Blogs at RogerGroom.com

A photo showing the Moon setting beneith the Milky Way. The moon was only a crescent (not eveident in this photo) hence I was able to have both it and the Moon in the one exposure series. Click here for photograph

On the 4th January I was out in the Wheatbelt region of Western Australia photographing some storms rolling through: see them here

New picture of the comet Lovejoy over Lake Leschenaultia. I really like this shot, the silhouette trees and lake bring in the landscape elements I like to have in my wide field astro photographs: click here to view comet lovejoy

Comet Lovejoy keeps putting on a great show, getting better each morning. Now it's clearly above my horizon and showing an enormous tail that some estimate at 22 degrees in length.Click here to see new pics of comet Lovejoy

A new time lapse video featuring the constellation of Orion, and the Large Magellanc Cloud and Small Magellanic Cloud: Time Lapse video of Orion, LMC and SMC

Check out my first ever astro timelapse!

http://vimeo.com/32657517

It turned out cloudy, but I still made something of it :)

Here's a nice wide field pic through the Megrez 90 showing the comet 2009 P1 Garradd together with Messier M71

Click to see comet

I've had some fun dredging up old log files from automated nights, and importing these in to my Observatory Usage database. It's given an interesting insight in to how much my observatory is used on an automated basis. You can see the graph at my page about my observatory and its capabilities

My second pic of the Total Lunar Eclipse of June 16th 2011....

http://www.rogergroom.com/items/Total_Lunar_Eclipse_16_June_2011_Moon

Here's a first pic of the Total Lunar Eclipse of June 16th 2011....

http://www.rogergroom.com/items/Total_Lunar_Eclipse_16_June_2011

You might be wondering what I've been up to lately, with so little activity on my website. Well I am still doing more astronomy than ever, but it's taken a shift towards less pretty, more research orientated tasks.

First off a while ago I started performing searches for supernova in other galaxies. This lead to me making a new database and set of programs and scripts to automate the photography of several hundred galaxies per night.

Second, I built up on the supernova work I was doing to do the same for comets. Considering the observations I did a couple of years back for a paper on the rotation of comet nuclei I thought it might be interesting to record comets over time. I've chosen to photograph all comets brighter than magnitude 20 on a regular basis. Occasionally there's a few stand-outs, like these:

http://www.rogergroom.com/items/comet_213P_Van_Ness_201106
http://www.rogergroom.com/items/comet_2009P1_Garradd_201106
http://www.rogergroom.com/items/comet_9PTempel_201106

Both the comets and the supernova searching have been aided by the upgrading of my observatory from a 12" LX200 Classic to having the 12" OTA mounted atop a Software Bisque Paramount ME. It's only recently, after several months, that the new setup has started running smoothly, but now that it is the acquisition of good data is becoming easier.

I have been taking some other wide field colour photo's lately, but haven't got around to processing them yet....

Last night (19th/20th March 2011) the Moon was full and at around the same time it was at it's closes aproach to Earth in it's orbit. This resulted in a somewhat larger and brighter moon being visible. Here's a quick snap of it (not that you would notice any difference to any other full moon based on this image!) ... full moon photograph

I was digging through some old photo's yesterday and stumbled upon a many nice ones that haven't yet made it up to my website. Some are quite hard because they are film, but this one was digital and an obvious omission from my website!

Pemberton Karri Forest Photo

Well, it's not my own discovery of a supernova, but it is my first observation of a known supernova! And it was by accident, so if only I'd taken my photograph 30 days earlier I might have discovered it.

I am shifting from taking NGC images in my Project NGC, to taking supernova discovery images. The Project NGC is getting to the point now that the trees to my North are causing too many problems. I have most objects between -70 and 0 Dec, it's just north of 0 Dec which it gets more tricky for me, in particular from +20 Dec and North. With the dwindling success due to the trees I'm looking at extending my knowledge and experience of the Project NGC to surveying for supernova discovery.

The work requried for supernova discovery is almost identical to what I have already been doing for Project NGC. In fact I'm using an exact copy of the software I wrote for Project NGC for supernova hunting. This makes it easy for me to build a target list for a night's observing. A key difference is that while my Project NGC database had 5399 objects to select from (not the full set of NGC's due to lattitude), my supernova database now has 95325 objects! (should keep me out of trouble for a while!).

Anyway, back to my first observation. I was photographing NGC 1954 purely for it's cosmetic value. It was a galaxy I decided to stop by on my way to the start of my NGC run for the night, but I got stuck there taking 10 minute exposures of it (it's quite an interesting galaxy). Being interested in supernova discovery I thought what better time than now to start comparing images to look for new supernova. As luck would have it my Project NGC had captured NGC 1954 back in December 2009. Comparing my new images with the 2009 image I noticed the supernova, standing out like a saw thumb. A quick google search showed it to be a known supernova, discovered on 5th December 2010 and labelled Supernova 2010ko. Here's a page of observations: http://www.rochesterastronomy.org/sn2010/sn2010ko.html

So, after a few emails back and forth, and lots of work on my behalf to get an estimate of magnitude of the supernova, one of my 10 minute exposures is now shown on the above linked page, and I'm quite happy that I have at least some little link to the supernova discovery world so early in the piece.

Well, my focal length doesn't really lend its self well to this object, but after taking a quick snap on my way to other objects I got hooked.

I had a lot of troubles that night and last night with dark pixels in my reduced images. Not sure what's going on there. The dark frames seem reasonable but something is amiss. It took a lot of processing to get rid of them, and get rid of a verticle line of shading down the left, presumably an artifact of the nearby bright star.

Even without those problems the image would be somewhat soft, being at 0.86 arc seconds per pixel. But you work with what you have

100% size, and only a couple of pixels cropped.

Consdiering all, I'm quite happy with the result, and won't be going back to it for a nother few years I expect (last shot of it with the ST7/LX200 was several years back I think).

http://www.rogergroom.com/items/horsehead_nebula_2011

I have up on my website a new shot of the Orion nebula with the Running Man nebula along side. It's an improvment on a previous image of the same field in 2007. I'm quite happy with the result here. It was taken in 30 km/hr winds, which didn't affect the Losmandy much but together with hot days did make for a very turbulent atmosphere and so soft image.

http://www.rogergroom.com/items/m42_ngc1976_ngc1977_orion

Well it's been a long time between uses of my AstroTrac, last time being in
August, but I had another very successful night with it this weekend just gone.

Again it only took me about 10 minutes to setup and 5-10 minutes to polar align.
And only two trips to the car to pack the gear. And again I had no trailing in
any exposures I took, with the longest attempted being a few 4 minute exposures
on Orion.

Here's a few pictures from the night:
http://www.rogergroom.com/items/aswa_tammin_december_2010

There's a neat startrail one with the AT in it .. hapenned that the red "busy"
LED of the camera was illuminating the AT nicely.

I can't wait to get out there with the AT again, play around with more lenses
etc. This night just gone I only used my 50mm F/1.4 lens, which leaves so many
combiations yet to explore.

Enjoy.

Roger.

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