Planets, Orionids and Zodiacal Light

Meteor with Venus, Jupiter and Mars rising in zodiacal light during the Orionids, October 22, 2015

Who saw or photographed some Orionid meteors over the last night or two?  In the photo above, a meteor crosses over the path of Venus, Jupiter and Mars, rising in zodiacal light during the Orionid meteor shower around 5 am this morning, October 22, 2015.

Although the streak is clearly a meteor (note the characteristic green color), technically it's not an Orionid, since the radiant point for the Orionid meteor shower is out of the upper right corner of the frame.  So this meteor is traveling at nearly a right angle to what its trajectory would be if it were one of the Orionids.

It may however be a Leo Minorid meteor, since its radiant point is to the left of Venus Jupiter and Mars this morning.  The Leo Minorid meteor shower peaks the morning of October 23, but it is a minor shower with an estimated 2 meteors per hour, but minor showers sometimes have an unexpectedly high rate, so tomorrow morning could offer a surprise from the Leo Minorids along with after-peak Orionids.

There are also random, sporadic meteors, particularly in the early morning, as your position on the earth rotates to the leading side of the earth as it travels through space rotating around the sun.

The Zodiacal light is sunlight shining off of dust in our solar system, the light tilted up from the lower left in the photo above.  You can experience the Zodiacal light, or false dawn, this time of year when a a pyramid-shaped glow can be seen in the east an hour before dawn's first light (or 80 to 120 minutes before sunrise). This light is caused by sunlight reflecting off of dust particles in space in the same plane as earth and can resemble the lights from a city. It is tilted to follow the same ecliptic plane that the planets travel in.  Zodiacal light is best seen under dark skies, in places with minimal light pollution.  You can catch the Zodiacal light for another 2 or 3 mornings this month, but after that the moon will be too full and it will no longer set early enough to leave you with a dark enough sky to see this pre-dawn light.

You can see the Zodiacal light as the planets rise in this time-lapse video captured this morning before and twilight light started to brighten the sky:

Venus, Jupiter and Mars in Zodiacal light during the Orionid meteor shower this morning

The 2015 Perseid Meteor Shower is Underway

Perseid Meteor and Milky Way Over the Sierra Nevada, by Jeff Sullivan on 500px

Comet Swift-Tuttle only passes the earth and circles the sun once every 133 years, but the earth passes through its trail of dust every year.  The debris field is large, so Perseid meteors may be seen on nights from July 17 through August 24.  The earth passes through the most dense portion of the comet's dust trail on the night of August 12-13, so that is when the peak, or maximum hourly rate of meteors, will be seen.  The rates will also be high throughout the August 11 - 14 period, so you can look for Perseid meteors any or all nights this week.

Below is a video that I assembled in 2009 from several nights photographing the Perseid meteor shower.  It is a time-lapse video that condenses several hours of meteor activity into seconds of video:


Not everything that moves in the video are meteors; the meteors are the brief streaks of light, the slower ones are airplanes.  As you see the Milky Way and stars move, that is from the rotation of the earth.

You can also see haze that is smoke from forest fires that year.  I may have similar challenges this year due to the fires currently raging during California's drought.  Already the photo I captured above from last Saturday night is darker than usual, due to smoke from a wildfire.

Chasing the Aurora Borealis in the Eastern Sierra, June 23, 2015

I read online yesterday that a particularly intense solar magnetic storm might enable the aurora borealis to be visible across much of the United States, as far south as San Francisco and Lake Tahoe. I could see from early results posted from the East Coast and Missouri that the event was progressing as expected.

The aurora borealis tends to be strongest in the location on the earth opposite the sun, and at 11 pm the aurora forecasting apps were showing the strongest magnetic field dipping down in the middle of the United States, so I had roughly one to two hours before that strongest part of the storm would reach us in the Western U.S..

