20131216 - ISON - Search and Rescue appears to have failed.

For the past few weeks, very much like when a yacht has been reporting missing, search and rescue have been out looking for this comet in distress.

At the beginning dozens, if not hundreds, of telescopes and binoculars swept the area of sky where the deathly remains of ISON hopefully could be found - but only if the remains were either large or dense enough to be seen.

There were a number of potential sightings by very experienced observers, though these potential sightings were always accompanied with health warnings. There was even a "sighting" report being circulated where someone had misunderstood the date format of a report which was of an earlier observation of the comet.

Everyone of these sightings needed to be followed up .... just in case someone has actually found the wreckage. Like most, I prefer for observers to post potential sightings, than for them to be sat on because of a concern of being wrong. There is always the danger though that they will get picked up by the media and misinterpreted - as is often the case, but we should never allow that to stop us making reports.

One of the good things about amateur observations are that they are distributed as soon as possible. Amateurs know that by putting out these possible sightings they may be able to be confirmed by someone in another Time Zone, before the object(s) have completely left, or are in the vicinity of that field of view.

Soon I expect the obituaries will start to be published telling us as much as possible about the life and death of ISON with the coroners verdict of Lost at Sea - sorry Lost in Space. As with all celebrities, much more will be written and published as more facts are discovered about ISON's life.

We only got to know her in her final years of life and know little of her childhood spent somewhere in the little know Oort cloud.  Someday in the distant future a little of what remains may arrive back at her original home.

                               -------------------------------------------------

I suspect that on posting this, within a day or two there will be more reports of seeing it, but as in real life there will be less suitable resources available to check.

From now on my time will be split, with Exoplanet Transits taking priority, but there will still be plenty of time for comets and other objects :) . This means that future Blogs will cover more subjects, including progress on a new SON observatory.

20131211 - A catch up on comet images

As I mentioned in the last post, the reaon for lack of entries it is not that nothing has been happening, but the reverse!

A comment to the previous post exclaimed surprise at the time that processing the images take.

Let us go through a simple outline processing the comet images that I now follow. I will cover an observing run another time.

OK then, I have finished and observing run and closed down the observatory. What next?

On the computer there may be as many as 500+ images from the observing run all held in a directory named after the evening before's date in reverse order. Today is the 11th December 2013, so the observing run that could have started yesterday evening and finished at daybreak today so the directory would be named 20131210.

I then create a number of subdirectories named after the objects I have imaged. Where I have imaged the same object in two different ways then I create two subdirectories. Into these subdirectories I copy the various groups of files. There could be up to a hundred or more image files in each subdirectory.

The images in each of the subdirectories need to be reduced (or calibrated). Data reduction This is to take out inconsistencies. If you want to read more about it here is a link that explains the basics. The reduced files are put into a subdirectory - we do not overwrite the original files as we need to keep these.

After this has been done what happens next depends on what type of observations have taken place on different classifications of objects.

I will now describe what I do for single framed images of comets. My starting point is a folder of reduced images of a comet. There maybe 100 images and at a quick glance you would think that they are all the same, but there are not. A comet is moving against the background of stars. If we looked at each of the images carefully you would note the comet, especially as it gets nearer to the Sun will be in a slightly different position against the stars.

We are interested in the comet - not the stars. Let us say that each of the images is a 10 seconds exposure. We have a hundred and we need to overlay each of the images so that the comet overlays itself and not the stars. A number of programmes can do this, but I have not found one better than Astrometrica . Not only can it stack the comets - called Stack and Track the programme can many other things including astrometery and photometry (where is it and how bright is it).

This exercise leaves me with a single combined image that I can save and its brightness (magnitude).

I can now load this image into another programme and prepare it for submission.

At the moment some of the images are shown here, sent to the British Astronomical Association, shown in a few Facebook groups including Comet Watch and CIOC_ISON and also shortly to the University College London.

We do not delete any of the observations because you do not know when they may be of use. A good example is the UCL where I will be going back in time to find images that meet their needs.  


