Oot and Aboot with Some Canadian Skeptic

10)Whirlpool Galaxy (M 51)
I took this on March 15.  I like this one because it was the first picture of a Galaxy that I've taken after the easy-to-find Andromeda Galaxy.  It's mostly invisible to the naked eye, and takes some knowledge of the sky to find, so this picture holds a special place in my heart not just because it's a pretty galaxy, but it was taken at a time when I was really starting to understand how to read the map of the sky.

9) Neptune
I know this picture doesn't look like much, but Neptune is absurdly hard to spot, even with an 8" scope like mine.  I like this picture because, like the Whirlpool Galaxy photo above, I had to know exactly where to look, but unlike the Whirlpool Galaxy, it's position changed slightly from one night to the next.  In mid-summer, Neptune crawled within close apparent distance to Jupiter, otherwise I doubt I would have been able to find it.  Considering that I was also in the light pollution of my old city of Peterborough, Ontario, I really shouldn't have been able to come out with such an obvious picture of a planet that wasn't discovered until the mid 1800's.

8) Comet Lulin
Comet Lulin was a double-tailed comet that flew through the bottom side of the constellation Leo during the month of February.  I had a little difficulty finding it, because the night that I was able to get out to the observatory, it was absurdly cold and the clouds kept playing peek-a-boo with me all night.  This image has been processed a little bit to bring out the rich green colour of the comet.  This was also my first comet photo, so I liked how fortunate it was that just as I was figuring out some pretty cool things I could do with my gear, a comet whizzed by!

7) Crescent Moon
This is just a simple composite stitch-together of 8 images taken through my 8" reflector in mid-Feburary.  I just really dig the epic-blackness of everything that isn't the moon and its craters.

6) Saturn & Saturn
I've always liked it when impressive results can come from cheap, easy-to-use technology.  The top shot of Saturn was taken by simply holding my Canon Powershot A340 (which is a standard, albeit outdated, point-and-shoot camera) up to the eyepiece, and zooming in.  No special equipment beyond the telescope, and this early-summer shot of Saturn shows clear ring contrast (though I'm fairly certain the pinkish hue is a digital artifact). The bottom shot was taken with my crappy cell-phone camera (no, I don't have an iPhone or anything like that....my cell phone is over 2 years old) held up to a 5.5" refractor.  No ring detail, but pretty impressive considering how low-tech I went!

5) Jupiter, with Io transiting
Mid summer, Io took an hour-long-transit in front of Jupiter, and the seeing (fancy-pants'd astronomer-word for atmospheric turbulence, usually in the form of moisture or smog) was really good that night.  This turned out to not only a capture of tiny-Io, but also a fairly decent picture of Jupiter as well.  The pinkish-blur in the middle-white band is Io, and the off-orange oval in between the dark band and lower white band is the Great Red Spot.

4) Venus
Another low-tech photo, all I did was use my DSLR with a telephoto...I like how the thin-crescent shape is clearly visible.  The black lines in the foreground are the tops of my neighbour's trees.  During march of this year, Venus was VERY close to the Earth, and it appeared as an extremely bright evening star, shining at around -4.7.  This photo was seen on Bad Astronomy (thanks, Phil!)

1) The Milky Way Galaxy
This image is a stack of two photos, with a combined 662-second exposure looking south-southeast on the evening of May 16, 2009.  The list of notable stars, clusters, nebulae and constellations is just too long to name, so I won't bother.  Besides, I think that kind of takes away something from the vast sense of wonder that I feel when I see shots like this.  This image has the centre of the galaxy in the right-side of the picture, and goes as far as the southern-tip of the "Summer Triangle" and the constellation, 'Sagitta'....so this shot covers barely one-quarter of the plane of the galaxy that can be seen at that time of year.  I needed a rather dark-sky to take this image, and considering where I live now, I can't imagine that I'll get a chance to get a shot like this again in the near future.  Furthermore, this image can be seen at the new Planetarium at Science North in Sudbury, Ontario, so if you're in the area, make sure you pop in and see my handiwork (I have about 5 pictures in the planetarium's pre-show).

So that's it for 2009!  I'd like to thank everyone who has been offering me kind words of support over the past year, and to Phil Plait, for drawing a lot of people to my blog right when this stuff was starting to take off for me.  I'd like to send a very special word of thanks to John Crossen, who runs the Buckhorn Observatory.  John has been a great help to me, and it's at his observatory where all of my deep-sky photography got done.  I'm going to be pretty busy with Skeptic North and holiday stuff over the coming weeks, but in the meantime, I hope you enjoyed the fruits of my astro-labour, and I hope to do this again next-year!





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