Eclipse of April 2024—Recorded by NOAA Weather Satellites

On eclipse day, I was exhausted from a long trip, so I stayed in Houston and went to work.  The whole area was clouded out.  However, live feeds of the event and NOAA satellite data were quite the show! Three cheers for NOAA satellites! Here's what I saw over Texas, the US, and Earth. Note that the center of the shadow, the umbra, is darker than the borders, the penumbra.

 

 

 

M81 & M82 (May 2023)

 

This is a data set from OMI Astro.  It's 11.4 hours of R-Ha/G/B.  This is actually one of my favorite parts of the sky.  These two galaxies are very bright.  In my 10", they look like a whirlpool and a wave, about of equal size.  I can almost squeeze them in the same field of view with the eyepieces I use.  It's quite a sight to come across these very bright objects.  In the telescope view, they have no color at all because they are so dim, even though they are about as bright as galaxies appear at the eyepiece.  Leave it to the camera to pick up colors. OMI collected the data with a Takahashi TOA 150.  I was hoping to work with data collected with a refractor, and that's a good one.

Busy Sun (2-27-2024)

 

This is 1/4000th of a second with the Canon T3i through the SW80ED with 0.85x flattener/reducer. We are near the peak of the solar cycle.  The big spot upper right is numbered 3590 by those who count.

Eta Carinae Nebula from 2022

 Eta Carinae is the bright star near the center of the frame.  The star formed from this cloud and then (with several other type O and B stars not quite so bright but also extremely hot) lit up the cloud from within.  Eta Carinae itself is unstable and increased sharply in brightness in 1837 before dimming back down.  It's been a constant object of study for astronomers ever since, as is the nebula surrounding it.  Unfortunately, the nebula is too far south for me to see in Texas, so this data came from Martin Pugh Observatories.

Annular Eclipse (Oct. 14, 2023)

 

Here is my take on the annular eclipse. I tried to set up near the center line in Beeville or George West (both Texas towns) but met clouds. With time running out, I drove north and bet on Kenedy, TX's Joe Gulley Park---and then for 40 minutes shot through every break in the (still present) clouds. It was pretty exciting.  These are various exposures through the SWED80 and 0.85x reducer-flattener and my old Canon T3i.  Oddly, perhaps, I am most pleased by the clarity of the sunspot in the second image.  I had very little time to focus and was happy to see that detail.

Sol (July 31, 2023)

I am thinking of the upcoming eclipses.  This is 1/4000, a single frame, with a Canon T3i and a SW80ED, processed in DPP and PS.

NGC 1555, Hind's Variable Nebula (data from 2021)

 

I've wanted to collect on this target for a long time.  It's actually positioned over my latitude, but it can't be shot from the suburbs easily.  I tried to shoot this once and only collected the brightest part of the nebula in a noisy and grainy stack.  So someone else whose telescope is in the southwest Utah desert collected this data, and this is my rendition.

This is 100 minutes of Lum combined with 50 minutes each of RGB from Starbase's ATEO-1 telescope, a 16" f/3.7 Dream Aerospace Systems reflector.