Here then is a gallery of some of the images taken since the last images until the 7th December:


SON@OSC (Searchlight Observatory Network at the Observatorio Sierra Contraviesa, Granada, Spain)
Observers Tony Angel and Caisey Harlingten
4" F4 Refractor ST8 Clear bin 1x1
FOV 115.5 x 77.7 arcmin
North at top

C/2013 R1 - Lovejoy - 2nd December

C/2013 R1 - Lovejoy - 2nd December

5th December

C/2013 R1 Lovejoy - 5th December

C/2012 R1 Lovejoy - 5th December

6th December

C/2012 R1 Lovejoy - 6th December

C/2012 R1 Lovejoy - 6th December

7th December

C/2012 R1 Lovejoy - 7th December

C/2012 R1 Lovejoy - 7th December

C/2012 X1 Linear - 7th December

C/2012 X1 Linear - 7th December

C/2013 V3 Nevski - 7th December

C/2013 V3 Nevski - 7th December

2nd December morning - Comet C/2013 R1 Lovejoy and C/2013 V3 Nevski and a little on ISON

After nearly a week of cloudy skies I had a good observing run yesterday morning :)

I first went to Comet Lovejoy. I was using the wide field 4" F4 Refractor along with an ST8 CCD Camera. This comet is getting better, brighter and clearer each time I observe it. It was discovered by Terry Lovejoy in Australia, this is his 2nd Christmas Comet and I will say more about him in another post. He is most certainly an astronomer's astronomer. It is visible to the naked eye and well worth looking for.

I had decided that I wanted to image the whole of the comet, which because of its length meant that I would have to take a series of images, starting with its head and working along the tail.

I took them between UT 2013-12-02 5:00:34.063   and  2013-12-02T05:14:50.329 . Each image has an FOV of FOV 116.5 x 77.7 arcmins - north is on the left! You really need to click on the image to see it better!

I took seven images.each 1 minute exposure - no binning - and overlaid them.

Using simple trig the comet as displayed is a touch over 5 degrees in length. It was not until I processed the images that I realised that I had not captured the full length of the tale. I was not able to do a retake this morning, so fingers crossed for tomorrow, but it will need this evening's winds to drop. :( If it is clear then I will do x2 binning but keep the exposure time to 1 minute. That will bring out the furthest parts of the tail. As this will produce smaller images it will make it easier to create the overall image. The comet is moving against the back drop of stars, so I have to move onto taking the next image directly after the previous one, (partially guessing I am moving the right way :) ). so that there is no perceptible change.

As well as the above image I took a series of shorter exposures of the comet head. These exposures are between half a second and ten seconds. I also took a colour image as well. These are still to be processed. I used a series of the shorter images with Astrometrica by Herbert Raab to get a N Magnitude of 8.8

The next comet I images was C/2013 V3 Nevski. It is quite recently discovered - 6th November - by Vitali Nevsky using an 8" F1,5 reflecting telescope. Vitali is no stranger to discovering comets. He, along with Artyom Novichonok, discovered Comet C/2012 S1 ISON.  When discovered it was magnitude 15.1. Fellow CIOC_ISON member +Charles Bell  imaged it on the 14th November and its N Magnitude was 15.6. There had been reports that it had brightened to about magnitude 10 however when I imaged it yesterday morning the N  magnitude was 14.7.

Here is my image taken UT 2013-12-02 5:58:27.454 - FOV 116.5 x 77.7 arcmins - north is at the top. The comet is to the right of centre. It is still quite small, though a short tail has been observed.

I then took a few of Comet Linear and I will put these on next time. After Linear I did try for a couple of others, but my processing has not yet brought them out. They were a bit fainter.

To complete the observing run I finally I went to the the Eastern Horizon to see if I could capture the poor remains of C/2012 S1 ISON, but it was too bright - the sky that is, not ISON. If the weather is OK I will trying tomorrow morning.  Is there anything to see? We just do not know yet.

Before I finish for the night I must mention a particular hang out that you may wish to look at. It is the Comet Festival South Bend Today I watched yesterdays and today's editions. They have good astronomers on there and today's edition - hosted by +Chuck Bueter had +Pamela Gay , +Karl Battams and CIOC_ISON's +Padma Yanamandra-Fisher  (heck I hope I have the links right - if I have not - sorry!). Yesterday's edition was great as well, especially as it had my favourite astronomer, +Alex Filippenko, on.

Clouds stopped play - apart from Friday

When the low clouds come in, as they did for most of he past week, it can be very frustrating in some ways, to see on The Net  images of the ever changing C/2012 S1 ISON, but it is exciting as well. Yesterday morning the clouds cleared, and I was able to take about three hundred images of Comets Lovejoy and ISON. This is about three to four times as many as I would normally take, the reason being is that with both comets being so bright now, it is no longer possible to take nice easy long exposures. Lots of short exposures means lot more work, so there will only a few to show today. This morning was particularly frustrating. Both ISON and Encke were in the same field of view, but again low cloud came in. The cloud was very thin, but because I was observing just above the horizon, the effect of trying to image through miles of thin cloud is as bad as trying to image through thick cloud. The first image from yesterday is one of a series that I took mainly to check on whether it was time to start serious imaging. Here is C/2012 S1 ISON just above a field of grape vines. If you look at the tree near the bottom it will look as though it is leaning. It is not. The field is not that steep! The image is at an angle, because the camera is always orientated so that one of the image sides is always pointing towards the Pole Star.
Below I have rotated the image so that is near the correct orientation.

