Cosmic

Sky Pictures & Words

Summer Delights on Late May Nights

After two weeks dominated either by the moon or wet weather, it cleared up during the week of May 26. I was able to get outside on the evenings of May 29-30 to do some photography with the SeeStar S50, the little two-inch trumpet of discovery that I’ve had a crush on for the last six months. 

I sat outside our door facing north on Wednesday night. At this time of year at 44 degrees north latitude, the sky doesn’t seriously darken until after 10:30 p.m. Dark sky-wise, it will get worse until June 20, the summer solstice, and then ever so slowly, the cosmic pendulum will swing toward shorter days and longer nights, which notable English amateur astronomer Billy Shakespeare described as a time when “. . . all the world will be in love with night and pay no worship to the garish sun.”

I shouldn’t complain. For amateur astronomers in the northern hemisphere, the summer night sky shrinks the farther north you go. Shane and Chris, two dudes who staff the actual astronomy podcast, live in undisclosed locations in Alberta, Canada. Soon, those fellows will enter perpetual twilight, a window which lasts five or six weeks on either side of the solstice. From their points of view, this is the time of year when the sky never darkens enough to see much of anything that twinkles or shines, other than the moon and sun. 

Hail Hercules! 

From where I sat Wednesday night, objects in the summer constellations are ascendent. So is the famous Summer Triangle of first magnitude stars Vega, Altair, and Deneb. The constellation Hercules leads the stars of summer, and it boasts one of the best globular clusters in the galaxy, M13. It is a bright cluster, even beneath this Bortle 5 light dome that keeps me squinting to see even third magnitude stars. The the five-minute exposure of M13 shows how condensed the stars are. But looks are deceiving 

From a distances of 22,180 light years the stars in M13 are tightly packed, but not like sardines entombed in tin. Composed of more than 100,000 stars, the average distance between stars of M13 is one-half a light year, which is equivalent to the distance of a three-month wagon ride behind two disinterested mules. Near the center of M13, it’s a tighter fit. At the core of the M13 cluster, it’s estimated that there are six to 10 stars per cubic light year. NASA’s Hubble telescope site claims star collisions occur within M13: “These stars are so crowded that they can, at times, slam into each other and even form a new star, called a ‘blue straggler.’”

Human stragglers? Sure. Blue stragglers? Maybe. 

The Ring Nebula

In Lyra, which features the summer diamond Vega, there is a remnant of an average star that grew old enough to devolve into a planetary nebula. At 2,380 light years distant, the ring nebula is almost next door. Though dim at 8.8 magnitude, the shape of M57 makes it an easy find. After all, who hasn’t stared down at a bowl of Cheerios at least once in their lifetime? 

If we want to know what two light years looks like from 2,380 light years away, the width of the ring nebula shows us. If we want to know what our sun could look like when it uses up all of its hydrogen and becomes a red giant, M57 might model the sun’s end. It’s believed that charged particles (the stellar wind) blew off the outer layers of this dying star and created this cosmic smoke ring. The central star or the nebula, invisible on this photo, varies between 14.2 and 16.1 magnitude; Its variability is attributed to cosmic winds blowing ionized gases across the face of the white dwarf.

Pinwheel Schimwheel

The last object I photographed Wednesday night was a massive star city in Ursa Major. I sent the SeeStar to see M101, a faint pinwheel 22.5 million light years away and 170,000 light years across. The experts say M101 is 70% larger than our milky way. With Ursa Major straight overhead in late May, M101 is perfectly placed for a photo. I spent 25 minutes of my life to shoot this photo of M101, and truth be told, I’d like those 25 minutes back. The objective of the SeeStar is too small, the light inside a Bortle 5 bubble is too bright, and the atmosphere that night resembled a river after six days of Biblical rain. 

The following evening the atmosphere was supposed to be clear, moderately transparent and sedated. Your intrepid astronomer gave M101 another shot. I was 10 minutes into another photo of M101 when a thin film of clouds strolled across the zenith, right in front of the great bear. A better look at M101 was not to be. End of observing session.

Thank you for reading. Share with your friends (or enemies) and please subscribe for free at this bottom of this page. 

Here’s the show page of The Actual Astronomy podcast: https://actualastronomy.podbean.com/

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6 responses to “Summer Delights on Late May Nights”

  1. Good results from your Seestar.

    I like your image of the Ring Nebula. Nice and sharp, it’s always an exciting object to view. I was surprised to see an image of it recently which picked out a very faint wispy outer ring which I had not seen before.

    I hope you get another chance at shooting M101. It’s one of those northerly objects that I’d love to image but as it’s maximum elevation is only 2° above my theoretical horizon I’ll never get to see it.

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    • Thank you, Roger, for your comments on the little ring nebula. I have seen a photo or two of the newly discovered outer ring of M57. Wouldn’t you just love to zip around the galaxy and see some of the familiar faces of the Milky Way up close? Have you been shooting any more shots of Comet Pons12-Brooks? I’m curious to see how it looks from Australia. Given the opportunity, I’ll drive out in the country to take another whack at M101. Clear skies to your island ;-).

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  2. A couple of comments:

    1. I don’t know if it’s my browsers, but the images are pretty small and, at least for me, they don’t open to a larger version when I click on them. If you care about such feedback, it lessens the enjoyment of the images.
    2. Relative to that, it also makes it difficult to judge the quality of the images from the S50. Is that why they are so small? because the quality is so poor?
    3. Relative to the S50, I don’t see a search option on your blog (I’m old, so I might be loosing my eyesight in addition to my mental faculties) and I scrolled through older posts to see if you did a review. You sound pleased with it, but I wondered about its strengths and pitfalls (I’ll do a search online, but I like getting first-hand non-commercial reviews).

    Note:
    I noticed you subscribed to my blog. Be aware I have very little cosmic content. Once in a while I’ll post something, but it’s sporadic at best.

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  3. This is a first for me, not being able to expand the images. What kind of device are you using to read the posts? That would be helpful to know.

    I’ll work on adding a search function. Thank you for your feedback.

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    • I’m using a PC, two different browsers (Edge and Firefox).

      That usually happens if the images are not linked to the source image.

      If you know how to do that, that’s the first thing I would check. If you don’t know how to check, I can paste a couple of images about how to do it . . . presuming this message goes through.

      Also, sorry for the slow response . . . because I couldn’t leave a message, I couldn’t subscribe to the reply.

      Like