The best visibility of the aurora would be to the north, but I live south of the light pollution from the Carson Valley and Minden/Gardnerville Nevada. There is also the Washignton Fire sending smoke in that direction, so I headed a few miles south then up into the Sierra Nevada to get further from lights and above the smoke.

Partway up the steep road I shot to the north, but the light pollution was too great, so I continued higher.  I tried shooting more to the east to cut out light pollution to the north, and there was a promising increase in green and red color in the sky, but common airglow can cause both of those colors, so I needed to try shooting a sequence of images and create a time-lapse video to see if the red-pink color on the horizon would dance like you see in aurora videos.

Sure enough, there was some aurora color on the horizon, and it gained in strength, shooting upwards into space and dancing across the sky:

 

I shot the time-lapse video from the high, dry, clear skies of the Sierra Nevada, near the Little Antelope Pack Station above the town of Walker, California: https://youtu.be/NaQiOQrQ_S8?list=PL6012D9822C1BA1E7

For comparison, I also shot the sky more to the south- southeast, to get a reading of the ambient green and red airglow colors in the sky.

It was cool to see the aurora borealis all the way down here along the California - Nevada border.  The forecast for tonight isn't quite as strong, but it's a rare opportunity that is hard to resist, so I may have to go back out and try again!


           
www.JeffSullivanPhotography.com

The rays of red light could be 65 miles high above the earth, and 600 miles north!

Moon, Venus Jupiter Will Line Up Tonight

Tonight we'll have the Moon, Venus and Jupiter lining up in the evening twilight sky, with a 9% crescent moon about 9% high in the sky around 9 pm (in a mid-California latitude).

Yosemite Valley isn't normally where I would go to see expansive views of the night sky, but on February 24, 2012 I was fortunate to arrive at Sentinel Bridge over the Merced River right before the moon set behind the valley rim, with Venus and Jupiter lined up above. I was able to capture this frame with the moon and Venus reflected.

Tomorrow evening the moon will be brighter and set later, forming a triangle with Jupiter and Venus.  With the evening sky also darker, it will be reminiscent of the Venus, Jupiter Moon triangle I caught last August:

Photos of the Moon, Venus and Jupiter Conjunction August 23, 2014
http://activesole.blogspot.com/2014/08/photos-of-moon-venus-jupiter-conjunction.html

Here's a photo of those three members of our solar system rising on the eastern horizon:

Then Saturday night the moon will be a brighter, wider crescent, and set later in a flatter triangle configuration, more reminiscent of this one earlier this year:

Crescent 9% moon set tonight, then Venus, Jupiter. Seen in Feb video w/Mars: http://t.co/2U0lvFpySU #astronomy pic.twitter.com/GwA8WbF5z0

— Jeff Sullivan Photo (@JeffSullPhoto) June 18, 2015

The easiest event of the next 3 nights to catch with earthly terrain will be the more linear configuration tonight, while twilight light still lights up your foreground landscape.

At the very end of the month, on the night of June 30, Venus and Jupiter will pass within 1/3 of a degree of each other, less than the diameter of the moon.  It will be similar to the conjunction (appulse) that I caught last year on August 18 on my Canon 70 with EF 70-200 mm lens and 2X teleconverter, but this time Venus will appear as a crescent.

Applause for the Appulse: Moon, Mars and Venus

Venus, Mars and the moon setting over Mt. Whitney

I thought that I was having a good day to catch some nice photos of the crescent moon by Mars and Venus last month, setting behind Mount Whitney.

Then I put a sequence of photos together in a time-lapse video, and the event came to life!


