Located in the southern skies, NGC 3324 lies close to the great Carina Nebula complex. I’ve never had opportunity to see it with my eyes. Telescopic views show it about 9100 light years away. This image of Carina shows a small yellow box in the lower right corner as the location of NGC 3324. For a sense of size, Carina is about 4 full moons wide making 3324 rather small in diameter. Within the small yellow box is a smaller pink box. The subject of this post lies within that boundary.
There have been countless good images of Comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS during the recents weeks. Mine from last night isn’t special or better than those. I offer it here as an example of what a phone camera can do. I don’t normally use my phone for astrophotography. I prefer my Canon digital camera for its optics and zoom capability. I got a new Android Motorola phone a few months ago and wondered if its camera was able to do acceptable dark sky images. My Canon can be set to maximum 3200 ISO and 1 second exposure. The phone camera can also do 3200 but exposures of several seconds is possible in Pro mode. Here is the result using a 6 second exposure. The phone was mounted on a tripod. Focus was manual set to infinity. Shutter delay was set to 3 seconds to avoid shake. I think it was an acceptable result.
Moto g 5G – 3200 – 6 sec
For comparison, here is the image from the Canon two days earlier with 3200 and 1 sec exposure. It also has a little software processing. It is rather dark and missing some faint detail. But the focus is better when viewed enlarged on a computer screen.
This much anticipated comet finally became visible here in the central US at 42Ëš north latitude. Very clear skies the morning of 26 September allowed my wife and I an opportunity to see it. We knew it would be a challenge as we headed for a site with a clear view to the east. We brought binoculars and my camera with tripod. The comet rose a few minutes before 6 AM local time. The sky was just beginning to brighten some. We scanned the horizon back and forth hoping to spot it but to no avail. I set up my camera assuming it would probably capture something better than my 77 yr old eyes. It did. The comet is near the center of the yellow box in this unaltered image.
Doing amateur astronomy in the winter can be a challenge in the midwest. There are cloudy periods lasting a week or more. When it is clear, the temperatures and winds can be brutal. That is what happened this past week. Six days ago we got 12″ of heavy wet snow. There wasn’t much wind or cold with that storm. Three days later another storm came through. It dumped another foot of snow on most areas. Plus, it was colder and a windy storm. We were under a blizzard warning for the weekend. The wind carries a lot of ice crystals into the air creating beautiful effects like these sun dogs taken by an acquaintance not far from me.
Yesterday I got an email notice that the International Space Station was to pass quite close to the Moon at about 7:34 pm in a possible transit. There was no way I was going outside with my gear where it was -10ËšF. I looked for the Moon from a bedroom window. That was going to work. It was about 13Ëš above the horizon. The ISS would rise toward it from below. I put the camera on a tripod at the window and started recording as the time drew near. Here is the 10 seconds of video that resulted. It was not a transit but a good catch anyway. The sound on the video is from the furnace vent directly below the camera.
The annular eclipse of 14 Oct 2023 created a shadow upon the Earth visible from space by the GOES-16 weather satellite. It was imaged every 10 minutes in a number of wavelengths. The path of the shadow is depicted here by timeanddate dot com.
How I See It 