Of Telescopes, Astronomers, and Comets

I repeatly wonder why I practice photography - especially astrophotography. It requires lots of equipment, time and effort. On Friday I had an engineering run on the 2.3 Meter Bok telescope on Kitt Peak. The moon was nearly full and didn't set until nearly 1.5 hours before morning twilight - leaving precious little time under dark skies. Knowing I was going to finish working on the BOk Telescope long before sunrise, I decided to bring my trusty Takahashi Astrograph and mount and attempt to photograph the early morning comet - 45P Honda-Mrkos-Pajdusakova. This periodic comet made a close pass to Earth earlier this year but was poorly placed for northern hemisphere observers. Now close to the sun in the early morning sky - photographing it was going to be a challenge. Though it is sporting a modest tail, it is buried in the morning zodical light and only achieves 12 degrees above the horizon before the onset of morning twilight. To make matters worse - from Kitt Peak I would have to shoot through the heavy glow of the city lights of Tucson. Sigh.

After finishing my duties with the 2.3 Meter Beast - I returned to the dorm around midnight and setup my mount and scope in the parking lot favored by a good eastern horizon and shielded from the wind by low trees.

At about 2:30am as the moon was about to set I decided to attempt a few minutes of imaging on the old standby - M42 - the Orion Nebula. Yeah - I know - everybody shoots this thing - its like a flower for the terrestrial photographer - pedestrian, but pretty. After about an hour of fighting a bad USB extension cable for the autoguider I finally was able to get about 30 minutes of integration with the 5D II on the neb - here is the result.

At 4:15 the comet was supposedly about 5 degrees above the eastern horizon. Not visible with the naked eye (and not having my binoculars) I was forced to search for it using the autoguider. My mount is not a "Goto" model and I had to fall back on my skills I learned as a lowly amateur and star hop to the expected location. After about 5 minutes I found a fuzzy "star" in the guider that was near the predicted postition. Without the luxury of time to decide on whether or not this was the comet - I started taking 1 minute long subframes of the field. 40 minutes later, twilight stopped further efforts on the comet. After inspecting the images - indeed the comet was there - though buried in the fog of the city and zodical glow. After processing - 40+ images revealed the object below.

After a few hours of shut-eye in the dorm I wandered back to the 2.3 Meter dome and finished working on a couple of hardware issues with the spare control system computer. This evening was the annual Tohono O' odham visit to their sacred mountain. All the Observatories were open to the public and the o'odham nation for inspection. The Tucson Amateur Astronomers association (TAAA) were on hand to show visitors views of the moon and celestial objects through various small telescopes (small compared to the monsters that permanently inhabit the mountain). My friends Dean and Melinda Ketelsen are members of the TAAA as well as docents for Kitt Peak. Seeing a note on FB from Mel that they planned on being on the mountain - I made the trek across the hill to where the TAAA had setup teles. It was good to see a couple of fellow astro-nuts and chat briefly with them before having to return to tour duty at the 2.3 Meter. Here are a couple of snaps of the K's setup near the 0.9 Meter that evening.

More off the Top

Some more images from the top of Mt. Lemmon. Closed out the "Making Every Pixel Count" seminar with a group shot. To all my new astroimaging friends . . .

Full Impluse Power restored.

Thursday night, the 23rd of October, under pristine clear skies and no moon, the VATT telescope came back on-line for the first time since the major network and computer upgrade that took place this summer. Astronomers gave the ship a full shakedown, and after a few minor leaks were plugged - science is being done once again on the good ship VATT.

Much thanks goes to the VATT engineering crew - Ned Franz, Chris Johnson, Gary Gray and Ken Duffek. Warp engines should be back on-line next week!

A different view of the Universe

Well - back up at Kitt Peak again running the 2.3 meter telescope for the astronomers. Took the opportunity to make some quick and dirty images of the environs during the night and a couple of "portraits" of the astronomers working. Above is Andrew Cenko from USNO. He and his team were there to test out a new laser based spectrograph - you see him here in the 2nd floor lab were he kept watch on the laser's tuning.



Another couple of images from my last romp at Kitt Peak - above an environmental portrait of astronomer Dr. Bob McMillan at work beneath the 2.3 meter Bok telescope. I combined a short 2 second exposure of Dr. McMillan with a 30 second exposure of the telescope which was illuminated by the LCD display in front of the astronomer and a flashlight which I used to "paint" the telescope's structure with light during the long expsosure.

Below is a rectalinearized fisheye view of the 2.3 meter telescope dome and the full moon. The image displays a full 180 degree panorama of the telescope and sky. Photo details: Canon EOS 5D | 15 second exposure | ISO 800 | f/4.5 | Sigma 8mm.