I posted a link to my Twitter account @JeffSullPhoto, and +Philip Plait embedded the copy of my video on Vimeo in a post on his +Bad Astronomy blog on +Slate:
"Venus, Mars, and the Moon Go to Sleep".
He tweeted a link:

Watch a short, lovely time-lapse of the Moon, Mars, & Venus going night-night. http://t.co/fU7Z2HgHoJ pic.twitter.com/HaU6MMpSym
— Phil Plait (@BadAstronomer) March 8, 2015

Then the +California Academy of Sciences tweeted a link as well:

Oh-so-lovely time-lapse of when Venus, Mars & the Moon recently "met" in the sky: http://t.co/gLbZeXZoNO #appulse pic.twitter.com/glqzmeL2hG
— CA AcademyOfSciences (@calacademy) March 9, 2015

It's cool to have astronomers and scientists recognize and share my astrophotography!  Check out Phil's blog post if you have the time.  He always adds some nice scientific context.  What most of us call a "conjunction" is actually called an "appluse".

Massive Asteroid BL86 Approaches Earth

Mountain-sized asteroid BL86 came hurtling towards its near-miss with earth today, and I caught it on my camera as it approached late Sunday night. Here's the time-lapse video, both an edge to edge 16:9 crop at 200mm, then a second copy cropped to 1080p. Look in the center as it moves from lower right center to upper left center:



 Both clips in the video were assembled from 119 separate images of the sky, taken with a full frame DSLR and 70-200 mm lens, on a star-tracking mount. Here's a composite image assembled from the first 60 photos.

If you missed the asteroid Sunday and Monday, +NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory has a chart to help you find it in the sky into the night of Tuesday, January 27 in the U.S., Wednesday January 28 GMT:
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news188.html

Although the asteroid is bright enough to see with binoculars, it probably won't do you much good to try to find it that way. The asteroid moves so slowly, it's very difficult to tell from the smaller stars in the background.  In the time-lapse video you see it move because several minutes of time are shown in each second of video.

Since it's easier to see the asteroid that way, I just pointed my camera where the asteroid should be, and I set an external timer to have it capture photos for a couple of hours. I used a star-tracking mount so the area of sky it was in wouldn't move away form where the camera was pointing.

 For the video, you can adjust the playback on YouTube from its standard low resolution playback to as high as 1080p HD.

 I also have a copy down-converted to 720p HD on Vimeo if that works better for your Internet connection:


Asteroid BL86 Approaches Earth from Jeff Sullivan on Vimeo.

Four Nights With Comet Lovejoy

Comet C/2014 Q2 Lovejoy on the evening of Monday, January 19, 2015.

Last night I enjoyed the best viewing conditions for capturing Comet Lovejoy so far.  Seen under the dark skies of California's Eastern Sierra region and with no moon in the sky, even its long tail showed up well.  Knowing where to look (near Pleiades) I was able to just see it with my eyes, and find it with a 70-200 mm lens.  Using a Canon 70D DLSR, its "crop sensor" gave me the equivalent of 320 mm focal length.  I even added a 2X teleconverter to bring the effective focal length to a massive 640 mm!

I used an external interval timer to capture one-minute exposures until the camera's battery power ran out nearly 2.5 hours later.  I had the camera placed on an inexpensive star-tracking mount to follow the comet as the earth rotated.  I converted the resulting 147 exposures to video, and with 640 mm zoom, over the course of 2 hours you can see the comet move against the starry background!

Here are the time-lapse video results of several nights shooting, at effective focal lengths of 28 mm, 35 mm, 320 mm and 640 mm.  The video is best viewed full screen, switched to HD 1080p quality:


I hope that I get more clear nights this month to shoot the comet, as it gradually moves away from the earth and the sun on its big lap of our solar system.

Geminid Meteor Shower 2014 in HD

Time-lapse video footage from the Geminid meteor shower on the nights of December 13 and 14, 2014. Shot at Topaz Lake in the Eastern Sierra region, on the California-Nevada border.

Here's a description of the Geminid meteor shower from NASA:

"Geminids are pieces of debris from an object called 3200 Phaethon. Long thought to be an asteroid, Phaethon is now classified as an extinct comet. Basically it is the rocky skeleton of a comet that lost its ice after too many close encounters with the sun. Earth runs into a stream of debris from 3200 Phaethon every year in mid-December, causing meteors to fly from the constellation Gemini. When the Geminids first appeared in the early 19th century, shortly before the U.S. Civil War, the shower was weak and attracted little attention. There was no hint that it would ever become a major display."