I had actually started imaging a little bit early and when I get the time I will display the sequence.
Soon the comet was high enough to take reasonable images of it. Here is the best I took on Friday morning. Below you will see the negative which always shows more detail. Look at the right hand edge and the lower part of the tail.
You can see it below clearer.
and here is a blow up of the right hand edge.

Below I used a utility that makes the image look 3D. It is called a Rotational Gradient. This really highlight a disruption to the tail. One word of warning. When you start "playing" with an image whilst quite often bringing out some detail, it is also destroying other details. I always keep the original image safe and create copies to work on. It is always best to display the original image as well as the worked on one, so as not to cause confusion. 






















The above images were all taken using the 4" Pentax F4 Refractor. using the ST8 CCD Camera.At the same time I was taking images with the 14" C14 and the ST7 CCD Camera. I was using this to capture the head or coma of the comet. I have still not processed most of them, but below is one image.


All I have shown here are some of the ISON images. We also took a number of images of C/2013 R1 Lovejoy. I will start processing these shortly and then show them here, hopefully on a page that I can get the formatting to work how I want :)

 

  

v

Its been a funny couple of days.

The two main comet Facebook Comet Groups I belong to - CIOC_ISON and Comet Watch - have been suffering from a shortage of current images over the past few day. Many of us have been clouded out - even though we are fairly scattered around the world.

I did manage to rescue some LRGB images from Saturday morning, but they were shot through cloud layers, which produced unusual results. I displayed one of them on Neil Norman's Comet Watch and was surprised by the positive response - I think partially because we were getting withdrawal symptoms and anything new to do with ISON helped.

On Sunday I messaged Petri Kehusmaa ,who is responsible for the SON New Mexico Observatory, asked if he could take an image of ISON for me to share with the groups and he came up trumps, even though it was hitting the limits of his local horizon, and he had to wait until just before dawn.. What I also did not know at the time was the operational telescope had not yet had First Light. Here is Petri's First Light image of Comet ISON:

The weather now seems to changing and over the past half day more images are starting to come in.

Sunday Evening saw the broadcast that I did a prerecorded interview for and +Padma Yanamandra-Fisher did live (brave lady), This was for Under British Skies on Astronomy.FM . If you missed it and would like to hear it then do not worry, a podcast will be available in a few days.

I had intended covering a recent discussion on whether Comet ISON is starting to fragment or not! That will have to wait for another day as I will soon be opening the observatory. The sky is fairly clear, so providing there is no last minute clouding we will capture some images of at least ISON,

Nothing today but most certainly More of Yesterday the 15th November 2013

After a few hours sleep last night I went up to the observatory to open up. The ground was covered in ice and frost and the clamshell was covered in a coating of ice. I pressed the open button and nothing happened - the clams were frozen. Pushed up on one side to break the seal and it opened. That was in fact the highlight of the observing session. By the time I walked back down to the house and sat down at my desk had sat down the sky clouded over and for the next couple of hours only caught a few glimpses of C/2012 S1 ISON.

So back to yesterday.

After Wednesday I thought it would be a long time before such excitement would come around again. I was wrong!

I had opened up the observatory a little late so only spent a short time on C/2013 R1 Love joy, (note to self must get round to processing those images). Then onto C/2012 S1 ISON. After moving the telescope slightly I took a one minute exposure to check I had as much as possible on the frame.

I looked at it and thought where is the second tail. Looked again and saw that there were multiple tails. Quickly changed the setting to a 3 minute exposure and binned 3- (basically that means that a 3 x 3 square of pixels is treated as a single pixel - bigger pixels mean more light captured quickly). Started to take the image - 3 minutes gave me the chance to make a quick cup of coffee :) - the image downloaded and I thought Wow! What has happened to it?

I felt as though I was looking at an old woodcut or engraving. Just look at it and imagine if  it filled the sky as some great comets have in the past.

I sent this image along with a negative to CIOC_ISON for Padma to look at and also to Comet Watch for Neil.

Negatives are very useful as they are easier on the eye for seeing the detail. To say that when people saw this caused some interest, would be an understatement.

From downloading the image from the camera to it being up for people to view was achieved in about ten minutes.  This enabled people to react to the change, either discuss what was happening or assisting in preparing to follow up.

