Month: May 2025

Rev Dr Sam Wells, Vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields

And in the Big News today from a Faith Perspective, Happy Nearly V.E. Day everybody!

It’s like Chariots of Fire. It’s all about winning. No, it’s not about winning. It’s about not winning. It’s about equality. Or possibly belonging and being different. I know, it’s about being non-violent. No, no, I’ve got it. It’s about Jesus. That’s it, Jesus winning is what it’s about. No, wait a minute, Jesus not winning. Jesus is dead, sort of. It must be that Jesus is with us even when he’s sort of dead. Yes, I’ve got it.

Happy Nearly V.E. Day everybody! It’s about Jesus being with us even when he’s sort of dead. Phew!

https://mega.nz/file/Bq9lRJAQ#Zs1nupBEcJS-PkaF-MXqvfAITgwXBMy0BhVbpE_kwWU

First Results with Equatorial Mount

The Seestar S50 smart telescope comes with what’s called an alt-azimuth mount. It can move left to right and up and down and so track a point object as it moves across the sky. However, unless you want to take a picture of a point object, like a single star, this will only partly compensate for motion across the sky. Extended objects, which is just about everything, also appear to rotate as they move.

Here’s a timelapse movie that shows how an attempt to image M106 is hampered by this effect.

http://www.platitudes.org.uk/m106_edit.mkv

This makes it harder to stack frames. It also means that a lot of frames get rejected due to star trails and other unwanted artefacts.

As summer approaches, the amount of darkness is becoming less and less. Last night, the moon didn’t set until well after 1am. It starts to get light at 4am. With cloud coming and going, the window where images can be taken of deep sky objects is very slim.

However, between 2am and 3am this morning, the moon was gone and there was no cloud. I put the smart scope on an equatorial mount. This has one axis pointed at the celestial north pole. It allows the scope to track both the movement and the rotation of the night sky. This timelapse shows the difference when imaging the galaxy M51, the Whirlpool Galaxy.

http://www.platitudes.org.uk/m51eq.mkv

Not only is the rotation gone, nearly all of the frames, for the full hour of observing were kept. This is the result.

The Dumbbell Nebula and Markarian’s Chain

M27, the Dumbbell Nebula, has made regular appearances on this blog. It’s a large “planetary nebula” blown off from the surface of a dead star, which now lies as a white dwarf at its centre.

https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/space-science/planetary-nebula

White dwarf’s themselves are fascinating objects. They have a mass similar to our sun, but compacted down to something the size of planet earth. They no longer generate energy and are in the process of cooling down. Eventually, they will become black dwarfs: dense, burnt out cinders. But since the time taken for a white dwarf to cool is calculated to be longer than the current age of the universe, no black dwarfs are currently expected to exist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_dwarf

My previous best effort for the dumbell was limited by the use of a manual telescope and camera. The colours here are false.

The other night, for the first time, I pointed the smart telescope at it. I took two, 5 minute, stacked exposures. One with the telescope’s light pollution filter (which makes the nebula brighter) and one with it’s infra-red and ultraviolet filter (which shows more stars). The result is a combination of the two.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumbbell_Nebula

At about 1,000 light years distance, The Dumbbell Nebula is on our cosmic doorstep. This was a rather pretty distraction from the real effort this week though. That was Markarian’s Chain, a long string of galaxies about 50 million light years away. They’re named after the Armenian astronomer Benjamin Markarian, who demonstrated that they were all part of the same group, moving through space together.

This is too large an object to fit in most telescope and camera combinations. It takes multiple images, patched together as a mosaic to build the whole picture. Fortunately, the smart telescope knows exactly how to do this. The following image took it four hours to assemble fully. This took several attempts, but I’m fairly happy with the result.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markarian%27s_Chain

I really recommend the full size version of this, seen on a big screen rather than a phone.

https://mega.nz/file/B9oxySBJ#bRNB8hOzvV-D8jSefOKfzTDKx-UQukrSghr6jZ1gxyc

I’m hoping to do even better some time soon. I’ve been experimenting with putting the smart scope on an “equatorial mount”. This allows it to track the apparent rotation of the sky by having a fixed axis that points at the north celestial pole. Initial efforts look good, but I need some clear, moon free, nights to really try it out properly. This would remove a lot of the rotation artifacts present in the above picture.