Extreme Fishing

Take a few mussels and the sauce left over from the previous day's moules marinere, add a piece of hot smoked salmon and throw into an earthenware pot along with one or two pre-cooked whelks (eveyone's favourite gastopod). Fry some samphire and mushrooms seasoned with chilli flakes and black pepper and add to the pot.  Roll out some of my friend Mr Morrison's shortcrust pastry and 'clothe' the pie with a pastry crust. Annoint said crust with milk and egg yolk and bake in a hot oven until golden brown.  Add vegetable sides to taste and voila!- a meal fit for St Peter himself - or as my daughter Loulou would say "Fishy wrongness on a plate"!

Adding lustre to your cluster

The Pleiades. Forty minutes of exposure as 8x5 minute subs + darks and flats. 127mm Meade refractor, Altair Astro field flattener and focal reducer , Canon 600D DSLR and QHY5-11 colour guide camera.

I'm really beginning to enjoy guided long exposure astro photography. It is a bit late in the season for imaging the Pleiades. By the time I got around to imaging this young star cluster it was low in the west, so I was fighting both atmospheric extinction and light pollution. Tried to image Jupiter but unfortunately the clouds came a rolling in off the sea at about 11.00pm on the 10th March 2016.  Just managed one brief and blurry video from which I extracted one stacked and sharpened still.

Sad to hear the news today that the progressive rock keyboard player and musician Keith Emerson had died. I can remember one memorable live performance of the 'Nice' in Manchester at a small venue. Both he and I were young in those days. A spirited rendition of 'Rondo' and 'America', complete with knives in the keyboard, jumping over the hammond organ and tickling the ivories backwards. Thanks for the memory Keith!

 

"Go Astro-Fishing" -and you never know what you might catch

A panorama I put together from 3 images (each at ISO6400 and exposed for 30secs) taken with my Canon 600D DSLR with an EOS telephoto lens at f=300mm. all mounted on a polar aligned Star Adventurer equatorial mount.

 This shows an area of the night sky on the border between two Northern Hemisphere Constellations 'Camelopardalis' and 'Perseus'.  At first glance a pretty but unremarkable field of stars. Then I noticed the smudge of  light betraying the presence of my 'old friend and comet C2013 Catalina'. But hang on! what was the separate bit of nebulosity just above and to the right of the comet?

I tried using Astrometry Net to iudentify it, but the search enginne came up blank. I tried my planetarium software,SkyMap Pro9 and it showed no nebulosity in this location. Had  I discovered something new?
No I hadn't!  As a member of Stargazers Lounge, I asked if anyone could advise me and a very knowledgeable member named 'Stu' advised me that the nebulosity was most likely a very faint Mag 16.6 elliptical galaxy PGC168425.
 
I was really amazed that my inexpensive camera and lens combo could in 30 seconds detect and image such a faint and diffuse astronomical object. The apparent brightness of astro objects is defined by a logarithm based magnitude system. The brightest celestial objects such as The Sun. The Moon, Venus Jupiter and the brighter stars like Sirius have negative magnitude numbers.

Apparent Visual Magnitudes

The Andromeda Galaxy (Approx 2.5 million light years distant)    +3.4
Sirius (brightest star)	-1.5
Venus (at brightest)	-4.4
Full Moon	-12.6
The Sun	-26.8

                                                              

 The naked human eye on average can detect stars with an apparent magnitude of +6. Objects with a lower apparent magnitude, for example: the largest asteroid Ceres at Mag +7 would be likely to be unobservable without a visual aid such as binoculars or a telescope. Each increase in positive magnitude, for example from +6 to +7 represents a decrease in brightness of 2.5 times. So any object with an apparent magnitude of 16.6 is very very dim  or more precisely, for an intrinsicly bright galaxy made up of millions of stars, very far far away!

 

As above but annotated to show the comet and the galaxy