NEOWISE Breaks the Drought

“Comets are like cats: they have tails, and they do precisely what they want.” ― David H. Levy

While they are not as infrequent as Venus transits, a showy comet is pretty rare based on my experience. And hands down they are the biggest tease that the solar system has to offer. From Kohoutek (1974) to this year's PANSTARRS (C/2020 K1) comets often show promise of putting on a show only to either massively under perform or occasionally just crumble into pieces. Even the most famous of comets, Halley, was a bit of a dud for northern hemisphere observers on its last visit in 1986.

In my half century of sky gazing I've seen 3 comets that fit the archetype of a comet: Bennett (1970), Hyakutake (1996), and the grand Hale-Bopp (1997). There are likely some I missed when I was less active but most comets that I've viewed are small fuzzies that need a scope or binoculars to see well and resemble a Manx rather than a Persian feline. They make you appreciate why Messier, fooled by the faux comets of nebulae and galaxies, started his catalog.

I had adopted a "I'll believe it when I see it" attitude towards NEOWISE C/2020 F3 when the initial assessments were that it could be a winner. No Lucy, this Charlie Brown wants to know that football isn't going to be pulled away at the last moment! And by the way - I know we need these robotic scopes to efficiently catch incoming asteroids and comets for our safety, but their comet names are so sterile. And it takes away one of the best lotteries in amateur astronomy - the glory of finding a great comet and having your name slapped on it. If I were in charge I'd say that the robots have to keep quiet - report their finding to a secret database but then wait for some lucky amateur to stumble upon it and get the naming honor. Bring back awesome comet names like Ikeya-Seki! Sigh - but I digress...

Once NEOWISE had completed its rendezvous with the Sun the reports - and images - started coming in with good news. There appeared to be a naked-eye visible tail, even from suburban venues. Excited with the prospect of ending the long drought of a fine comet I waited for a break in the normal Baltimore July weather pattern - hazy, warm, humid. Finally the weather sites agreed that Sunday morning was likely to be a good opportunity. While many HAL members were planning to assemble at Carrs Mills I opted for a closer spot with good horizons at Dulaney Springs park. 

I pulled into the parking lot with camera, binoculars, and face mask (just in case) at about 4:15. A last quarter Moon hung high above, and Venus gleamed adjacent to Aldebaran. To the left was Capella, and farther to the left should be roughly where NEOWISE ought to be hanging out. I thought with averted vision I could catch a shaft of light extending above the tree line, and the binoculars confirmed it. Moving out onto the field to shift the comet's apparent position into a break in the trees revealed a glowing nucleus and nearly 2° tail.

NEOWISE's Tail Above Treeline

Setting up the camera I worked on getting some shots of NEOWISE as it ascended above the treeline. As I'm taking one of the shots I notice a bright object moving nearby. First impression was that it was the ISS starting a pass but then it winked out, pretty suddenly. Odd - did it just enter the Earth's shadow that quickly? Something didn't seem quite right so I noted the time in order to check later as to what was in the area. As it turned out Jim Johnson captured it and properly identified it as a meteor. It was likely quite distant given the appearance in both our shots is pretty similar while separated by some 25 miles.

NEOWISE Crests Treeline and Greets Meteor

As NEOWISE gained altitude it became a fine sight! To the naked eye it had perhaps a 1^st magnitude coma gradually fading into a delicate gossamer tail. In the 7x50 binoculars the head was a compact, bright white with the tail streaming upward like a jet contrail. The tail had more yellowish-gold tones compared to the whiter coma, making a beautiful impression. The tail also seemed to be a bit stronger on its edges, as though the coma had active jets on each side. I drank in the experience of this celestial visitor to our neighborhood, knowing that the creeping dawn would soon overwhelm its presence. By 5 a.m. I headed back home, eager to see my digital images on a laptop screen.

A Sight to Behold

So now NEOWISE heads back out to the icy depths of the solar system and we'll get to see it in a more convenient evening sky. Hopefully it will continue to delight as it gradually recedes from view over the summer months.

