Ring Nebula and Saturn
Short one today, in the spirit of doing science in public. See here and here for prior posts on my consumer-grade astronomy habit.
I put the Seestar out again last night, hoping to get some good shots of Saturn that showed its rings and some of its moons. As usual, I scanned the sky atlas for other interesting stuff to look at, since I had more battery than strictly required for the main mission.
I got a middling shot of Messier 57, the Ring Nebula:
Little bit of color in there; shape is right. You don’t see many exploded stars on their way to being white dwarves in your day-to-day, so kind of cool.
I programmed the Seestar to take several shots of Saturn. The first failed; the planet was too low on the horizon shortly after midnight. The other two succeeded, but the brightness of the planetary disk completely obscures the rings:
This time the Seestar finished its unattended operation overnight with power to spare and shut itself down cleanly after completing the observations I’d planned. Good robot!
I walked out at a bit before 5am to collect the device. Unfortunately I slipped on the dewy hillside on the way down to the shore, which landed me on my ass and sent my phone-as-flashlight hurtling through the air and skittering down the slope. It took me five minutes of crawling around on the ground in the dark to find it, and by then my patience was too thin for the scientific method.
Phone recovered, I assumed that the Seestar would be battery-dead as it had been on prior mornings, so didn’t try to power it up. That was too bad — the moon was at about 8% waning crescent in the ESE, with Venus very nearby. I should have looked at them live through the Seestar and seen if I could get some good pictures of them. It was plenty dark.
Main takeaway from last night’s unsatisfying operation: You have to do solar system observations live so you can use your judgment on image capture. I bet that a very fast capture of Saturn would have been much less washed out, so might have shown some ring structure.
I’m generally not up at 3am, but might plan a night sky photo fest sometime when the planets align (heh!) to see if I can do better with human judgment than the robot telescope does on its own.
