Spiral Galaxy M101 in the Great Bear

5 x 120 second frames taken with my 400D Canon DSLR with telephoto lens at f = 80 mm. all on a driven NEQ6 mount. Frames stacked using DeepSkyStacker  and finished with APS

Image of M101 enlarged in APS and pasted into the original photo to show location

M101 further enlarged to show the spiral nature of the galaxy

Messier 101, also known as the Pinwheel Galaxy, is 21 million light years away in the constellation Ursa Major (The Great Bear). The combined light from this galaxy has an apparent magnitude of 7.86, so it cannot be seen with the naked eye. If you view M101 from a very dark site and know exactly where to look, it can be seen through tripod mounted or image stabilised binoculars. I find this a very difficult object even through my 11x80mm binoculars!  A bit more magnification helps.

 M101 is a face on spiral galaxy with abundant hydrogen gas clouds which are being gravitationally compressed to create new stars. The bright pink areas in my above image clearly show these areas of star birth.  M101 is similar to our own Milky Way but 70% larger. The Pinwheel Galaxy has a mass of approximately 103 billion times that of our Sun but strangely has a comparatively small black hole, between 20 and 30 times the mass of our Sun, at its centre. The black hole at the centre of the Milky Way is estimated to be equivalent to 4,100,000 solar masses.

In August 2011 a Type 1a supernova was observed in M101. At its brightest the supernova reached magnitude 9.2.  Sadly, I never got to see this supernova through the eyepiece, let alone image it.

Given the success I have achieved in imaging this galaxy with a telephoto lens, on the next clear night I will turn my big telescope towards this intriguing island universe 6 megaparsecs distant from our small but beautiful planet Earth.

M101 credit NASA-ESA

Syrtis Major

22nd April. QHY5v Planetary Camera, Televue x3 Barlow, Meade 127mm Meade Apo Telescope

 The night of the 22nd of April was absolutely clear. The atmosphere was steady and my telescope, camera and laptop all performed as they should.  Consequently I captured this reasonably sharp image of Mars.

I'm quite pleased with this image, my best photo of Mars by a long way. You can see the diminishing North polar cap (at 12 o' clock). The northern hemisphere is entering the summer season and consequently the carbon dioxide ice at the North Pole is evaporating in the summer sunshine.  The Southern polar cap is evident (at 6 o'clock) probably covered in cloud.  There is a thick cloud (at 3 o'clock) probably over one of  Mars's shield volcanoes.  The greenish triangular albedo feature, rising from the South Pole to the centre of the disc, is named Syrtis Major.  Historically, it was the very first surface feature to be identified on Mars.

Mars sailing through the stars of the constellation Virgo

At the scale of this photograph,  the star 38 virginis is close to being occulted by the planet Mars.  In reality they are not close at all, the star 38 virginis is approximately 105 light years away whilst Mars, our planetary neighbour, is much closer at 92 million kilometres or if you would rather have the distance expressed in light speed units- 5 light minutes and 6 light seconds away. 38 Virginis is an incandescent ball of gas a little hotter and having a luminosity approximately 3 times that of our Sun.  Mars is a cold, rocky, airless world with features we only see through the reflection of sunlight.

(Note: the Earth - Mars distance varies because of the differential speeds at which Earth and Mars move around their respective elliptical orbits and because of the different eccentricity of their orbits. My calculation of the Earth Mars distance is approximate for April 2014)

Swanning about

Happy 450th Birthday Bill

“What is a man, if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more. Sure he that made us with such large discourse, looking before and after, gave us not that capability and god-like reason to fust in us unused.”  (Hamlet)

Clearly there was no such thing as an early retirement in Tudor times, unless the phrase was used as a euphemism for decapitation!

Credits: Wikipedia 

Mars 'Bringer of War'

Reusing all of my movie clips I took on the 9th of April
Over 5000 frames stacked using Pipp, AutoStakkert,
Registax and APS.

'Mars Bringer of War' - I'm not getting anxious about World War 3 starting in the Ukraine; I'm just worried about Toot boxing my ears because I've spent so much time on this image, my eyes glued to my laptop and grunting when she speaks to me.  She has been working in the garden and I've been sitting on my butt. Justifiably, hostilities could break out at anytime in the next hour or so.

Anyway I'm quite pleased with this photo and as the weather has turned grim, there is very little chance I will gather many more photons from Mars before it spins off on its orbit. Since its closest pass to the Earth on the 14th April, Mars will apparently shrink and grow dimmer with every passing week.

In my image you can clearly see the North polar cap at about 1 o'clock, yellow-white carbon dioxide clouds along the eastern and western limbs and an isolated cloud in the upper middle of the disc.

The magenta coloured areas are albedo affects, where the winds on Mars have blown away the sand to expose  the bedrock. In reality these weathered and oxidised rocks are also red but show up as a contrasting colour because they reflect light in a different manner than the adjacent sandy deserts.

Getting the colours right on an astro image is quite difficult, particularly when the object you are photographing is very small and a long way away.  I think I find this less red version easier on the eye?