The Venus Show

One thing is for certain - the disruption of our routines thanks to the COVID-19 virus outbreak has created a vacuum. Binge-watching has taken center stage for a lot of America, but if you step outside you'll find another show streaming through the evening twilight. Venus has been dazzling, high above the horizon like a super intense LED. Even the average person out for their stroll around the neighborhood notices this gem in the western sky.

Our sister planet returned to the evening twilight last fall. I recall catching sight of her in early November heading south on I-81 in Virginia on our way to NC, anchoring a wonderful Zodiacal alignment of Venus-Jupiter-Saturn. Slowly but steadily since then, like a diver ascending the ladder to the high dive platform, Venus has been gaining altitude from the Sun's glare.

Venus and crescent Moon Thanksgiving evening 2019

This evening apparition has been particularly auspicious, hitting a trifecta + one of favorable celestial mechanics. First, for us spring brings the angle of the ecliptic - that imaginary highway that the visible planets traverse - to its steepest angle with the horizon, reaching 73° on March 24th. This means that every degree that a planet lies from the Sun translates to maximum distance above our northern hemisphere horizon.

Next, that date of steepest ecliptic coincided with Venus reaching the point in its orbit where it forms a right angle alignment between itself, the Sun, and us - i.e., the greatest distance it can appear separated from our home star. The result of all this? Our brilliant neighbor began the evenings in late March a full 44° above the horizon, an inner-planet party animal that stayed up until close to midnight.

Another favorable aspect is that on March 20th the planet was at perihelion - the point in its orbit where it lies closest to the Sun. This contributes slightly to the planet's brightness so that when it hits that sweet spot between disk size and phase on April 28th it achieves an eye-catching maximum brilliance of -4.4 magnitude. While it may not be visually apparent that Venus is reaching an incremental notch above its normal brilliance it is as good as it gets (but don't tell the press less we start a "Super Venus!" meme). 

Perhaps the pièce de résistance of this apparition was Venus making a call upon the Pleiades, passing through their midst on April 3rd. While not rare (it happens every 8 years due to celestial mechanics returning Venus to roughly the same spot) it is one of the most lovely and photogenic conjunctions around. I have (somewhere) a shot of a similar alignment some 24 years ago taken on film. This time around I used the digital magic of taking 200+ shots with my 200mm lens and stacking them to produce a nice souvenir of the occasion (star spikes courtesy of Photoshop).

M45 and Venus on Apr 2, 2020

 

But wait - there's more! Like that diver perched high above on the platform our sister planet is preparing to swan dive into the glare of the Sun. Once we reach dichotomy (half phase) Venus becomes a more interesting target for amateur astronomers with even a modest scope. We enter a period where the size and apparent phase alter week by week and then day by day as we approach the June 3rd inferior conjunction date. If you have never tried to spot Venus in the daytime you'll have a great opportunity on April 26th using the Moon as your guide as it slides roughly 5° south of the planet. It also is a great time to see how soon you can pick out the phase using only binoculars or capture it using only your telephoto lens.

Remember, you don't have to practice social distancing with your old friends in the night sky - let them infect you with their beauty and mystery!

Improv at the Impromptu

Last Saturday was blessed with a dome of high pressure over the mid-Atlantic, bringing transparent but frigid skies. Despite the chill Chris Miskiewicz announced he'd open Alpha Ridge for a HAL Impromptu star party. As soon as he called it I fired up Telescopius and elected galaxy NGC 2841in UMa as my primary target for a photography session. If I could hold out against the cold I'd also attempt a wide field of Messier duo of M97\M108. Little did I know that despite my best efforts of being prepared for my evening under the stars I'd need to circumvent a variety of unexpected challenges!

