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.

Here’s a wide field shot of M100, the galaxy in the center of the picture. There are several other galaxies in this picture. Can you see them?

I had to head out to the West Coast this week for some business development meetings.

It was a pretty productive week…

Lots of finds are being made out in Wisconsin. At least ten have been reported so far and I’m sure there are more that haven’t been announced yet. This fireball event is a meteorite hunters dream come true. Everything worked out as perfectly as one could want: multiple cameras from different sides of the track captured direct sightings of the fireball, 1000s of witnesses saw it, three radar returns spanning more than 25 miles were captured. The radar returns alone told hunters exactly where to go and that is the main reason why meteorites were recovered 22 hours after the fall. For fun I plotted the track based on the radar data and two videos. For the videos I used the US Bank video from Milwaukee and the police dash cam video from the Howard County Sheriff.

Here are two pictures of the doppler radar data:

And here’s a close up:

For the videos, the first thing you have to do is figure out where they were taken from. I knew one video had the Milwaukee US Bank building in it. Using 3d buildings in google earth I was able to determine with a pretty good approximation where the first camera was. I then used the 3d buildings to line up the shot to determine the azimuth readings. Here’s a view of downtown Milwaukee where I think the camera was located.

For the second camera I don’t know the exact location so I just picked a random place. Using these three data sets and my interpretation of the witness reports I have plotted the ground track for the Wisconsin Meteor. This is certainly not exact, but I think it might be pretty close.

There are meteorites in and around the town of Milfin Wisconsin. Mike Farmer thinks there are thousands of them.

Here’s a picture of Bode’s Galaxy and the Cigar Galaxy. Some scientists believe these galaxies are close enough to each other that the gravity from M81 (the one of the left)  deformed its neighbor causing star formation to increase by 10 times. The galaxies look pretty close to each other but are actually separated by 130,000 light-years.

Here’s a closeup of the galaxy pair.

Here’s a map of the fireball observations reported to the The American Meteor Society. Over 150 people reported their sighting to the AMS. Thousands of reports have also been submitted to facebook and twitter.  Considering there were very nice radar returns and excellent video coverage and that multiple stones (i’ve heard 3) have already been found, the witness reports are far less important than in other falls. Its still interesting to see all of the reports plotted and how far this thing could be seen.

I’ve uploaded the Google Earth KMZ file for the AMS reports for the Wisconsin Meteor. To get this file to work you have to have Google Earth downloaded and installed on your computer. Once Google Earth is installed, simply download the link and it should automatically load up in Google Earth.

A 131 gram Wisconsin Meteorite was recently found by Mike Farmer. Congrats Mike!

http://www.rocksfromspace.org/Farmer_Meteorite_Hunter.html

The first meteorite from the Wisconsin Fireball was recovered less than 24 hours from the time of the fall. Check out the story on Universe Today.

No its not the BMW M5, its Messier’s M5. M5 is one of the larger globular star clusters in our galaxy. Its about 24,000 light years away from earth and thought to hold 100,000 to 500,000 stars.

Hundreds of reports of a fireball in the sky above Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Illinois are flooding news and police stations, blogs and social networking sites. A few videos have already been posted online:

Awesome Video of Iowa Fireball

Web Cam Fireball Capture

Traffic Camera

Information is still poring in on this one. It looks like there is already a lot of data and witnesses which makes the initial meteorite recovery outlook pretty good.

Here are a few news stories

http://addins.kwwl.com/blogs/weather/archives/8863
http://blogs.woodtv.com/2010/04/14/gigantic-meteor/
http://bit.ly/9YE7WS
http://ow.ly/1yFHQ

I’d guess there will be some meteorite hunters flying out to Iowa tomorrow.

Here’s a photo of M44 an open cluster in the constellation Cancer. To the naked eye the Beehive Cluster looks like a nebula in the middle of the constellation.

This picture was taken with a William Optics FLT 98 Refractor and a Canon 20Da camera.