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 :)

 

  

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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 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 :)

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 :)

Observing report for mornings of the 1st, 4th and 7th of November 2013

Observing report

The following images were all taken at the SON@OSC (Searchlight Observatory Network at the Observatorio Sierra Contraviesa)

4" Pentax Refractor at F4 plus an ST8 CCD camera

Observing 01/11/2013

Slightly overslept plus thin cloud to the East. Just suitable for C/2012 X1 Linear, and managed to capture C/2012 S1 ISON, C/2013 R1 Lovejoy and 2P Encke. In the case of 2P Encke I originally thought that the cloud was thick enough to hide most of the ion tail, however when I made a negative the ion tail is very clear, so much so that it has been complimented on Facebook Comet Groups.

C/2012 S1 ISON

C/2012 S1 ISON

C/2013 R1 Lovejoy

2P Encke

C/2012 X1 Linear - negative

C/2012 X1 Linear

Observing 04/11/2013

This sky this morning was not very good as a mist came rolling in. This meant that imaging the two lower altitude comets 2P Encke and C/2012 X1 Linear was impossible. C/2012 S1 ISON when imaged was so faint it was useless. That left C/2013 R1 Lovejoy. The mist was thin enough to image this a number of times using the clear filter and also LRGB. On processing though it soon clear that the LRGB images were not very good and the once's through the clear filter although reasonable were not showing as much of the tail that other observers were seeing, though I have managed to bring out what I believe to be the ion tail in the negative.

C/2013 R1 Lovejoy

C/2013 Lovejoy negative showing tail

Observing 07/11/2013

Woke up at 4:30 ready to image the four comets. Disaster, the electric had been off the previous night and the CCD camera was warm. Set the cooling on, but there must be some slight condensation somewhere as it took just about the rest of the night to dry it out. :(  I managed to take a few images of C/2012 S1 ISON. I have trimmed the best one.

C/2012 S1 Linear

 This evening I intend to change the configuration!

Quartet Revisited

Taken yesterday morning a quartet of Comets using the 4"Pentax at F4 & ST8 here at the SON@OSC (Searchlight Observatory Network at Observatorio Sierra Contraviessa). Comets 2013 R1 Lovejoy, 2012 X1 Linear, 2012 S1 ISON and 2P Encke.

FOV 116.5 x 77.7 arcmin for the full frame images

 4 one minute exposures LRGB

Should you wish to repost any of these images please let me know and also indicate that they are the property of SON@OSC, Tony Angel & Caisey Harlingten, (or words to that effect).

C/2012 S1 ISON

C/2012 S1 ISON

C/2012 S1 ISON

C/2012 X1 Linear

C/2012 X1 Linear

C/2012 X1 Linear

C/2013 R1 Lovejoy

C/2013 R1 Lovejoy

C/2012 S1 ISON

2P Encke

2P Encke

Another comet imaging night. Comet C/2012 S1 ISON was hidden by cloud so time was spent on the other three main comets in the sky, Lovejoy, Linear and Encke.  Lovejoy is high in the sky, but Linear and Encke are fairly low 

All the images on this page were taken at the SON@OSC observatory (Searchlight Observatory Network at the Observatorio Sierra Contraviesa).

The equipment used was the 4" Pentax F4 Refractor and the ST8 with LRGB filters.

Comet C/2013 R1 Lovejoy

Comet C/2012 X1 Linear

Comet 2P Encke

A Quartet of Comets - Observed Monday 28th October 2013

Taken this morning a quartet of Comets using the 4"Pentax at F4 & ST7 here at the SON@OSC (Searchlight Observatory Network at Observatorio Sierra Contraviessa). Comets 2013 R1 Lovejoy, 2012 X1 Linear, 2012 S1 ISON and 2P Encke.

The conditions were not perfect with thin to medium cloud.

Should you wish to repost any of these images please indicate that they are the property of SON@OSC, Tony Angel & Caisey Harlingten

Comet 2P Enke

Comet 2012 S1 ISON

Comet 2012 X1 Linear

Comet 2013 R1 Lovejoy