I started packing up the equipment into the Rogue about 5pm. First in was the Orion Atlas EQ mount - but wait! What the heck!? One of the tripod leg tips was missing! I spent 10 minutes scouring the area where I usually observe from home and in the garage where the tripod is stored but no luck. I decided that I could still make it work for the evening by extending the affected leg a bit. Improvisation #1.

Made it to Alpha Ridge as twilight was fading fast and the temps dropping. I transferred the equipment to my observing spot and roughly aligned the mount on the North Star. Turning on laptop and the PoleMaster camera I thought I had Polaris in the field, but soon realized it was an imposter. Nudging and bumping the mount this way and that brought no other suitable candidate star onto the screen, so finally I resorted to taking the camera off and sighting it through the shaft as was my custom prior to PoleMaster. This improvisation allowed me to get Polaris onto the screen when I reattached the camera - all at a cost of time. Finally, about an hour after my arrival I was ready to target NCG 2841 and begin taking my series of 30 second exposures.

I popped on the Telrad and reached for its On lever, only to find it was already on. Nooo! I cranked up the rheostat in hopes that maybe it had happened when loading the Telrad into the car but the poor batteries had no juice left to give me. Sigh - and no spare batteries with me. Alright then - we'll do it using the Vixen scope's finder. Improvisation #3.

I get the Tiger Eye galaxy in the eyepiece and begin to attach the Canon and establish its WiFi to my tablet. Boom - my Orion red headlamp I'm wearing shuts off. Did I bump it? No, apparently I'm having the worst dead battery night I've ever had. Fortunately for this bump in the road I did at least have a hand held red-light flashlight that I dig out from my observing toolbox. With improvisation #4 I'm finally connected and snapping photos.

Sketch NGC 2814

The allure of these clear February skies keep me from being bored while firing off round after round of 30 second exposure. I drink in the showy winter constellations: Orion and his dogs, the Twins, the Bull - all old friends who have crested and are riding the night tide to the western horizon. Over the dome of HALO the Big Dipper stands on its handle as if to vault itself high overhead. Leo climbs his way up the eastern sky as the subtle Hydra crawls beneath his feet. No matter how high-tech the gadgets become and what they can do, there is still something in the amateur astronomer's very being that finds joy in taking in a starry sky with nothing more than one's eyes.

By 9:15 p.m. the cold is beginning to win - I clearly do not have the perseverance to start a new session targeting the Owl Nebula and nearby galactic neighbor M108 - that will need to wait for another spring evening. I take my final 30 second light shot and go to get my home-made "light box" that I use to take my flats. Arrghh - are you kidding me!? I guess with the distraction of finding my peg-legged tripod I neglected to pack it. Think, think, think - how can I get a diffuse light source for these flats? I wonder if - maybe I can find a way to make my Samsung 10" tablet display an almost completely white screen? Can I find some web site or document to meet my need? A quick Bing search and - by Jove - there it is! The "White Screen Page" is exactly what I need for Improvisation #5. I load the page on my tablet and hold the tablet over the Vixen 80sf dew cap and rattle off my flat shots. Wow, that improvisation worked great!

Before I pack it in I take a few minutes to do a visual observation. At 60x in the 80mm refractor the galaxy is readily seen as a soft, elliptical glow running more or less in a N-S orientation. There's no core visible but the star field is pleasant with a tight, white double at the southern edge of the field competing for one's attention - the sort of pair whose symmetry of magnitude and coloration make it stand out. There'd be no hope of seeing the subtle light of this distant island universe from my driveway, so I linger a few moments to enjoy the benefit of Alpha Ridge's skies.

The next day I do some preliminary work with the image files in DSS and PixInsight. It's always a bit like Christmas morning when you open up that stacked photo to see what you have. The result is decent for a first pass but I think that there's more in there that can be teased out - if only I knew the intricacies of PixInsight better. The good news is that with the data in hand and safely dropped onto the cloud storage, NGC 2841 can await a cloudy night in the future to have its details extracted from the hour's worth of exposures. 

