Bill's Sky

  Full Moon 2 Mar 2026 Lunar Eclipse, 3 Mar 2026 Totality for the Lunar Eclipse was supposed to be about 04:38 MST on the morning of 3 March. I wasn't sure if I would be able to stay up to see it, or get up in time. From the altitude for the time, it looked like it would be touch and go for it being above the trees on the hill to the west. I did decide ahead of time that if I did watch it I would try to get some images with our DSLR, a Canon T7. We have a 75-300mm zoom lens for it. I went out early to try it out by taking pictures of the full moon. I initially accidentally took several images in JPEG format before I realized it, and reset the camera to RAW. Lens set at 300mm, F5.6, ISO 100, shutter speed to 1/250. The camera was on a tripod, and had it set for a 4 second delay since I was having to press the release on the camera. I decided to go ahead and go to bed, but the dogs woke me up about 03:30, so I decided to get up and watch the eclipse.  The Moon was further above ...

  I set up about 20:00 MST, I did a "Skyalign" using Mizar and Sirius for the first two stars, and then just a random star in between them for the third star. NELM is about 3-4 and transparency not great. The only star I could see in the Little Dipper was Polaris .  The first target was M1,The Crab Nebula ,  but I couldn't see it so shifted to M42, the Great Orion Nebula.   M43 , it's smaller companion was also in the field of view. Using the 25mm Plossl eyepiece the four stars at the heart of M42 were visible. The bright core of M43 was also visible. The dark lane to the core of M42 was very well defined. I sketched it using HB and 4B pencils and a smudge stick in my sketchbook/log.  Next target was M35  and I switched to the 32mm Plossl. This is an open star cluster about 2,800 light years away in the constellation Gemini. It consists of several hundred stars scattered over an area about equal to a full moon.I have tended to shy away from open clusters ...

   Just went out for a quick session. I haven't been able to observe Jupiter since opposition. It was very bright (as always) not long after sunset. I started out with the 32mm Plossl, then the 17mm Plossl. The 10 and 8 were to unstable, so I tried the 25mm with a 2x Barlow. That gives an effective eyepiece focal length of 12.5mm, yielding a magnification of 162.56x. The view was still wavering some, but had periods of stillness. This turned into one of the best nights viewing Jupiter in quite a while.Besides the north and south equatorial bands, I was able to pick out faint bands between them and the poles. There was also a very obvious bright white band just under the south equatorial band. When the seeing would steady down  could just make out some of the turbulence along the equatorial bands. More so in the north than the south band. Seeing came and went throughout the session.  At its best it  was about an Antoniadi III. Transparency was probably a 3-4 out ...

  Just stepped outside to see how the sky looked, and  Orion was  in the southwest. Got out the binoculars instead of messing with the telescope. I was pretty amazed at how well this showed up in the 12x50 binoculars. Seeing was pretty steady, and transparency just so-so. There were also scattered clouds around. M42, the Orion Nebula, is one of the most photographed objects, by both amateurs and professionals. The Horsehead Nebula that has been shown a lot since Hubble Space Telescope imaged it is actually part of this complex Original sketch was made on white paper in the sketchbook I am using for a journal/log book. I then take a picture of it with  my phone camera and email that to myself. I download and save the image in a folder for astronomy sketches. The file names typically include the object and date. Those downloaded images are then inverted using graphics software. With this new computer, I have been using GIMP to perform the inversion.

  Bulliardis and area . North is up and slightly to the right in this sketch. This is the view through the eyepiece, so East is actually to the left. The sketch was made with pencil on white paper in a sketchbook, photographed, and then colors inverted using GIMP . I was able to get out and observe for about an hour, The Moon is 9.9 days old, and about 75% illuminated. No plan other than to find some interesting areas and then identify them. I started at the southern end of the terminator and slowly worked my way north. I was able to identify several features using Sky and Telescope's Mirror Image Field Map of The Moon. this map is really handy. it is large and waterproof, but folds into quadrants. The mirror image matches the view through the eyepiece for my Celestron 8SE with a diagonal. I started out using the 32mm Plossl eyepiece, moved to the 17mm and finally 13mm. The craters I identified were Clavius, Blancanus, Scheiner, Klaproth, Moretus,  Montanari, and Wilhelm. I al...

 I finally have the C8SE set up on a permanent pier and covered with a Telegizmos 365 cover. The months of October and November have unfortunately provided proof that the cover lives up to its reputation. There have only been three possible nights for observing and I was unable to take advantage of them. The forecast for November 11 was looking like it might be possible to do some observing but it started clouding up enough I decided not to try. There was also a possibility of the Aurora showing up. I went out and looked just after dark, but didn't see any. Later in the evening I got an email from the Western Montana Astronomical Association that the Aurora was visible north of us. The clouds had cleared enough to get a view of most of the sky, except south. I went out again and the Aurora was covering most of the north and northeastern sky. There were areas that had a pink color visible. These waxed and waned, sometimes showing almost red color to the naked eye. In images taken w...