Taking good pictures of astronomical objects is quite challenging. Especially if you don’t own highly advanced (and very expensive) equipment.

For quite a long time I thought that the only celestial object which is in my reach to take good images of, was the Moon. Here is one of the better Moon images that I have taken:

Over time, both my skills and my equipments advanced a bit. And I managed to take pictures of almost all the planets out to Saturn (not counting planet pictures taken through web-based observatories like GRaS). There are:

Mercury:

Venus (probably my best planet picture so far):

Mars (the red dot on the left; certainly my worst planet picture so far, but for the purpose of completeness …):

… and Saturn:

I didn’t have a picture of Jupiter yet, but that is rather coincidental, as Jupiter is the brightest planet just after Venus and certainly an easier target than Mercury, Mars or Saturn.

Today I not only completed this collection by adding a picture of Jupiter, but also passed another milestone. My first pictures showing Natural satellites (colloquially known as moons) other than Earth’s Moon. Here is Jupiter with (from left to right) Io, Europa and Ganymede:

To complete the Galilean Family, I took another one showing Io and Callisto (the little dot quite some distance outside):

Last but not least, this is what they looked like in Stellarium (Stellarium is what actually allows me to tell which dot is which moon).

What makes a great observation night? You get to see a lot of things that you don’t get to see every day.

This night (morning of May 31, 2011) was good weather and good sight. Basically I put out the binoculars because I went to see Neptune and asteroid 4 Vesta again, which I already observed yesterday.

Neptune isn’t spectacular, it looks just like an arbitrary star and if you didn’t know its exact position, you would never recognize that it is Neptune. I use primarily Stellarium which has always been reliable and serves the purpose of letting me know where to find a particular object very well. So it also left no doubt that what I was looking at was indeed Neptune.

The same was true for Vesta yesterday. I knew its position based on Stellarium, and it was particularly easy because it was located very near to star ι Cap. (Iota Capricorni), which is easy to find. And since it was where I assumed it to be, there was no reasonable doubt left that I was looking at anything different.

But the great thing especially about observing an asteroid is when you have a chance to look for it on 2 consecutive days, especially if it is that near to a significant star. One can see how it changed its location and that’s real evidence that it is not just an arbitrary star (even though it looks just like one).

Here is Vesta’s position of yesterday at 3am local time:

And here is Vesta’s position today:

That’s just what I’ve seen. Take this lesson: while what you are seeing may seem boring, to know what you are looking at can be very fascinating. Even though a dot in the sky may look just like the thousands other dots, it can be something very different … and to find and identify (and eventually track) them is a rewarding thing to do (in my opinion).

But there was more this night. It’s always a good idea to take a look at heavens-above.com to watch out for special observation opportunities. And this night delivered HUGE opportunities.

First thing was a Magnitude -8 Iridium Flare at 3.17am. Iridium Flares are pretty common and there is one (or more) to see almost every night. But such with mag. -8 – which is almost as bright as an Iridium Flare can get (about 17 times brighter than Venus at its brightest) – don’t show up that frequently, maybe once in a week or two. And more often than not, either the weather isn’t good or you just forget to check them out. So if there actually is such a bright one during a night that you do observing (and don’t forget to look them up at Heavens Above), you are quite lucky. And this was quite a mighty one, one of the best I’ve seen.

But the real jewels were yet to come.

The STS-134 mission is nearing its end and the space shuttle Endeavour undocked from the ISS just yesterday. This is even more significant as the space shuttle program is coming to an end, and it’s likely the last opportunity ever to see what I had the chance to see tonight (saying this with a tear in one eye, but also with a little smile as it’s time for new challenges beyond low Earth orbit).

Heavens Above showed me that the ISS was about to pass at ~3.34am this night (only 17 minutes after the Iridium Flare). When a space shuttle is on its way back to Earth, you can assume it to show up just a few seconds ahead of the ISS. There was something else that Heavens Above showed me which was very interesting. The path of the ISS led just below the very bright and significant star Deneb Algedi (δ Cap. or Delta Capricorni):

Deneb Algedi is the star in the center of the chart, right next to the 03:34:30 marker (which is the time the ISS passed it)

So I knew exactly where to look and where to point my binoculars too, which I could prepare even before the Endeavour/ISS pair showed up. I only had to wait until I could see them with the naked eye (very easy since they are both very bright), go to my binoculars, wait until they show up below Deneb Algedi, and follow their ways. An easy job even for a moderately equipped and modestly experienced amateur astronomer like me, but very rewarding.

But the really big deal about this all is that you a) neither need a big budget and b) nor need many years of experience to do just what I am doing. My Omegon Nightstar 25×100 binoculars cost € 299.00. Other than that you need only a PC and an internet connection, which you are likely to have already, if you are reading this. And last but not least, a little bit of passion for what’s going on above us.

Today I took videos of both the (near full) Moon and the (little past opposition) Saturn through my telescope.