NGC 2841, the "Tiger's Eye" galaxy

Oh - and that eye-catching double? Turns out that's STF (Struve) 1341, a near equal 9th magnitude pair with a separation of 20" and sun-like spectral class G5. And to top it off, the preceding one of this E-W aligned pair [HD 80606] actually has an exoplanet associated with it weighing in at about 4 Jovian masses and whipping about the star once every 111 days. 80606b also sports an amazing orbital eccentricity of e=0.927 - check out the diagram below from NASA website "Earth Observatory" to get a sense of how elongated the orbit is (Pluto is e=0.25 for comparison). As Spock would say, "Fascinating..."

Orbital Eccentricity

Transit Terminus

This past Veterans Day the tiny planet Mercury was scheduled to cross the face of the Sun in an event visible in its entirety from my vantage point in North America. Such alignments are infrequent yet not as rare as those when we get to see Venus interposed between us and the Sun; we get two of those within a decade and then the interlude is over a century before the next transit pair. For Mercury we get to witness roughly 13 such events in a century. Like any celestial phenomena that takes place in under 12 hours, not every point on the globe gets to see the transit - in some locales the entire event happens while the Sun is below the horizon (a.k.a. night time).

I've been fortunate enough to catch a couple of prior Mercury transits. My first was on Saturday May 9, 1970, just about two months following the amazing total Solar Eclipse for the east coast that took place on March 7th. My notes have long since been lost on that event but I do recall seeing the tiny dot of our smallest planet against the Sun using my RV-6 Newtonian using a solar filter by the same company. The next transit that I have a clear memory of (and some notes) was Monday May 9, 2016. It's not just coincidence that both are on May 9th - the orbital mechanics dictates that a transit of Mercury can only occur within a couple days of May 8th or November 10th when Mercury's orbit intersects Earth's plane. If Mercury happens to be undergoing inferior conjunction at that time we have ourselves a transit.

Looking at the predictions for Mercury transits beyond 2019 showed that while there was one set for 2032 and another in 2039 neither would be visible from my side of the planet. That makes the next candidate May 7, 2049 - putting me well into my nineties. So for me the reality was that the November 11th event would be my swan song for any planetary transits. In a year that brought several reminders of my own mortality here was the universe offering yet another commentary upon it.

I decided to try to make this last Mercury transit the best yet. The prediction for 1st contact was 7:35 a.m., which meant the Sun would be quite low in the sky. If I could find a suitable location I might be able to witness that 1st contact and maybe even the "black teardrop" effect. But a more realistic goal was to try to obtain some nice photographic captures of the tiny orb as it marched its way across old Sol. I planned to take the RV-6 on the Atlas mount with me and the Canon Rebel t6s camera and the DFK21AU042 planetary video camera. I gathered everything together the evening before and then fashioned a solar filter using some Baader solar film, sandwiching it between stiff cardboard. The weather forecast was iffy - most prognostications had high clouds moving in as the morning wore on. I set out the equipment so that when I got up it would be easier to load it into the Rogue and set off in search of a venue with good eastern horizon.

The pre-dawn was not encouraging. While portions of the sky were clear the eastern direction had a buildup of high altitude clouds - the Sun was clearly not going to penetrate it. Regardless I set off looking for a location. I toyed with the idea of heading to the parking lot at Leidos where I work. It would be pretty empty on Veterans Day (a government holiday) and the horizon is pretty good. But the commute could be 30 minutes or more meaning the transit would likely be underway by the time I made my own transit and got set up. In the end I set up on the western edge of the ball field by the BYKOTA senior center in Towson, trying to position myself to catch the Sun soon after it rose. I had used the spot before in 2004 to catch the Venus transit soon after sunrise.

Setup outside BYKOTA, waiting for clouds to disperse

The 1st and 2nd contacts came and went without my witnessing them, a combination of clouds and obstructing building. Finally by about 8 a.m. the clouds thinned just enough that I could target the Sun using the shadow technique. I popped in the 16mm Plossl and focused. It took a moment but then there it was - a tiny black silhouette of planet Mercury against a solar disk completely devoid of sunspots. Yay! I could at least say I had successfully witnessed my third transit of Mercury!