Composite photos showing multiple 2014 Geminid meteors

I'll be teaching photographers how to capture meteor showers in a photography workshop during the Geminid meteor shower in Death Valley in December 2015: www.JeffSullivanPhotography.com

#Geminids #meteorshower #science #breakingnews #astronomy +Death Valley Workshops 

Perseid Meteor Shower 2014 Continues as Moon Rises Later

Perseid meteor over mining ruins, Eastern Sierra

I set up my camera Friday night to take a sequence of shots so I could make a composite all of the meteors I caught in the hour before the moon rise, but I only caught this one Perseid meteor. I still made a composite photo however, since the best Milky Way was when I first set up and the meteor came later as the moon was rising, washing out the view of the Milky Way. So everything in this photo is exactly where it happened, but the 11:29 pm meteor is effectively time-shifted into this image from 10:32 pm.

Thanks to +Angela Fritz of the +Capital Weather Gang at the +Washington Post for blogging two of my earlier 2014 Perseid meteor shower photos over the weekend:

Perseids delight photographers despite the supermoon http://t.co/zFOaBV8cxj @capitalweather @angelafritz #astronomy pic.twitter.com/NCv719Odym
— Jeff Sullivan Photo (@JeffSullPhoto) August 18, 2014

In past years I've captured time-lapse video of the Perseid meteor shower, as in the first 1:49 of this 7 minute video:

Venus - Jupiter Conjunction at Dawn Today

Venus and Jupiter put on a show in the sky this morning as sunrise approached.  As seen from earth these two bright planets appeared to pass within 0.3 degrees of each other in the sky.

For the next shot I used a crop sensor camera to get a little more effective zoom out of my lenses:
Canon 70D, 70-200mm f/4 IS L lens, 2X teleconverter
400mm focal length x 1.6 crop factor = 640mm equivalent

I uploaded one of my shots to Flickr, and +Universe Today had already blogged it moments later.  Thanks +Nancy Atkinson!

Spectacular Venus-Jupiter Conjunction Graces the Dawn http://t.co/B8EGvM8gOl @universetoday #astronomy #space #news pic.twitter.com/YsAqbwFfKh
— Jeff Sullivan Photo (@JeffSullPhoto) August 18, 2014

Here's a link to the blog post by Universe Today:

"Astrophotos: Spectacular Venus-Jupiter Conjunction Graces the Dawn" http://t.co/ZpfYKZObWT pic.twitter.com/h58ORw48UM
— Universe Today (@universetoday) August 18, 2014

Transit of Venus in Front of the Sun, June 2012

The planet Venus (black dot) passes in front of the sun, as seen from earth

When the planet Venus was scheduled to pass in front of the sun in early June 2012 I wanted to capture the event, but I didn't want to simply record a dark spot in front of a bright one. So I decided to place earth-bound objects in front of the sun to capture the Sun, Earth and Venus in the same shot. And why not... the next opportunity to capture a Venus transit across the face of the sun wouldn't come for another 105 years!

There will a a transit of Mercury across the sun on May 9, 2016.  This article on timeanddate.com can tell you when the mercury transit may be available from your location.  It also provides links to information on proper eye protection!

"After centuries of trying, only photographic technology could measure the ‘Transit of Venus’ and tell us our position in the solar system." - +Royal Observatory Greenwich

#astrophoto2014 #astronomy #science #astrophotography

Delta II Rocket Image Sequence from OCO-2 Launch

Four minutes during NASA's OCO-2 satellite launch from Vandenberg AFB, California

NASA sent the OCO2 satellite up on a Delta II rocket last Wednesday morning, and I captured it on several different cameras at once.