First the Moon:

This one was captured with my old Kodak EasyShare C813. A camera which I bought 3 years ago for $120.

And here is Saturn:

The camera that I used on Saturn is my new Casio EX-H30. This one is capable of producing much brighter pictures, which is very helpful for Saturn, but not for the Moon (when I tried it on the Moon I got just a big bright spot, but hardly any surface features recognizable).

The weird movements of Saturn are partially the Earth’s rotation (when Saturn moves from right top to left bottom), and when I turn around on the scope. I also tried different zoom levels. However, the more I zoomed in, the more Saturn got blurred.

Saturn’s prime time for this year is already over, but the next candidate is on his way. In 2-3 months, Jupiter will begin to be in a position where I will be able to take pictures and videos of it. I’m excited to find out how much detail (and hopefully all of the Galilean Moons) I will be able to capture.

Today was not a perfectly clear night, but good enough for some observations. Recently I found that the asteroid 6 Hebe is approaching opposition and therefor makes a good observation target, so I tried my luck finding it.

The source which I used was http://www.heavens-above.com/MinorPlanet.aspx?desig=6. The position where 6 Hebe was specified to be was RA 0h 30.6m, DE -14° 25′ (J2000). I fired up Stellarium (of all astronomical software that I know, Stellarium resembles what one can really see through binoculars or scopes the best), looked up this position, tried to find a path how to find this position (the star Diphda was a great starting point, it was easy to hop to 6 Hebe’s position from there), and searched this spot with my binoculars. Thanks to Diphda it didn’t take me long to find it.

But whoops, where I expected to find 6 Hebe, there was nothing. Instead, just a little bit further to the left there was an object just as bright as 6 Hebe was supposed to be, and according to Stellarium, there was no star of this brightness at this place. So was this 6 Hebe? I pretty much thought this has to be 6 Hebe, but it was basically just a guess, I had no evidence to support this.

What could I do to know for sure (or at least as sure as I can be)? I remembered NASA’s HORIZONS Web-Interface which allows to track basically every solar system object which is known. There I found that its supposed position is RA 0h 31.47, DE -14° 21′ 11.8″ (J2000). I checked this spot in Stellarium, and voilà – that was exactly where I saw the object which I thought must be 6 Hebe. Evidence enough to confirm.

See this Stellarium screenshot to see the discrepancy:

On the right end of the blue bar is the spot where I expected 6 Hebe to be, on the left is the spot where I actually found it. So the discrepancy is around 20-25 arc minutes, or ~ 2/3 of the diameter of the Moon.

There are some web-based observatories which allow normal people like you and I to rent a telescope somewhere on this planet for a short period of time and quite reasonable amount of money, to take some pictures. Not only is the available equipment superior to the scopes that many people have at home (at least to me this applies for sure), these scopes are most often located on very favorable places up on a mountain, far from city lights and likely good weather conditions. One of these web-based observatories is Global-Rent-a-Scope or short GRaS, where I made my first steps.

They have telescopes in Australia (which adds another advantage: you can take pictures of the Southern Sky, even if you live in fairly high Northern Latitudes; this is also true the other way around of course), Spain (this one is relatively new) and the one which I’ve been using for my tests so far, Mayhill, New Mexico at 32° 54′ 3.60″ N, 105° 31′ 26.41″ W.

My latest achievement was to take 2 images of dwarf planet Pluto, the first on August 23, 2010 at 05:25 UTC and the second on August 27, 2010 at 03:11 UTC. I cut the images to show the same area of the sky, so you can open the images in new browser tabs, switch back and forth between them, and I think you should be able to spot the “pixel” which is Pluto that has changed its location significantly, while the surrounding stars stay at the same positions:

If you didn’t manage to spot Pluto, here is the same sky area with Stellarium (an awesome piece of astronomical software … Open Source and available for all the major platforms):

You can also view the original Pluto image of August 23 and the original Pluto image of August 27. The unedited Stellarium screenshots are also available, for August 23 and August 27.

This is something which I could never do with the binoculars and the telescope which I have at home. Pluto, with a magnitude of around 14, is beyond my capabilities (whether it's limited by my technical capabilities or just my skills is yet to be found out).

Here are some more images which I have taken through scopes provided by GRaS (all in Mayhill, NM).

Orion nebula on March 29, 2010 at 4:06 UTC

Saturn on March 29, 2010 at 8:52 UTC with Saturnian moons Titan, Enceladus, Dione and Rhea visible

Jupiter on August 20, 2010 at 5:09 UTC with Jovian moons Callisto, Io, Ganymede and Europa visible

Uranus on August 20, 2010 at 6:35 UTC with Uranian moons Titania, Umbriel and Oberon visible

I took new pictures of the Moon (on August 21, 2010). They were taken through my Omegon Nightstar 25×100 binoculars.

There are more at http://www.flickr.com/photos/mpopp75/tags/moon/.