Fighting clouds & buildings at the start

My initial attempt to record the phenomena was with the DFK21AU042 video imager, but it proved a frustration. With the Sun over my shoulder making it hard to see the screen and focus at the same time I was not getting any worthwhile results. I switched to the 35mm camera adapter for eyepiece projection using the 16mm and the camera's live view mode,  working to bring the solar limb into sharp focus. Even though I finally got to what seemed to be a good sharpness it was challenging to see if the view contained the tiny dot of planet Mercury. Without any sunspots that could serve as landmarks to guide me to position the best I could do was approximate, My approach evolved into taking a shot, bringing it up for review and enlarging it on the tablet to see if I by chance had caught the messenger planet. If not I used the RA/Dec control pad to slew to another part of the Sun to take another shot. It took a little while but finally ended up with a pretty decent image of the transit.

Mercury Transit - ISO 400 at 1/15 sec using 6" f/8 with 16mm Plossl

As I worked to get some photos there was a gradual stream of dog walkers, joggers, and curious neighbors wondering what the heck was going on. I obliged most of them with a peek through the scope so that they could tell friends and family they had seen it. By a little before 9 a.m. I decided to pack up and head home to finish observing and capturing the transit. I was back in business on the driveway of 404 within about a half hour, setting up the Vixen 80mm as well so that I could take some whole disk shots of the Sun sporting Mercury. The clouds continued to threaten - in the short video below you can see them crossing the face of the Sun. There were a few times when the clouds won but surprisingly the bulk of the transit window the Sun was visible.

Around 10:30 a.m. I decided to start taking a set of bracketed shots of the whole disk every 15 minutes in the hopes of creating a final product that would document the tiny speck making its way towards 3rd contact. I got most of the shots but the 10:45 one was a bit out of focus. It was quite challenging to get a sharp focus on the Samsung tablet that was connected to the Canon due to the Sun making it hard to see the screen. I resorted to having a pillow case draped over my head every 15 minutes as I tried to recenter the Sun and check the focus.

Mercury marches across the Sun on Nov. 11, 2019 (times EST)

As we slid past noon the tablet was running low on battery, signaling that photography would soon be over. I took a few more looks at the tiny, silhouetted dot to appreciate the scale of things in our solar system. As the clouds began to thicken yet again I decided to conclude observations and began to breakdown the setup. I may have missed the ingress and egress but overall it was a fine and memorable event to mark my last planetary transit!

New Tools

As I've noted before, the advances in technology have allowed amateur astronomers to obtain increasingly better planetary images. The ability to pluck several hundred images from a video containing thousands, align them into a composite, and then apply post-image processing to draw out the details is game changing. While I almost always spend a few minutes at the eyepiece soaking in the tiny planetary orb that I have chosen to examine for the session I am now invariably spending the bulk of time acquiring video of that member of our solar system. And yeah, the old eyes are not quite as sharp as they were when it comes to discerning surface features.

The enabling technology comes in two forms - hardware and software. Both can be expensive, but of the two there are times that software can be quite a bargain or even no cost (violating a variety of adages about getting something for nothing). As noted in a previous blog this summer I decided to give FireCapture, software that is used to record the video stream onto the laptop, a try.

One of the challenges with new software can be the user interface. Sometimes it is clean and intuitive, sometimes you need crib notes just to perform the basics until you get the routine down. FireCapture seems to fall somewhere in-between - lots of knobs and levers to play with but after a couple of YouTube videos you can be in the field using it, leaving the more advanced features aside while you handle the fundamentals. The fact that there is a "Dummy Cam" mode to allow us newbies to play around some was a great decision by the developer.

