My meteor image was selected for the Astronomy Picture Of the Day (APOD) today, October 11th, thanks!

I have updated the page to reflect the correct time for the fireball (or bolide) as provided by Thomas Ashcraf. He has a very comprehensive webpage for that date, highly recommended. I had already noticed that my camera clock was off by a few minutes and Thomas was able to provide exact timing.

Also new on the bolide page is a daytime photograph of the camera location relative to the star party.

Thanks for all email comments!

There was a nice display of meteors during the OTSP. Some sporadic and some from the minor meteor showers going on. Yet one meteor outshined them all. A bolide happened around 2:24 2:19 CDT Tuesday morning. It was spectacular. Lighting up the entire area for a moment. Wow.

I had a camera in the right place at the right time, what luck! Once in a lifetime picture of a brilliant meteor over the star party. Click here or the little image to the right for the picture!

As I write a beautiful three day old moon hangs low in the sky. I’m back early from the annual Okie-Tex Star Party (OTSP). This year it was held from September 27th through October 4th. I traveled down to Kenton, OK on Saturday the 27th and it appeared like everyone showed up on that day. There must have been two hundred people already there when I arrived that evening! Here is the week in review:

Saturday Night

Its always a difficult first night after driving for nearly eight hours. Spent much time polar aligning as the sky was not that great at first. Night turned out to be pretty good.

Sunday Night

Very good night with intermittent clouds that rolled through in the morning. During the day I setup my hillside camera mount and equipment. Before sunset I ran a series of auto-exposures and then switched memory cards and ran continuous 30 second exposures starting at 21:00. This went through morning until it filled the memory card around 9:00. My main telescope target was the cocoon nebula.

Monday Night

Outstanding night! The hillside camera was setup again and this time I started continuous 30 second exposures at 20:00 and never touched the camera until the next day. At about 2:24 in the morning a fantastic meteor lite up the entire area, it was incredible. The question was did I catch it? I imaged the Iris nebula in my main telescope.

Around 1:00 on Tuesday afternoon I retrieved the hillside camera and found I had indeed captured the meteor. Sweet!

Tuesday Night

Outstanding night again! No hillside camera, just my main scope. With excellent transparency I decided to image LBN 534. This is a fainter nebula I had never heard of until the November issue of Sky and Telescope. Kinda screwed up because I decided to reframe the object, after I had already taken two hours of exposure. Jeez.

Wednesday Night

Outstanding night surprisingly. The Clear Sky Chart forecast had predicted clouds before morning but that was not the case. I spent all night collecting images of the Pacman nebula, staying up past the official end of darkness. Around 6:00am the Zodiacal light was a fantastic cone of brightness in the east. In retrospect I wish I had taken a few images of it, what the heck was I thinking? Oh well, it was a visual treat.

The End

Through out the week we had very good weather until Thursday. Then a strong storm just missed us in the evening and the night was clouded over. Thats OK as we needed an excuse to drink the beer we all brought, party time. With a poor forecast for Friday night I left around noon. While I hated to leave it was obvious a front would move over the area and reek havoc with any photography.

One surprising thing all week was the wind. Until Thursday night we had virtually no wind which is unusual. I collected the weeks temperature data on my 4000NV. Click here for the graph. Ignore the daytime high points but the nighttime data was logged in the same location six feet off the ground. Apparently I am a nerd.

This was the 25th anniversary of the star party and the tenth anniversary at this location by Kenton. I saw many a familiar face this year as I’ve gone nine out of the ten years at Camp Billy Joe. Congratulations to the Oklahoma Astronomy Club for putting on a great star party.

New image: the Snake Nebula (B72)

This image is the composite of the best 35 exposures out of 46 taken from Clearfield Observatory. I am pleased, no, surprised with the result considering the location and conditions. The snake varied between 25 and 23 degrees above the horizon during the exposures. This is the lowest I have ever seriously tried to image from my location and I was skeptical it would amount to much. With high humidity and stagnant summer air the stars close to the horizon are in the muck we say.

A combination of steps and technique helped this image:  I kept the sub-exposures to a shorter time to reduce thermal noise, a fan was blowing on the camera to help cool it, the target object was in the best possible location to avoid light pollution around my site and I discarded sub-exposures that were clearly affected by local traffic. Result: happiness.

Six months goes by and the two major DSLR manufacturers release a bunch of new models. I updated my FOV Calculator to include the Canon Rebel XSi (EOS 450D) and Rebel XS (EOS 1000D). Note I always use the numeric model number as the XT/XS/XSi nonclementure is confusing IMO. Also added are the Nikon D3, D300 and yet to be released D700.

As always if you see an error in the camera specs or calculations please let me know.

New image posted: M17

Taken the nights of June 29th and 30th as noted in my entry for Summer Skies. Took me longer than I planned to get this photograph assembled from the various images and posted. Not that it was difficult or complicated, rather other things like work got in the way :).

Sunday June 30th 29th in the Flint Hills, photo above looking SSW as the sun was setting. Photon Phil and I both arrived early from opposite directions. Guess we were pretty excited to have a potentially good night. And the night sky turned out to be excellent. Consistently good transparency all night (as predicted) with virtually no wind. The temperature was steady around 65 F with dry air, unusual for this time of year. Possibly the best night at our site in many, many months.

I collected many good exposures that resulted in my best effort yet on the Rho Ophiuchus / Antares region. This area is a fantastic combination of emission and reflection nebula. The image to the right is the composite of the best 28 exposures using a Canon 100mm f2.8 Macro lens (EF, non USM) wide open. Click the image or here to view a larger sized image.

The next Monday night, last night of June was also pretty good. Between the two days I have several hours of exposures of M17 to process. Hope to get that posted in the next week or so. I also collected over 540 images for a star trail and/or time lapse movie. This was an experiment to test a few new ideas for use later. I can confirmed that a 16gb card (Sandisk Extreme III) does work in a Canon 20D. Note that the 20D will not correctly format the card so I used a Canon 40D for that.

Summertime and the livin’s easy
Bradley’s on the microphone with Ras-MG