Exploring the Night Sky

by: Simon Tang

Ive only own a telescope for a short time and I still find myself going back to my camera and lens kit taking pictures of the night sky just to see what I can find.

Since I dont have a tracking mount, im not able to get cool images of galaxies or cluster. But hold on for one minute! Who's says I have to have thousands of dollars worth of equipment.

Astronomy isn't about owning the biggest telescope with for longest focal length. It's not even about how big your mirror is or how fancy you astro-imaging device is.

Astronomy is about learning, science, understanding and discovering what is out there.

Since being a member of this club, i've had more fun coming up with crazy ideas and playing with different things. Who knew you could but a barlow on a barlow and still get a good image! Or even use whatever camera you have and get an image of Saturn.

The challenges to me is what makes this fun and interesting. At the same time, i've learnt more about space than i've done in my whole life.

One of the things that I did, which I highly recommend doing, is taking images of the night sky and stacking them. I would spend a few hours capturing an area of the sky and process them to see what I find. Let's have a look at a result.

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This may not seem exciting but in reality, it is! What you are looking at is Antares and the globular cluster named M4 in the constellation of Scorpius.

At this time of year (February - July), this area of the sky is filled with alsorts of exciting things. Not only does the moon pass through here but so do 2 planets. Saturn and Mars. When it gets to the early hours of the morning, the Milky Way can be seen to the right streaking across the sky and over your head to the other side!

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The image above shows Mars, Saturn and the Milky Way. That fuzz at the bottom of the mountains is Los Angeles.

In order to learn the night sky, I also took some wide field images of these areas and labeled the stars based off known charts, specifically using Stellarium. This might be time consuming to some but it really helps you learn specific patches. Also part of the fun is discovering things.

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Since the sky is such a big place, I always find it fun to point the camera in the direction of the sky where I cannot see anything at all and spend some time imaging that area. This time, I was pointed in the direction between the North Star, Polaris and the Big Dipper. I sat down and started the stacking process and waited for the results. I spent about an hour scanning through the image and comparing it to Stellarium and discovered that I had actually captured M81 and M82. At first glace most people would miss it or assume that it was dust on the lens. Sure enough I zoomed in on that area of the image and saw the 2 fuzzy objects.

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I was so pleased with myself that I had to get back outside and shoot a different part of the sky. This time I took images of the Big Dipper itself (Ursa Major). Again, I spent a few hours comparing the image, labeling stars and looking for other cool and interesting things. I managed to catch 3 galaxies in total in this image. 

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The great thing about these exercises is when I do finally get a tracking mount, I can swing my telescope in the general direction and know if I am close to it, of course with some help of an app or two. So this brings me to an interesting question. Should one get a mount with a GoTo system or not? Interestingly enough, a GoTo system may not get you pointing in the right direction. Evening knowing the Right Accession and Declination may not get you in the right place. In some cases, it's close enough and you can wiggle the scope around until you think you see it. But if your in the right area and know the stars around that area, you can easily correct the deviation and hit your target.

Of course the sky is a very big place and I dont expect anyone to know every star in the sky. I guess the lesson here is really to learn a specific part of the sky and know what objects are there to image before moving on to the next part. After all, isn't that what I was saying earlier about learning and discovering.

I leave you with one last image of the night sky and keep it a mystery of where the camera is pointed. This small area of the sky may look like nothing much going on but every star you see in this image has a story to tell.

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