Overall this video capture software seems better than what I was using previously. The relevant settings are easy to access and adjust, and there is the ability to save these for each particular planet, allowing you to retrieve your last configuration with the click of a button. The zoom feature that allows you to get an enlarged image on your screen is also helpful, especially when trying to acquire a good focus. But the feature that really prompted me to switch over was the ability to bring up a crop box that allows you to capture just the planet and a bit of surrounding space, serving to reduce the file size. But wait - it gets better! The cropping zone actually adjusts to follow your target to compensate for your pole alignment inadequacies. Awesome!

The second piece of software that I began using was Planetary Imaging PreProcessor, or PIPP for short. This interface is far less intuitive - it has a bit of a geek feel to it where if you are not an insider you just don't get it. However, it is not so off-putting (like PixInsight) that you cannot be up and working with it in less than half an hour. The ability to save off and then load a configuration once you have adjusted the whistles and bells to your liking is a valuable feature.

PIPP comes into play after your session, and as the name implies is an intermediate step that allows you to tweak your video to stabilize the image, reject overexposed frames, perform a quality assessment of the frames, and a lot more. You can also generate a GIF animation from several still frames if you wish, allowing even me to create a "rotating Jupiter" sequence. I've certainly only scratched the surface here and have lots to learn, but again - awesome!

Jupiter animation taken 7/26/2019

Finally in my summer of experimentation I downloaded AutoStakkert! - another free piece of software that stacks the best of the planetary images into your final image ready for enhancement. This interface is not overly complex, was up and working with it fairly quickly. You load the video file, ask it to do some quality analysis, then select your alignment points. You can then define up to six outputs that represent the percentage of the best frames stacked into a final image. But the best part to me is that it will also give you a quick and dirty preview - an image that has some post-processing enhancement already applied to it. That is genius as it allows me to do a quick assessment of my video in the field within a minute, and quick feedback is so good to have when trying to do things such as assess your focus and exposure.

Saturn 7/26/2019

I have lots to learn in order to get the most out of these tools, but I already feel that this trio has allowed me to up my game a bit this summer. Alright Mars apparition 2020 - bring it on!

The King Returns

This has been a wet and very cloudy few months. I don't think we've had more than a dozen really good nights since February - tons of clouds and an abundance of rain. And it has been a terrible tease to boot - I have on more than one occasion this spring trotted out the equipment only to have clouds move in within 30 minutes of setting up. But as June drew to a close the weather relented just enough to convince me to bring out the 6" Criterion and check in on Jupiter - king of the planets that came to opposition a couple weeks ago.

Jupiter is always interesting with the cloud bands, satellite phenomena, and of course Great Red Spot. But right now we have a couple of interesting developments going on that are further motivation to spend some time observing him. First, as reported in many places such as Sky and Telescope's June 2019 edition, the equatorial band is noticeably darker. According to the article this represents a clearing of the high, white ammonia cloud deck that normally resides in this wide swath of the planet. Furthermore, scientists have recently recognized that there seems to be a pattern to this - the clouds dissipating every 6-7 years and reforming after about a year.

The first night was the old Lucy (the weather) pulling the football from Charlie Brown (me). The seeing was pretty unsteady and then batches of clouds started rolling in like waves at the beach. I doggedly tried to capture some video, hitting the pause button when clouds dimmed Jove and resuming when he peeked out again. But I pretty much captured garbage and ended up really frustrated. Not throw the golf clubs into the water hazard frustrated but still muttering about the $%^# clouds.

The next night seemed better, certainly far less risk of an aborted session due to intruding clouds. But the seeing looked to be marginal as the front worked its way across the mid-Atlantic. While it wasn't the most stable view it was reasonable - I could see right away that the equatorial zone was indeed not the usual white zone but a very light tan. (For comparison see my 2016 posting with a shot of Jupiter). As an added bonus the GRS was just visible as it set on the preceding limb.

