… in my world, there is Photography, Astronomy, Electronics, Software Engineering, 3d printing and much more
On August 12 I will be in central Spain to observe the solar eclipse. Apart from the regular camera setup, this time I will have a dedicated camera running, to show the sun being completely shadowed by the moon.
Follow the link for the live feed: https://live.picsngeek.at/
Hannes and Gerhard (two fellows from the astronomy club) invited me to join their endeavor to see the northern lights in Tromsø. It paid off to participate from the first moment on. Despite unpleasant weather forecasts, it was a great trip with beautiful sightseeing opportunities, good food, some drinks and relaxed time (waiting for the lights to come)
Only a few of the days in northern Norway were disturbed with unfavorable weather. We had like every type of possible weather conditions from strong wind, snowfall, icy roads to blue skies and temperatures above freezing. More off, from the 10 days we spent around Tromsø, we were fortunate to see the northern lights on 8 nights.
Even more, on 3 of these nights, an auroral substorm provided beautiful and intense displays of colors (mostly green, but also red and violet), where sometimes all the surroundings were cast in green light.
Earlier this year, I happened to meet Elineema from Tanzania. He spent some time in Austria for studies. More importantly, he is responsible for the Mount Meru Astronomical Observatory (https://mmao.space). During his stay he contacted the observatory to participate in one of the observation nights. After a perfect night at the observatory and a few more follow up meetings, he invited me to visit ‘his’ observatory. When the decision was finally made to travel to Tanzania in November, preparations startet. Apart from plenty of time for Tanzania and the incredible african wild life, a key component was to promote astronomy. The importance of astronomy in curriculum is not (yet) comparable to Austria. It also seems that some teachers are not sufficiently trained in astronomy. Therefore, the MMAO frequently organizes teacher trainings. This time, it was me to guide a group of teachers through a day of Oh’s and Ah’s of astronomy. Another part was to visit schools and a university and get into contact with many students, teachers, headmasters, … who were all so welcoming and fascinating personalities!
Personal note: Asante kwa kila mtu niliyekutana naye Tanzania. Hasa kwa Elineema na familia yako shukrani zangu za dhati kwa wakati huu wa ajabu na usiosahaulika!
With the sun in solar maximum 2024 had several fascinating aurora events even far from the aurora oval at around 66 degrees latitude. Therefore I planned for a trip to Iceland, to see aurora in its best. Who could expect the sun to take a pause, so no significant eruption takes place from the first days of 2025 on? Reencouraged with a note from space weather officials, that the setting of interplanetary magnetic field, earths magnetic field and the ring current was favorable to produce aurora at least close to the aurora oval, I travelled to Iceland. Arriving there in anticipation for a pristine northern winter experience had another surprise at hand: a large low pressure zone lured south of Iceland. This low pressure zone caused strong winds (reaching almost 30m/s), lots of rain and unusually high temperatures (up to 9°C) for February.
After four days of grey skies and rain, weather was improving a bit. Even a 3-4 hour window of cloudless skies was predicted for the late evening. As if planned, when the clouds subseeded, the aurora began its show. Most of the time, Aurora was like eery greyish cloud bands to the naked eye. But during phases of increased intensity, green and red tones were also clearly visible. On camera, especially the green aurora looks spectacular!
The following day was again quite wet. But at night, once again a few hours with little cloud cover provided another aurora show to be witnessed. To top off the Iceland experience, on the last day a few moments of sunlight during sunset let me part in joy to have seen aurora and the beauty of this island
Recently I visited Helsinki (Finland). Temperatures dropped down to -15°C, causing even the waters in Kruununvuorenselkä to freeze over. Further out, patches of ice foes were drifting. Along with a fresh blanket of snow, everything just looked amazing. Especially Nuuksio national park close to Helsinki provided a marvellous setting for a great time
Finally, the long awaited comet C2023/A3 Tsuchinschan-ATLAS reappeared after its passage close to the sun. With a well timed window between clouds, I could observe and image the comet. From all the announcements, I expected the comet to be brighter. But still, it is a naked eye comet to enjoy with a pretty long tail.
The main reason to travel to the US and go on a road trip to follow almost the entire golf coast from east to west was to see and photograph the total solar eclipse on April, 8th.
My plan was to image with a total of 9 cameras. Most of the cameras got a custom made (see my 3D design here: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2431974) flip-away solar filter, to facilitate the on and off during totality. As I was up to share my photos with the scientific community through the Eclipse Mega Movie project, like in 2017 (https://eclipsemegamovie.org/), I had some constraints to follow for my setup.
Therefore, the complete setup, which should be mounted on 4 independent tracking mounts, was:
With bad luck, the airline was incapable of delivering one piece of luggage with my primary tracking mount within almost 3 weeks. Therefore I had to reduce the actual setup for the eclipse day in parts. Furthermore, it was quite unsure, whether observing the eclipse was even possible. A wide stretched cloud system covered large protions of Texas. In the morning, there was not even a patch of blue sky visible. Luckily, the clouds got less and less and even the one cloud covering the sun a few minutes before totality moved away. So we finlly could observe the eclipsed sun with an almost perfect sky. In the end I was able to record the required images, totaling to more than 400 GB of data.
The April 2024 total solar eclipse was a must-see event for me. To add some adventure before the big event, we decided to start from Space Coast (Kennedy Space Center) in Florida and drive all the way to Boca Chica for a visit to SpaceX’s Star Base in Texas. Inbetween, lots of interresting places waited to be visited (theme parks in Orlando, New Orleans for Mardi Gras, Space Center Houston, …). Apart from an essential piece of luggage which did not arrive (and a horrible mosquito attack in the Louisiana swamps), the biggest disappointment was the scrubbed launch of the last Atlas IV rocket with no time to wait for the next time frame. After all, it was a incredible trip. On the one hand, there were rockets (including a Falcon 9 launch), satellites, rovers and many more space tech. On the other hand, there were fascinating animals, buzzing cities and great people.
So i started a new imaging run with higher magnification (1320mm instead of 564mm) and more sensitive camera. The resulting image of almost 13 hours data shows a lot more of the surrounding and weak features, even though, the same imaging location was used. The same Bortle 6-7 location was used, observing low above the light cone of the city.
Image data:
Date: 2024-01-10 – 2024-01-27
Location: Graz, Austria
Telescope: TS 256mm f/5 Newtonian with 1.06x ES HR coma corrector (equals to 1320mm focal length)
Camera: QHY268M @ -10C
Filters: Optolong LRGB, Baader H-alpha, O-iii
Guiding: PHD2 off-axis guider (ASI485)
Exposures:
H-alpha: 30x600s
O-iii: 24x600s
L: 116x60s
R: 24x120s
G: 18x120s
B: 18x120s
During the last weeks I imaged IC1613, a dwarf galaxy of the local group in constellation Cetus. After stacking the images, I detected an object, which obviousely moved 28 arcsec during the 129 minutes I captured images on November 15th. It seems to be Asteroid (140) Siwa.
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