Mike's Astro Photos

The full moon on January 30th, 2010 was the biggest and brightest it will be all year according to space.com. The moon travels in an elliptical orbit around the Earth and it is closer at some times than others. About 2 times a year this closeness coincides with a full moon and that’s what happened Saturday night. Despite the extra big full moon I tried doing some meteor photography Sunday night. I actually caught a couple. You can see in this picture the moon is huge. Part of this is due to the 25 second exposure, but even still, that’s a big moon.

Big Moon Meteor - January 31st, 2010

here’s a closeup of just the meteor. I’m surprised it was even visible with the light from the moon.

Big Moon Meteor - January 31st, 2010

Here’s a cropped picture of a sporadic meteor from 4:20 am on January 10th, 2009.

Sporadic Meteor - January 10th, 2009 4:20 AM

Here’s the full picture. The trail on the left is a meteor. The small red line in the bottom center of the picture is a plane.

Sporadic Meteor - January 10th, 2009 4:20 AM

Here’s a sporadic meteor inside the constellation Canis Major (the dog). The bright star to the right is Sirius, the brightest star in the sky.

Sporadic Meteor - January 10th, 2010

Here’s the full picture:

Sporadic Meteor - January 10th, 2010

Here are two sporadic meteors I captured during the Ursids Meteor Shower. These are not Ursid meteors because they to do radiate from the right place in the sky, therefore they are called sporadic meteors. Below is a zoom crop of the first one.

Sporadic Meteor - December 24th, 2009 2:21 AM EST - Zoom Crop

Below is the full image. Ursa Major (The Big Dipper) is clearly in view. This seemed like a good place to photograph based on the location of the radiant.

Sporadic Meteor - December 24th, 2009 2:21 AM EST

After taking 1000+ pictures near the Ursids radiant I gave up and decided to try my luck on the western horizon above the observatory. I’m glad I did because I caught this picture.

Meteor or Iridium Flare - December 24th, 2009 4:24 AM EST

I think this is a meteor but it looks a little bit like an iridium flare. Iridium flares are bright bursts of light caused by the reflection off of a specific type of satellite. Iridium flares have a distinct look that is similar to this image. I checked the calsky.com website for satellites and it did not look like any satellites were in this part of the sky at this time, so I’m not sure if this is a meteor or a flare. Here is a zoom crop of the image that shows a bit more detail:

Meteor or Iridium Flare?

The Ursid’s Meteor Shower peaked on Dec 22, 2009. I set my camera up and pointed it near the radiant and shot continuously for several hours on a couple of different nights. While I caught two sporadic meteors during the sessions, the picture below was the only official Ursid that I captured. I spent some time tracing the meteor back to the radiant and I’m 99% sure this is an Ursid meteor.  Here’s the zoom crop of the image. (Its long but faint, you should be able to see it at the top of the image if you click the picture below.)

Ursid Meteor - December 22nd, 2009 (actually a satellite)

Here is the full image and an annotated version of the full image.

Ursid Meteor - December 22nd, 2009

Ursid Meteor - Annotated

Finally, here is the image roughly plotted in a star chart. By drawing a line along the meteor and back to the radiant, we see the meteor originates at the Ursid’s radiant making it an Ursid meteor.

Ursid Meteor Shower Radiant

If its not too cloudy tonight, I think I will setup my cameras and see if I can catch Santa’s sleigh streaking across the sky.

Update 12/24/2009: I got some feedback on this picture and its looking like its a satellite trail and not a meteor. For its length if it were a meteor there would have to be more shape to it. Thanks Chris!
I also got some suggestions to check calsky.com & heavens-above.com websites as they offer satellite tracking databases that can be used to identify satellites. I checked calsky.com for the exact time from my latitude and longitude and found an entry that was almost at the same exact location as my picture:

Cosmos 1950
(19195 1988-046-A)
Mag= 4.9m Persei
az: 302.2° WNW h: 72.9° dist: 1547.2km
ra: 2:54.3 de: +46:54

Amazing!

Here’s a nice meteor picture. Almost makes up for the one yesterday.

Meteor Over Observatory - December 17th, 2009

I almost cried when I saw this picture on my camera’s LCD a few minutes after it was taken. I was inside while the camera was running and came out to check it. What you see in the top right corner is the tail of a very big fireball. Just this tail is 10x brighter and bigger than every other meteor photo i’ve taken during the last two showers (geminids and leonids). This would have been amazing if I was only two inches further west. DARN!!!!!

Just missed big fireball - December 16th, 2009

A friend sent me this rage guy cartoon. Yes Derek, that’s exactly how I felt. Thanks.

Sunday night was the peak of the Geminid meteor shower and there was no moon, which had many people saying this would be the best meteor shower of the year. Unfortunately in Maryland there was heavy cloud cover. This didn’t stop me from staying up all night and trying to catch something. I was watching the skies from inside and around 4 AM noticed a few breaks in the coverage. I setup my camera on the tripod and programmed a series of 2 minute exposures and photographed continuously until dawn. I was able to catch one faint meteor through the clouds.

Geminid Meteor Shower - December 14th, 2009

The above picture is a zoom crop. Here is the full image:

Geminid Meteor Shower - December 14th, 2009

Sporadic Meteor - Geminid Meteor Shower - December 11th, 2009

Friday night, December 11th 2009 was amazing. There were zero clouds, no moon and lots of meteors and other weird stuff in the sky. You couldn’t have asked for a better night and it will probably be the best of the year as far as viewing conditions and activity go. I had been looking forward to this new moon week since the beginning of the month. Unfortunately based on weather reports it looked like Friday would be the only clear night for the Geminid meteor shower so I planned to put in a full evening.