Olympus Mons is the largest shield volcano in the Solar System and is often  cloaked by clouds. I'm no Mars expert but I have done my best to annotate the brighter features in my image.

 

Annotated version of my image

Mars at opposition 9th March 2014

The planet Mars photographed from our Backyard on the 9th March 2014

The planet Mars is now shining bright and pink  in the constellation Virgo.  Mars is due south at about midnight.  It will be at its closest point this year to Earth on the 14th of April, after which it's distance will start to increase again.  Mars gets close to Earth every two years, one month and eighteen days but because of the eccentricity of it's elliptical orbit, sometimes it is much closer than others.

I was pleased with this image because you can clearly see the polar ice-cap and a number of white carbon dioxide clouds in the rarefied atmosphere of the 'Red Planet'.

Oh no there isn't - Oh yes there is!

The Chatham Empire

I'm just old enough to remember the last days of the 'British Musical Theatre'.

My God Father 'Uncle Phil' was a sailor and had been based at Chatham Dockyard so he was a regular attendee at the Chatham Empire. As were my Nan and Grandad Swinbourne.

The Empire building was designed by Frank Matcham and Company, noted Theatre Architects. It was an interesting building which  presented a 'Baroque' elevation to Chatham High Street. On top of the roof was a cupola its finial supplanted by ship shaped weather-vane.

I was taken to the Empire by my Uncle Phil with Auntie Joyce and by my Nan and Grandad- Mabel and George.


My Uncle Phil taught me to say to my Mum and Dad - "Can I go to Chatham to see some crumpet", -  the less than politically correct way of me asking to go to the 'Empire' to watch the 'dancing girls.


I can remember some of the acts I saw performing at the theatre, not because I have a phenomenal memory for detail but because the acts didn't change.  Television in Britain was in its infancy and Music Hall entertainers were used to traveling around the United Kingdom, performing in hundreds of local theatres.  The music hall performer only needed two or three different acts and as long as they traveled widely and remembered which act they had performed where last, three well honed acts could last them a life time.

I remember seeing Wilson, Keppel and Betty performing their famous Egyptian sand dance. One of them would come out and throw sand on the stage and then all three would dance in it to the music of the familiar Egyptian Ballet by Alexandre Luigini.  (you know the one......... der-dee- der -der- der, der-dee, der-dee, der-dee-der).  I was totally bewildered by this act.  As a three year old who had never left Kent, I think I believed they were from Egypt!

Betty had yet to enter stage right

'Jimmy James and his gang' was one of my favorite turns. He had two acts that I can remember - 'In the Box' and 'The Chipster'.

'In the Box' was a bizarre three way conversation about animals brought back from the colonies.

'The Chipster' a monologue about the rewards and risks associated with the fish and chip shop industry. The financial benefits of 'two burners going day and night', but ignore at your peril,  the potential industrial injuries of  working with hot oil and a flour based paste - i.e.'Permanent wink' and 'Batterer's elbow' - .

 Now Jimmy James was on 'the telly' and my Nan and Grandad had a black and white television a 'Ferguson' in a mahogany box. I think I saw 'the Chipster' act on the television by I'm almost certain I saw the 'In the Box' act at the Empire.

Jimmy James on the right

 To view a video clip of the 'In the Box' sketch follow the link:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANIA4IP245c











Another act I remember was the ventriloquist Saveen.  He was very suave and on stage wore a morning coat and  top hat.  He had a girl dummy with pigtails called Daisy May and two dogs, one a real fox terrier and the other a glove puppet.  The real dog sat on a stool and was so well trained to sit still, that I thought it was a puppet until when, at the very end of the act, it jumped down and ran off the stage. Saveen would sing to Daisy May and for some unknown reason this always made me sad and cry.

To view a video clip follow the link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LF0T3STTzvA

My very favourite turn was 'The Two Pirates'. Two men, one large and one small with a shrill voice would enter the stage.  They both wore stripey pirate tops and mateloe's skirts over tights.  They would do a lot of hand slapping, gesticulating and make apparent preparations for performing acrobatics but I cannot remember them doing anything particularly athletic. They would build the tension moving inexorably towards the finale when the smaller of the two would  balance 'fingertip-to-fingertip' on the larger one.  As the attempt was made it became quite clear that the smaller pirate was being 'flown' on a wire rather than being supported by the larger pirate's finger. At the point where the audience started to laugh, the smaller pirate would shout 'Oh no there isn't'.  The audience including me would shout back 'Oh yes there is'. Both sides would repeat this several times and then the smaller pirate would shout in falsetto 'It's a lie'. I saw them several times and the act was always exactly the same - bless!

The Two Pirates

My reconstruction of the finale of the Two Pirates act on the stage of the Chatham Empire

My last visit to the Chatham Empire was after it had become a cinema.  I watched Danny Kaye and Bing Crosby in 'White Christmas' with my Mum Edna and Dad Joe , Grandad George and Nanny Mabel.

Credits: Wikipedia, 1950's Music Hall UK, British Hall Society, Chris Mullen Heroes of the Early Days and The Stage Archive.