Last Wednesday night we lucked out with clear sky conditions and relatively good seeing to observe something amazing: the transit of an exoplanet!
HD80606b is a planet that is four times larger than Jupiter, orbiting one star of a binary star system 190 light-years away from earth. Every 111 days, this planet passes in front of its star as viewed from earth. Continue Reading…
Auriga is the “Charioteer” in the sky, and is quite prominent in the sky now. Its brightest star is Capella. A fairly bright star (3rd magnitude) not far away from Capella called epsilon Aurigae is undergoing one of its unusual dimmings. These happen once every 27.1 years. It should reach its minimum light state around December 21st. If you look up at Auriga, you might notice that something looks “different” in the outline of that constellation.
Right now and over the next two years Continue Reading…
Another nova was tentitively discovered by H. Nishimura in Japan and I went to the observatory Tues night to see if I could confirm it. Yup – its there! I took an AAVSO finder chart wit me, but it was scaled for the Stellarvue D80. I actually used the LX200 scope with a smaller field of view so it took a little “star-hopping” to locate the star field. I measured a position of RA 18h 43m 45.62sec, Dec -07deg 36min 42.0sec. I measured it at about magnitude 8.2, so it appears to still be brightening from Continue Reading…
I spent some time last Saturday evening taking images of some galaxies. I wanted to get a good wide field image of M33 in Triangulum which was nearly overhead. M33 (along with the Andromeda Galaxy) is part of our local group. It is fairly large (being relatively close by at 3 million light years) and very faint with a small star like core and some bright star forming regions.
The Starlight Express H9C camera on the 80mm APO refractor at 480mm focal length gave a field of view of almost 1 degree. Continue Reading…
Image of the nova – a star that was not visible there before.
A little while back, I subscribed to the special notice bulletins from the American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO). I thought that it might be interesting to hear about unusal variable stars, novas and perhaps even a supernova should one of those appear. One of these notices arrived in my inbox on Monday. There was a newly discovered nova in the constellation of Sagittarius. I wondered, could we observe this at the Harken Observatory?
Since I had never tried to do this before, I could not resist trying! The weather map showed Continue Reading…
The CCD cameras at the observatory are very light sensitive but have a smaller number of “megapixels” as compared to the digital camera that you may be using at home. The CCD chip in many digital cameras today might also be physically larger in area which corresponds to a wider view of the sky. I have been Continue Reading…
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