Earlier in the week I bought a new camera (so I can run two at the same time), a new f/1.6 camera lens and a few new accessories. The plan is to have one camera on the scope photographing DSOs (deep space objects), while the other camera is setup on the tripod trying to get meteors. Everything worked out perfectly, except for a few technical problems that resulted in some bad images. On the scope, I had left my camera ISO on 400, I ended up shooting from 6 PM till 4:30 AM in a low ISO so all of my pics came out pretty dark (darn).

On the tripod, I caught several meteors, but I was still working things out with the new camera and lens and my pics were slightly out of focus (darn again). I always chalk up mistakes like this as good learning experiences, but I’m a little disappointed today after reviewing the pics because they could have been a lot better and I squandered the best viewing night I will have in a few months. Mistakes aside, I shot continuously for 8-10 hours (about 800 pictures) and was able to catch at least 6 meteors, 2 very strange moving objects (maybe satellite flares) and one really weird variable star. I’ll post updates later about the satellite flares and variable stars after I’ve had a chance to research them some. For now here are the best meteor pictures of the night.

Here’s the full picture for the zoom image at the top of this post:

Sporadic Meteor - Geminid Meteor Shower - December 11th, 2009

Here’s a long faint one that stretches across Orion. I tagged the meteor so you can see it easily.

Sporadic Meteor - Geminid Meteor Shower - December 11th, 2009

Here’s a zoom of a short small one,

Geminid Meteor - December 11th, 2009

and the full picture the zoom came from. Note the difference between the way plane trails and meteors look.

Geminid Meteor - December 11th, 2009

Here’s a zoom crop of a sporadic one I think, interesting alignment with the constellation Orion. It should have been going left to right to be considered a Geminid I believe.

Sporadic Meteor - Geminid Meteor Shower - December 11th, 2009

and the full picture of that one.

Sporadic Meteor - Geminid Meteor Shower - December 11th, 2009

Here’s another one I found from Thursday night’s session. It is pretty faint, but smack in the middle of the shot.

Sporadic Meteor - Geminid Meteor Shower - December 10th, 2009

I wish I had one more night with this meteor shower, so I could fix some of the tech glitches that impaired these pics, but the mostly cloudy clouds have already rolled in for tonight and its supposed to rain tomorrow. Oh well, there’s always next year.

Here’s a Geminid meteor picture I took right before the clouds rolled in December 9th, 2009. I haven’t plotted it in a star map yet, but I’m pretty sure the radiant is Gemini. After looking at the weather reports I’m afraid we will miss the peak of the shower here in Maryland due to rain and clouds so I was happy to have a break in the weather tonight and even happier to get lucky and catch another meteor.

Here’s a zoomed crop of the meteor. This was a 2 minute exposure at ISO 800 using a Canon 40D camera.

Geminid Meteor - December 9th, 2009

Here’s the full picture. This was one of the last frames before the clouds came and blocked out the stars.

Geminid Meteor - December 10th, 2009

The star in the center of the picture is Capella. The Pleiades is in the lower right.

A Russian astronomer sent out a notice about a newly discovered nova and requested images of Orion between Nov 16th and Nov 19th. Turns out I have 4 pictures of Orion from Nov 17th and the nova was captured in my images! I will post an update with the Orion Nova picture once I have more info and have been able to successfully identify the nova.

While reviewing my meteor shower pictures I found an image of a faint meteor I had originally missed. I haven’t plotted the picture in a star chart yet, so I’m not sure if this is a sporadic meteor or a Leonid. So it turns out I caught at least 2 meteors during the recent Leonid shower, bringing my total meteor picture count up to three.

Leonid - November 17th, 2009

The above image is a crop out of the big picture. Here’s what the full image looked like.

I setup for the Leonids meteor shower last night and was able to capture a picture of one of the meteors. I focused my camera on Procyon thinking it would be a good spot to catch something. I set the camera to shoot repeatedly and waited. As I waited I stared at Procyon, after a few minutes just like that a bright meteor flew out of the sky, its starting place looked to be exactly at Procyon. I waited for the exposure to finish and then eagerly checked the small camera screen, but I didn’t see anything! I was very upset. I started looking at my camera settings and noticed my focal ratio was way to high — f/5. I dropped it down to f/3 (as low as it can go) and continued to shoot the rest of the night with no results.

This morning I was reviewing my pictures on the computer and I saw my Procyon meteor in all its glory. I was so happy! The streak left by the meteor was too faint to see on the camera screen, but I could clearly see it on the computer. I have ordered a new camera lens that has a f/1.4 ratio which should be much better for future meteor shower pictures.

This is my first ever intentional meteor photo. Not as exciting as the last one, but still pretty good for an amateur like me.

Leonids Meteor - November 17th, 2009 12:30 AM

For reference purposes: I was using a Canon 20D, piggy back mounted on my telescope with ISO 800, f/5 focal ratio and a 60 second exposure.

UPDATE: Robert Lundsford from the American Meteor Society let me know that because of the location of the tail on this meteor, it is considered a sporadic meteor and not a Leonid. I plotted the picture in a star chart to understand what he was saying and I now see what he means. To be a meteor associated with a shower, the meteor has to radiate from a specific central point, in this case Leo. I’m curious to know if sporadic meteor rates increase during a shower though, meaning was this meteor caused from the same dust field that creates the shower, or something totally unrelated.

Here is the star chart plot of the picture. Click to enlarge.