To achieve this speed I do have to keep the processing simple. Flat and Dark frames have been applied, the background normalised, the image slightly stretched to bring out detail, in this case rotated 180 degrees so that north is up and then first saved as a positive then a negative and finally uploaded to the sites.

If you are a serious comet observer then you may wish to join CIOC_ISON and you are a Facebook user then click on the link.

While doing this more images were needed and I set of a cycle of LRGB image taking. This involves the camera taking multiple images, rotating through clear, red, green and blue filters. Twenty seconds per image. That was when the cloud came in and only nineteen more images were taken.

It was time for a quick cup of coffee and then shutting the observatory.

Between answering and asking questions I processed four of the last set of images to produce a colour image. Because these were short exposures the coma (head) of the comet looks smaller and there is less detain in the tail.

You can though still see the multiple tails an yes the comet is green. During the rest of the day I continued to keep uptodate with the comet, taking part in a number of discussions and a number of other activities.

These activities including sending images to the Comet Section of the British Astronomical Association . Later in the day there was a report and ebulletin issued.

I also produced a montage based on the last seven days activity up to yesterday.

Although simple to put together it went down very well with all the people who saw it.

I was asked during the day for permission to display a number of the images on various websites. I may cover this in a later blog.

Finally I did a prerecroded interview with Paul Harper of  Under British Skies
and this will be broadcasted on Sunday.  Although I will be talking about the comet the interview I was first asked about what is Searchlight Observatory Network. I only hope that I get it right. :) For more on the comet there is at least one other person covering it and that is +Padma Yanamandra-Fisher and I expect that she will be the highlight of the show. Padma is responsible for the CIOC_ISON Group on Facebook.

The CIOC_ISON Group is an a forum to provide support for professional and amateur comet observers to: share, discuss and collaborate on observations of comet ISON, as part of NASA's Comet ISON Observing Campaign (CIOC).

Well that is the description!  but it is a lot more than that.

Detailed information about the CIOC is located at: http://www.isoncampaign.org/


I finally got to bed twenty four hours after last in it.

ISON changes into a Broom Star - a quick uptdate

The weather was bad yesterday morning so no observing. It was very frustrating, people were reporting activity in the coma and all I could do was read other peoples reports :(

The comet is now naked eye - not by me :( I was racing to image what I could before the Sun came up.

Again I have been lucky and pointed the telescope at the right time at the right place and captured a change.

Let us look at the difference in how C/ISON has changed over the past seven days.

The change is quite dramatic. The first image shows it with a single tail, the next it has gained a second tail, the third it has changed a great deal as covered by a previous post and now it has taken on the form that one associates with 17th and 18th Century engravings of comets - the Broom Star. ...... and this has all happened in a week!

There will be more images later today. Click on the images below to see them larger.
.

Morning of 9th November

Morning of 12th November

Morning of 13th November

Morning of 15th November

The BAA and ISON

A nice finish to the day. The images have been put on the BAA Comet Gallery, Denis Buczynski published an entry in the BAA Comet Forum headed C/2012 S1 ISON tail structure activity which mentioned both myself, Caisey Harlingten and the Searchlight Observatory Network. Finally the BAA issued an ebulletin which also mentioned the observations.

A couple of hours ago I took part in a prerecorded interview for Under British Skies. I suspect that after being up since four plus today's events I sounded a little punch drunk LOL.

Now to bed, even though there is still a hundred or so images to process. It has been raining here today, so there is a good possibility that when I get up in four hours time at four o'clock, I may find that it will not be possible to observe and
be able to go back to bed.

ISON and feeling happy :)

Just woke up from my siesta (well I did make do with just four hours last night) and saw on the CIOC_ISON Facebook Page :

ALERT: images from earlier today: from Tony Angel:
 maybe outburst - please image, take spectra ??
 Thanks Tony for the quick alert.... Thanks, Padma Fisher

CIOC_ISON: is the Pro-Am Collaboration for Support of NASA Comet ISON Observing Campaign (CIOC) via Social Media.

Click here to read Padma's article or visit the NASA Comet ISON Observing Campaign

I do know that I was not the only person to pick this up, but it still feels good :)

Special on ISON - Observation from this morning.

C/2012 S1 ISON . this morning 13/11/2013 at 05:30 GMT SON@OSC 4" refractor F4 ST8

The two tails are like searchlights - both of similar dimensions and brightness (or I might be talking a load of rubbish)

FOV 116.5 x 77.7 arcmins

Please note that this was a quick and dirty process so that anyone who is just about to start their observing run can have an idea what to look for :)

Observations of Tuesday morning 11/11/2013

Written 12/11/2013 started whilst observing.

