CtCameraEye.com

In my job I spend a lot of time on the road covering news events of all types. This week a license plate caught my eye. Because I follow the sun in my astrophotography hobby, this plate held a special interest in it for me.

Duct tape is a polyethylene, reinforced, multi-purpose tape with a soft and flexible shell.

It is alive and well in almost everybodies, basements, garages, and even kitchens. It manages to fix almost anything. Don’t believe me? Here is an image I captured on my ride home yesterday. Yes, it can fix almost anything.

All the stars (and weather conditions) lined up for me this morning as I succeeded in imaging Comet C/2009 R1 McNaught!

I set up this morning in my dark sky location in Colchester, Ct. at about 2:00am. A line of low clouds passed through when I was setting up. When they had left at about 2:30am I went at the task in locating the comet. About 10 minutes later I located it at about 10 degrees above the horizon in the southern part of Perseus. It was much brighter than I though It would be. Through binoculars I managed to make out the Ion tail without a problem. Below is a single two minute exposure of it. I estimate the magnitude of at least 4.9 or better.

This image was taken with a 400mm lens with a Nikon D300 at asa/iso 800.

Here is a wide angle shot of Perseus with a 24mm Lens with the comet at the bottom. Can you pick it out?

It was a nice comet to image and add to my scrapbook. I hope I get one more chance at it before it dissapears!

Clear skies!

Alan

With the weather lately being on the less than ideal side for doing astronomy, it has been quite the opportunity to chase some storms around the area. Over the past several weeks we have been hit with a lot of severe thunderstorms. Thunderstorms bring lightning, and lightning presents a great chance for photographs….if your careful. Here is a shot I took June 11 as it passed over Marlborough, Ct.

Here are some more cloud images that managed to get.

“What an experience! Stargazing with 5000 of your closest friends interested in astronomy in New York City.”

It’s one thing to say you had a chance to do some astronomy in Battery Park, New York City,  but another to say you did it with 100 other telescopes on hand, a tennis court sized James Webb telescope model just feet away, and a host of top shelf participants talking about science and space. Wow! It was a non-stop night of questions from hundreds of people from in and around New York City about telescopes, the stars and planets, and the future of space exploration.

The weather was in the mid 80’s and the humidity was better than 70%, but that did not keep the people away From the City to the Stars, Star Gazing with the Web Telescope. Unfortunately it also did not stop the overcast skies that plagued us throughout the event. We actually saw a brief glimmer of Venus early on in the evening, and a fleeting flash of light in the sky which turned out to be the star Arcturus.

Astronomical Society Of New Haven members, who claimed a patch of ground near a ten foot blow up projection screen showing videos throughout the event were, President Greg Barker and his wife Cheryl, Allan Sacharow, Bob Crelin, and myself.

It was the largest sidewalk/subway/bike path/National Park astronomy get together that I have ever, and probably will ever get to be a part of, never mind having Lady Liberty watching you all the time. Quite the experience!

Here are some questions that people asked me that were…lets say, a little out of the relm of what we are usually asked.

Question 1 - ” Is there really a Milkyway way?  The most I have ever seen is a few bright stars.”

Question 2 - “What kind of telescope should I get to look at planets, and neighboring apartments?”

Question 3 - “Will the sky look any darker if I went to Queens?”

Question 4 - “Will it take longer than a few nights to learn were all the stars are?”

Question 5 - “These telescopes are all pretty nice. I have $25,000 to spend. What can I get?”

Here are a couple of pictures I took of the event.

Here is where we all set up our scopes, on the path to the Webb Telescopes.

Jessica Stewart a journalist for scriptphd.com gets the drop on CtCameraEye while doing an interview with Greg Barker, and Alan Sacharow. Thanks for the press exposure Jessica!

At the height of the evenings activites a host of speakers talked to the over flowing crowd. They included Heidi Hammel, a noted planetary scientist, Astronaut John Grunsfield, John Mather, a Nobel Laureate in cosmology, Miles O’Brien a CNN broadcast space news veteran, and Neil deGrasse Tyson, Director of the Hayden Planetarium.

Here is image of the Webb Telescope with observers all around it.

Did you ever observe under these conditions? New York City Astronomers do it all the time!

Neil deGrasse Tyson interacts with the crowd of observers after his speaking engagment.

Hats off the the World Science Festival for hosting this unique oppertunity, and a special thanks to Bob Moore of the Rockland, NY Astronomy Club who sent out an invitiation to participate in the activites.

Alan Chaniewski

Battery park.  This 25 acre park at the tip of Manhattan and at the confluence of the Hudson and East Rivers is being turned into a giant Star Party Friday June 4th, 2010. As part of the World Science Festival and it’s “From the City to the Stars” theme. Being featured, and on location in the park, is a model of the James Webb Space Telescope. Being 80 feet long, 37 feet wide, and almost 40 feet high, it’s a first hand look at the telescope planned to be launched in 2014. It’s all part of the World Science Foundation’s festival this week in New York City.  Here’s an rendering of it from NASA.

The life size model will be available for viewing from June 1-6 in Battery Park.

CtCameraEye and other Astronomical Society of New Haven members we be participating in the Star Party friday night which kicks off at 8:00pm.

If you have a chance to get to NYC Friday night, you will have a once in lifetime star party treat at Battery Park!

I had a little while today to blow the dust off the old solarscope and try to do do a little imaging.

After checking out the sun visually I decided to start doing a sweep of the sun with my Meade Electronic Eyepiece and do a video of the many prominences around it.  Then I switched to my DSLR and shot many frames of the the whole disk and downloading it directly to my laptop. After examining the shots that I got I decided to put a 2x converter on my scope which put it to 1800mm. I managed to pick up a lot more detail because of the unusual steadiness in the atmosphere. Here is a composite image of the top half of the solar disk today.

One last posting about Space Park in Titusville, Florida. We knew we were getting close when we passed these two street signs. I am sure there is a lot more hidden Space Gems throughout Titusville if one had time to explore a little.

After watching the incredible landing of STS-131 last month from Space Park in Titusville, Florida I decided it was certainly worth a blog about the city park dedicated to man’s race into space.

I could go into the history and development of the park throughout the years, but I will leave that to these fine websites to check out.

Official website of Titusville, Florida    Titusville area Community Guide

I will however show you some images of the park that I captured during the two visits I had there last month.

This sign welcomes you to this easy to find park full of history.

The history of Space Flight awaits you by walking around the park looking at all the informational panels on the art work.

Here is the dock area early in the morning before the landing. Merritt Island is just visable on the horizon after the morning fog has lifted. This is were hundreds of people gather to watch liftoffs and landings.

While waiting for STS-131 to land, we were happily surprised with the sighting of a mother Manatee and her baby which stayed around the dock area for about an hour in Space Park. A surprise treat for all of the people waiting for the landing.

I managed to get out on Friday night and take a shot at imaging the ISS again as it flew close (within 100 miles) to my town of Marlborough, Connecticut. Right on time it appeared in the Northwest as a dim reddish star. Getting brighter by the second the ISS brightened to a magnitude of -3.2 as it passed to the south of my location basically passing over New York City.

Here’s what I managed to capture this time. One thing I have learned after trying to capture a nice image of it is, the closer the better! Even a hundred miles or so makes a HUGE difference in the quality of the image.

Tags: International Spae Station