February 2022 Stargazing Photos

I made another foray out into a cold winter’s night. This time I ended up in Crossroad’s Park because Marymoor was unavailable. It turns out that Crossroad’s Park is a decent place for stargazing. I spent 2 or 3 hours at the park and got some good pictures but not as many as you might think because the objects I was observing required long exposure times. My heated gloves kept my hands nice and toasty but my feet got cold. So, I ordered heated socks the next day. Being dressed properly for the weather makes for a much more comfortable and successful night of stargazing.

I’ve decided to cover particular astronomy topics in some of my blog postings. This month’s topic is…

Stellar Magnitude

Magnitude is the measure of apparent brightness of a celestial object. The ancient Greeks divided the stars visible to the unaided eye into six magnitudes. The brightest objects they saw were given magnitude one and the dimmest were magnitude six. Viewing objects of magnitude 7+ requires binoculars or a telescope. Some objects are brighter than magnitude one, their magnitudes are expressed as zero or even negative numbers. The magnitude of Venus varies between -3.8 and -4.9. The Sun, at magnitude -27, is the brightest object in the sky. “Magnitude” is often abbreviated as “mag.”

Stars

I used to think that I could get a purer image of a star’s color if I adjusted my telescope’s viewing parameters but I was wrong. Everyone’s pictures of stars are mostly white with the star’s true color just showing around the edges of the star. Even pictures of stars taken by the Hubble Space Telescope look just like my pictures taken with my Unistellar evScope.

The brightest star seen from Earth is Sirius, the Dog Star. Its magnitude is -1.44. Sirius is easy to find in the Winter sky. Follow the line from the three stars that make up Orion’s belt down and to the left until you see a very bright star. That is Sirius. You can see that my picture of Sirius is bigger and brighter than any of the other stars in my entire blog.

Sirius is part of the constellation Canis Major, the Big Dog. It lies at a distance of 8.60 light years from Earth. Sirius is the lower point of the Winter Triangle that is made up of Procyon, Betelgeuse and, of course, Sirius. It is a blue, white star.

Sirius is the only star I know of that – on rare occasions – can be seen during the day. The next time this should be possible is on or around March 27, 2022. Look for Sirius high in the sky around an hour before sunset. Of course, very clear skies and haze free air will be needed to see the star.

Rigel has a magnitude of 0.18. It is the seventh brightest star in the sky, and the brightest in the constellation Orion. It is Orion’s right foot. (Betelgeuse is the second brightest star in Orion with a magnitude of 0.45. See the January 2022 blog entry for more information.) Rigel is a blue supergiant nearly sixty thousand times as luminous as our sun. Rigel is 860 light years from the Earth.

Nebulae

I decided to redo a couple of the nebula photos I took last month with longer exposures to see how much the extra time improves the pictures. I think these photos are about as good as they can be when taken with my telescope that does not support filters or nonvisible light. (Remember to click on the pictures to see bigger, more detailed versions of them.)

My latest picture of the Horsehead Nebula took 25 minutes to get. While this picture is definitely better than last month’s photo (3-minute exposure), it is still faint. You can see more of the red haze that defines the dark nebula that makes up the horsehead. The head is dark and in the center of the picture. The head is facing up. It is surrounded by a faint, red glow that “highlights” the head. (See last month’s entry to learn more about the Horsehead Nebula.)

My latest picture of the Flame Nebula took 19 minutes to get. Up from 3-minutes last month. There is better definition to the flames but the color is still the same. The nebula is an emission nebula that is near the eastern (leftmost) star in Orion’s belt. (See last month’s entry to learn more about the Flame Nebula.)

The Running Man Nebula is the one new nebula in this blog entry. I think I got a pretty good picture with a 15-minute exposure. The Running Man Nebula (NGC 1977) is a reflection nebula that can be found in the Orion constellation, 1,460 lightyears away. It’s located along the sword of Orion, north of the Orion Nebula, and is known as the Running Man Nebula because many observers think it bears a resemblance to a human figure running with its arms in motion. It was discovered by William Herschel in 1786.

The Running Man is just below the center of my photo. The man is horizontal and looks like he is running towards the top of the photo. His legs are on the left and his head and torso are on the right.

Planets

No planets this month. I still want to get pictures of the inner planets but they are still only visible in the pre-dawn sky. I haven’t been able to convinced myself to get up that early to go stargazing. It shouldn’t take too much longer for them to reappear in the evening sky.

Comet

Comet Borrelly is the first comet I have been able to see and photographed. I was pretty excited to get my first comet even though the picture could have been better. The comet is in the lower left part of the image. You can see the comet’s nucleus, a haze around the nucleus, and a small part of the comet’s tail. I had hoped to get more of its tail but, for some reason, I was not able to keep my telescope focused on the comet for more than about a minute. That might have been because of the glare from the ambient light you can see in the lower half of the picture. I took my picture just 11 days after the comet’s closest approach to the sun.

Comet Borrelly is a periodic comet that takes approximately 6.9 years to orbit the Sun. It was discovered by Alphonse Louis Nicolas Borrelly on Dec. 28, 1904, in Marseille, France. The spacecraft Deep Space 1 did a flyby of the comet in 2001. DS1 took up close pictures of the comet’s nucleus. Those pictures show that the nucleus looks like a chicken leg or a bowling pin.

Star Clusters

The Christmas Tree Cluster doesn’t look much like a Christmas tree in this picture. That’s because the cluster is in front of the Cone nebula. When seen together, the two look like a Christmas tree with the stars of the cluster as the lights on the tree. Unfortunately, the nebula does not emit visible light so the nebula is not in my picture.

The Christmas Tree Cluster is a young open cluster located in the constellation Monoceros. It is part of the NGC 2264 region, along with the Cone Nebula and the Fox Fur Nebula, and belongs to the Monoceros OB1 association, a loose association of very young stars located in the Orion Arm of the Milky Way.

Galaxies

NGC 891 (also known as Caldwell 23, the Silver Sliver Galaxy, and the Outer Limits Galaxy) is an edge-on unbarred spiral galaxy about 30 million light-years away in the constellation Andromeda. It was discovered by William Herschel on October 6, 1784. The galaxy appeared in the end credits of The Outer Limits TV show and that’s how it got its nickname.

NGC 891 looks the same way the Milky Way would look like when viewed edge-on. Some astronomers have even noted how similar to NGC 891 the Milky Way looks as seen from the Southern Hemisphere and, in fact, both galaxies are considered very similar in terms of luminosity and size.