Not sure which is more stressful; chasing the comets to image before dawn, processing the most interesting images or thinking of what to write on here :)

Certainly chasing the comets is getting more hectic as drop lower in the sky and it becomes a race to beat dawn.C/2013 R1 Lovejoy is bright and high in the sky, in fact I realised after the fact that I need to look at bringing down the exposure time for Lovejoy.  C/2012 S1 ISON is still high enough to get reasonable images, but 2P/Encke and C/2012 X1 Linear are getting quite difficult.  Today will be the last time I will try - if I have time - for a colour image of Encke and Linear.

All images were captured using the SON@OSC Observatory (Searchlight Observatory Network) 4" Pentax F4 Refractor and an ST8 CCD camera

Here are some of yesterday's images.

The t(r)ail on Encke is still very distinct and some 150 arc minutes of it are visible

2P/Encke

2P/Encke

Linear is getting quite faint, especially now dawn approaches. It is still possible to see the what is left from the recent outburst. 

C/2012 X1 Linear

C/2012 X1 Linear

I expect that this will be the final colour image.

he

C/2012 X1 Linear

The second tail of ISON was first observed a couple of days ago. This was the first chance I have had to image ISON and capture the two tails.

C/2012 S1 ISON

C/2012 S1 ISON

The two tails of Lovejoy are quite clear. There seems to be, below the other two tails, either a third tail starting or a minor outburst. 

  

C/2013 R1 Lovejoy

C/2013 R1 Lovejoy

I will start the observing report of this morning's observations soon. The tails of ISON have changed so I will want to get an image on here soon. :)

Another tail - this time C/2013 R1 Lovejoy

Just a shot blog today (11/11/2013). As Lovejoy is now the brightest comet in the sky by far I thought I would see if how much of the tail I could image. It was soon obvious that the tail extended beyond the width of the image - some 115 arc seconds, so I took a second and third overlapping images and found that two overlapping images could pick up all the tail capable of being captured by the current SON@OSC set up for wide field imaging - 4" F4 Pentax refractor and an SBig ST8 ccd camera.

The following images are not pretty pictures - the aim is not for beauty but for detail. That is not to say you cannot have both beauty and detail - the images of @Damien Peach belay that idea, however in this instance I needed to really stretch the image to bring out the ion tail.

First Image - showing coma and tail

Second Image - showing tail

Third Image - no tail found

Joined images one and two together.

I have seen one other image that shows the unusual detail in the second image.

Comments are welcome :)

More on Friday Morning's Comets plus Saturday Morning's Comets - that quartet again!

On Friday 08/11/2013 I wrote a little about 2P/Encke and that day's imaging of it. Here are some other images I took that morning.

C/2012 S1 ISON

C/2013 R1 Lovejoy

C/2013 R1 Lovejoy Negative

C/2012 X1 Linear

C/2012 X1 Linear Crop

Saturday morning - 09/11/2013 - covered the Quartet - Again!.

First 2P/Encke. As there was a fair amount on interest in its trail I spent as much time as possible on imaging this before dawn came.

What follows are four versions of the same image. The first is the regular image. The second is the negative. The third is a stretched regular and the fourth a stretched negatve. In the final image you can really see the meandering trail.

2P/Encke

2P/Encke

2P/Encke

2P/Encke

Below is C/2012 S1 ISON.  This is still not developing very much, though I did see an image that was taken 24 hrs after this one and a second tail has now clearly appeared. I will be trying for this tomorrow morning.

C/2012 S1 ISON

C/2012 X1 Linear continues to be fairly bright after its outburst.

C/2012 X1 Linear

C.2013 R1 Lovejoy is really becoming the star of the show. It continues to brighten and is well ahead of ISON. Where as ISON is difficult to see in 10x50 binos, Lovejoy is now being seen with the naked eye.

I used four different method of processing Lovejoy to see if I could bring out more detail. I then stretched each one.

Process 1.

Process 2

 Process 3 

Process 4

All the images were taken using the Searchlight Observatory Network Observatory here in the Sierra Contraviesa, Granada, Spain at an altitude of 4,500 feet. The telescope used is a 4" Pentax F4 refractor and the camera is a SBig ST8 . All the images, with the exception of the cropped Linear are FOV 116.5 x 77.7 arcmins

There was no observing on the morning of Sunday 10th November due to my wife going to England for a week or two. I thought it would not go down too well to open the observatory while she was getting ready to leave :)

In the next blog I will include some objects that are not comets :)