The Great Red Spot, while not positioned well on the evening of the 23rd, is the other big story. We have seen it shrinking over the last couple of decades, and now we are getting reports and images showing pieces of it being "torn off" and trailing away. It is so iconic as a part of Jupiter - I really hope that we are not witnessing its demise.

The next evening was the best of the three in terms of seeing, and Jupiter presented multiple cloud bands and a clearly muddled equatorial zone. Io also hovered nearby and was caught up in the video frames.

By now I was also getting more comfortable with FireCapture - new software that seems to do a better job of capturing video than the IC Capture that came with the Imaging Source camera. I also have begun exploring the PIPP (Planetary Imaging PreProcessor) application. Pretty pleased with the resulting image below which was captured using FireCapture, run through PIPP, and then post processing filters applied using Registax 6.

 It's hard to keep abreast of the new tools and techniques that enable amateur astronomers with modest equipment to capture images that they could only dream of 25 years ago!

Fabulous But Frosty

Well January 2019 is just about in the record books - and it was both kind and cruel to my observation quests. The "big events" that I was interested in were the lunar eclipse on January 20th and the Venus-Jupiter-Luna alignment at month's end. It was kind in that the skies were indeed clear - but cruel in terms of the deep freeze one had to endure to witness them!

It seemed doubtful for a while that those of us in the mid-Atlantic would see the eclipse thanks to "Winter Storm Harper". (Seriously - we need names for these now? Apparently the NWS does not go along with the idea which is the brain child of the Weather Channel - you know, the folks who stand out there bringing you live coverage of catastrophic weather events, like this. But I digress with my disdain for hype). I happened to be a little NW of Baltimore at my son's in Waynesboro PA, and by the time Sunday rolled around it looked like it would be clear - but also bitterly cold and windy. It was too much to pack the scope but I figured the camera & tripod was worth a go.

I took a couple shots around 8pm through some high, thin clouds and then decided I'd just rest a bit after a busy day with my grandson. I startled awake at about 10:40 p.m. just in time to see the Earth's shadow having nibbled away at the Moon's edge. I could last about 5 minutes or so of taking shots before retreating into the home to warm up, leaving the camera outside tucked up against the house. Even with the tripod the wind ruined probably a third of my shots.

An overexposed eclipsed Moon with M44 to left

Just as totality began the battery on the camera signaled it was about done, further testimony to how cold it was. I brought it inside to change it out and as expected the lens immediately dewed over. I left it near a warm spot and popped on the wide field lens. It's definitely darker up in Waynesboro so I was fairly happy with the shots where I tried to include some of the fainter stars and the famous Beehive cluster. Then with the telephoto warmed up and ready for action again I swapped out lenses again and took some of the eclipsed Moon. I have not seen any official reports (or unofficial for that matter) but to me this was a fairly dark eclipse - perhaps a 2 on the Danjon scale as the deepest part of the shadow was grayer than the usual deep orange.

A rather dark eclipse?

By a little after 1 a.m. I abandoned any thoughts of eclipse egress photography - my grandson would be up in about 5 hours and I needed to be functional 😴

The second celestial highlight was the aforementioned appulse of Moon, Venus, and Jupiter. For several weeks I've admired the dance of Jupiter and Venus as old Jove slowly emerged from twilight to reach and then overtake the dazzling Venus. Those early morning January skies with the pair amid the stars of Scorpio were gorgeous - the combination of the winter transparency and the fewer lights made me literally stop and linger for a minute or two before climbing into the car to head off to work.

Venus & Jupiter mid-January

So with the waning crescent joining it was was time to grab the camera once more. But mother nature once again exacted a cold price with another Polar Vortex descending upon us (I'll let that piece of WC fluff slide...). Although technically colder than eclipse night the winds were not nearly as bad. That being said, it was a brief session admiring the alignment and grabbing a few quick shots before heading down the road.

So all in all January worked out just fine. After all, you can do something to fight off the cold, but with overcast skies you're just outta luck!

Venus - Moon - Jupiter January 31, 2019