+Philip Plait (The Bad Astronomer) goes into some detail on the satellite in his blog post NASA Launches a New Eye on Carbon Dioxide, so I'll stick to the photographic detail in the following sequence of photos matched to their corresponding events in the launch timeline.

2:55:53 a.m.

T-minus 30 seconds. SRB ignitors will be armed at T-minus 11 seconds.

The launch ignition sequence will begin at T-minus 2 seconds when a launch team member triggers the engine start switch. The process begins with ignition of the two vernier thrusters and first stage main engine start. The three ground-lit solid rocket motors then light at T-0 for liftoff.

2:56:23 a.m. 

LIFTOFF! Liftoff of the Delta 2 rocket with the Orbiting Carbon Observatory 2 to watch the Earth breathe from space!

T+plus 15 seconds. The launch vehicle is departing Vandenberg Air Force Base, heading south for the trek downrange over the Pacific carrying the OCO 2 spacecraft.

T+plus 36 seconds. Delta has broken the sound barrier, rapidly accelerating on the power of its first stage main engine and the three ground-lit strap-on solid-fuel boosters.

2:57 a.m. 

T+plus 50 seconds. The rocket has flown through the area of maximum aerodynamic pressure in the lower atmosphere.

2:57 a.m. 

T+plus 1 minute, 6 seconds. All three ground-start solid rocket boosters have burned out. The Delta 2's first stage RS-27A main engine is providing the sole thrust for the next couple of minutes.

2:58 a.m.

T+plus 1 minute, 50 seconds. The ATK-made solid rocket boosters have jettisoned from the first stage. They remained attached until the rocket cleared off-shore oil rigs.

T+plus 2 minutes. Delta now weighs half of what it did at liftoff two minutes ago.

2:59 a.m.

T+plus 2 minutes, 41 seconds. Delta now traveling at Mach 5.

T+plus 3 minutes. The first stage main engine still firing well. The Aerojet Rocketdyne powerplant consumes kerosene fuel and liquid oxygen to produce about 237,000 pounds of thrust.

3:00 a.m. 

T+plus 3 minutes, 34 seconds. The Delta 2 is now passing a speed of Mach 10.

3:01 a.m.

T+plus 4 minutes, 39 seconds. MECO. The first stage main engine cutoff is confirmed and the spent stage has been jettisoned.

T+plus 4 minutes, 44 seconds. The Delta's second stage has ignited! The engine is up and running.

T+plus 4 minutes, 51 seconds. The rocket's nose cone enclosing the satellite payload has been jettisoned.

3:02 a.m.

The rocket is at an altitude of 82.7 nautical miles, a downrange distance of 360 nautical miles and a velocity of 11,127 mph.

Here's NASA's diagram of the sequence (click on it  for a much larger view):



















Here's the whole sequence put together in a time-lapse video covering 3 hours prior to 1 hour after launch:

If night photography looks like something you'd like to master, I'm scheduling a night photography session at California's Bodie State Historic Park on July 25: http://www.jeffsullivanphotography.com/blog/bodie-night-photography-workshops/

Digital photography differs from film photography in many important respects, and nowhere is that more true than for night photography.  I've invested the sleepless nights learning the techniques and trade-offs to save you time and money required to discover it all for yourself.

NASA Launch This Week: Orbiting Carbon Observatory

NASA Orbiting Carbon Observatory Launch from Jeff Sullivan on Vimeo.

What happens when a time-lapse astrophotographer goes to a NASA launch?  Enjoy my latest edit of this new footage, just uploaded to +Vimeo :https://vimeo.com/99906771.  
NASA's OCO-2 Orbiting Carbon Observatory will take 1 million measurements daily at a resolution of one square mile, enabling the analysis of local, regional, national and global CO2 emissions and trends.
My new blog: www.JeffSullivanPhotography.com
#NASA #science #news #space #climatescience #NASAJPL #NASASocial #OCO2