November 2023 Stargazing Photos

Hello everyone.  This is going to be a short blog entry.  Quanda and I went to Hawaii in November to spend a week with some old friends at their house on Kauai.  I took my telescope with me.  I was hoping to see some new things since I was going to be so much farther south than normal.  I did see some new things but not as many as I had hoped.  You know me.  I always want more. I only had an hour or two each of the two times we went out stargazing.  Not many people like to spend 4+ hours looking at the stars the way I do.  I understand that.  It’s normal.  I spent a lot of our time showing my friends cool things in the night sky that I have already shown all of you in previous blog entries.

Be that as it may, I did have a lot of fun stargazing in Hawaii.  To begin with, it is amazing how many stars you can see in the sky once you get away from the light pollution of the cities.  The downside of this was that there were so many stars, it was hard for me to navigate the skies on my own.  The extra stars confused me.  Of course, the telescope had no problem.  On the upside, I got to see the Milky Way with my own eyes for the first time ever.  We also had a great view of the Leonids meteor shower.

I was also able to photograph a few new celestial objects that I have included in this blog entry.  The most notable photos are my first pictures of the sun.  I bought a solar filter for my telescope that made this possible.  I tried it out in Hawaii.  Now, I know that I will be ready for the total solar eclipse in April 2024.  Quanda and I are going to San Antonio, TX to view the eclipse.  I am really looking forward to it.  This will be the last total eclipse visible in the continental US for over 20 years and I will get to see it, photograph it, and post the pictures to my blog!

The Sun

Here are a couple of pictures of our sun.  There was some cloud cover when I took the second picture.  I think the pictures are mildly interesting and just a small preview of what my eclipse pictures will look like.

The Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System. It is a massive, hot ball of plasma, and it is inflated and heated by energy produced by nuclear fusion reactions at its core. Part of this internal energy gets emitted from the surface as light, ultraviolet, and infrared radiation, providing most of the energy for life on Earth.

The Sun moves around the Galactic Center of the Milky Way, at a distance of 26,660 light-years. From Earth, it is on average 1 AU (93 million miles) or about 8 light-minutes away. Its diameter is about 864,600 mi, 109 times that of Earth or 4 lunar distances. Its mass is about 330,000 times that of Earth, making up about 99.86% of the total mass of the Solar System.  Roughly three-quarters of the Sun's mass consists of hydrogen (~73%); the rest is mostly helium (~25%), with much smaller quantities of heavier elements, including oxygen, carbon, neon, and iron.

The Sun is a G-type main-sequence star (G2V), informally called a yellow dwarf, though its light is actually white. It formed approximately 4.6 billion years ago from the gravitational collapse of matter within a region of a large molecular cloud. Most of this matter gathered in the center, whereas the rest flattened into an orbiting disk that became the Solar System. The central mass became so hot and dense that it eventually initiated nuclear fusion in its core. It is thought that almost all stars form by this process.

Me On The Beach

Here I am stargazing on the beach.  We were on the west shore of Kauai near Waimea.

Nebulae

The Lagoon Nebula (catalogued as Messier 8 or M8, NGC 6523, Sharpless 25, RCW 146, and Gum 72) is a giant interstellar cloud in the constellation Sagittarius. It is classified as an emission nebula.

The Lagoon Nebula was discovered by Giovanni Hodierna before 1654 and is one of only two star-forming nebulae faintly visible to the eye from mid-northern latitudes. Seen with binoculars, it appears as a distinct cloud-like patch with a definite core. Within the nebula is the open cluster NGC 6530.  The Lagoon Nebula is estimated to be between 4,000–6,000 light-years away from the Earth.

Stars

Aldebaran is the red eye of Taurus the Bull.  It is the brightest star in the constellation Taurus.  You can find it by following the three stars in Orion’s belt up and to the right.  Aldebaran is the first bright star you will see along this path.  Aldebaran means “the follower” in Arabic and is so named because it appears to follow the Pleiades through the sky.

Aldebaran varies in brightness from an apparent visual magnitude 0.75 down to 0.95, making it (typically) the fourteenth-brightest star in the night sky. It is positioned at a distance of approximately 65 light-years from the Sun. The star lies along the line of sight to the nearby Hyades cluster.

Aldebaran is a red giant, meaning that it is cooler than the Sun with a surface temperature of 3,900 K, but its radius is about 44 times the Sun's, so it is over 400 times as luminous. The star spins slowly and takes 520 days to complete a rotation. Aldebaran is believed to host a planet several times the mass of Jupiter, named Aldebaran b. The planetary exploration probe Pioneer 10 is heading in the general direction of the star and should make its closest approach in about two million years.

Star Clusters

The Hyades (also known as Caldwell 41, Collinder 50, or Melotte 25) is the nearest open cluster and one of the best-studied star clusters. Located about 153 light-years (47 parsecs) away from the Sun, it consists of a roughly spherical group of hundreds of stars sharing the same age, place of origin, chemical characteristics, and motion through space. From the perspective of observers on Earth, the Hyades Cluster appears in the constellation Taurus, where its brightest stars form a "V" shape along with the still-brighter Aldebaran. However, Aldebaran is unrelated to the Hyades, as it is located much closer to Earth and merely happens to lie along the same line of sight.

The age of the Hyades is estimated to be about 625 million years. The core of the cluster, where stars are the most densely packed, has a radius of 8.8 light-years (2.7 parsecs), and the cluster's tidal radius – where the stars become more strongly influenced by the gravity of the surrounding Milky Way galaxy – is 33 light-years (10 parsecs). However, about one-third of confirmed member stars have been observed well outside the latter boundary, in the cluster's extended halo; these stars are probably in the process of escaping from its gravitational influence.

Galaxies

NGC 520 is a pair of colliding spiral galaxies about 105 million light-years away in the constellation Pisces. They were discovered by astronomer William Herschel on 13 December 1784.

Noted astronomer Halton Arp called this the second-brightest, very disturbed galaxy in the sky, and it is as bright in the infrared and radio bands as the Antennae Galaxies. Simulations indicate this object consists of two galactic disks that began interacting about 300 million years ago. The system is still in an early stage of its merger, showing two separate velocity systems in the spectra, and two small tails. Two galactic nuclei have been detected.