
Down in the lower right corner of each photo, you can see that the images were composed of observations over 21 and 36 minutes. That’s compared to more than an hour of actual imaging time for Barnard’s Galaxy the night before. I set the device up, in each case, to observe for an hour or more. It automatically discards images with cloud cover or other obstructions. I need to read more to figure out why all three of the images were composed over much shorter duration than the plan I specified.
I had designed an observation plan, that night, for both the globular clusters, followed by an observation of Saturn as it cleared the southeastern horizon in the wee hours of the morning.
Alas, the Seestar ran out of battery before that happened. It politely saved all its work before that, though! The forecast for tonight is clear again, so I aim to design an observation plan that gets me some solar system objects.
I’m two thumbs up on the Seestar.
