Mike's Astro Photos

I came across this Bald Eagle’s nest while hunting for meteorites in Lancaster, PA.

As you can see there are two young eagles in the nest along with a momma (i think) keeping watch.

Here’s a close up of one of the parents. I few days prior I saw two adults, but when I took this picture there was only one adult at home.

While I was watching and photographing from about 150 yards away, one of the baby eagles started to fly (or at least tried to).

I captured about 100 pictures of this young eagle jumping all over its nest, trying its hardest to make flight. Best it could do was about a foot off the crest of the nest. I sequenced the frames and made a short time lapse video of this eagle learning to fly.

I came back to the nest about a week later and no one was home, so I guess the young ones figured it out.

A large fireball was reported along the east coast early Monday morning. Observations were reported all along the east coast including: South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvanian, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts. No videos of this great site have yet to be reported. Over 30 AMS reports where submitted and after reviewing the details on these observation it looks like the meteor landed in the Atlantic Ocean. Too bad, it sounded like it had all of the characteristics to be a meteorite dropper.

Here’s a map of the AMS reports along with an estimated meteor path based solely on these reports.

To help understand the image above: Green lines are the first point a witness observed; yellow lines are the second point observed; purple lines are from witnesses who only reported a single point; the red line is the estimated meteor path.

From what I can tell the meteor was headed on a south west to north east path, hugging the coast line.

This meteor path is an estimate based on the AMS reports. I think its safe to say this thing landed in the drink, so there’s not much point in refining the trajectory more than this. If you have a better idea about the path of this meteor lmk.

Here’s a write up on the fireball from Frank Roylance’s Blog. There are a lot of great comments about the event on this site.

Here’s a link to the google earth KMZ file for this fireball.

Coincidentally there was another large fireball reported over Wisconsin within 15 minutes of this one. The WI fireball was a different event all together and most likely not related, but this seems to be an odd and rare occurrence [two big fireballs so close to each other in terms of both distance and time].

I’m a little bummed out I still don’t have my allsky cam setup. I’ve missed two great fireballs since deciding to get an allsky cam setup. I’m on it now.

Here’s a photo of Messier 53, a globular cluster in the Coma Berenices constellation.

Here’s a wide field shot of the galaxy  M88, one of 15 Messier galaxies in Virgo’s cluster of galaxies. Approximately 47 million miles away from Earth, M88 is a spiral galaxy with a highly elliptical orbit. This orbit will lead M88 to the core of the galaxy cluster in another 200-300 million years. There are several other galaxies visible in this picture, including M91 at the top center of the picture.

Here’s a crop of the galaxy at full resolution

Photo Details
William Optics FLT98 / Celestron CGEM Mount
Canon 20Da DSLR Camera
30 minute exposure 19×2 minute
ISO 800
STV Autoguider
No moon, clear

I got a new telephoto camera lens for birding and wild life photography. I thought I would give it a try on the full moon.