Comet!

Galaxies and Glitches

On March 10th bright comet 12P/Pons-Brooks was located in the constellation Andromeda. By the time the sky darkened about an hour after sunset the comet's altitude above the western horizon was getting lower. Unfortunately, the comet wasn't visible from my usual back yard observing site because my house blocked the view. So my granddaughter and I moved the Seestar telescope to my front porch. We crouched down behind a bush which shielded us from both a streetlight and a strong wind. We were astounded to see how well the comet's image built up during three trial exposures. The best image, shown below, was produced by a 7-minute exposure which shows the bright green head and some of the tail.

This is the best comet image I've ever captured! The next evening on March 11th I tried a longer exposure to reveal more of the dim tail. During a 14-minute exposure the comet moved appreciably relative to stars causing the head to smear out. So the 7-minute exposure above turned out to be best.

Only a brief observing window existed between the time when the sky became dark and the time when the comet set behind a rooftop across the street from my porch. After the comet dropped out of sight each night I took a couple quick images of M31, the Andromeda Galaxy, just out of curiosity. On March 10th I pointed toward the galaxy's center and captured the following 7-minute exposure.

The Andromeda Galaxy is too big to fit within Seestar's field of view. In the image above dark dust lanes are visible. Also, M32, a small companion elliptical galaxy, appears as a fuzzy bright object on the left edge. The following night I aimed slightly below the galaxy's center and took a longer 20-minute exposure to produce the next image.

Some dim details in the galaxy's outer regions are beginning to show in the previous image. I'll have to wait a few months for Andromeda to get higher in the sky before trying for longer exposures. The galaxy's altitude ranged between 21 and 17 degrees for the images above.

Up until March 10th my Seestar had operated flawlessly. For some mysterious reason it would not start up on March 10th when I initially pushed the power button! What the hell?? After several repeated unsuccessful attempts I went to get a screwdriver to open the battery compartment. While I was away my granddaughter pressed the small reset button on the bottom. Apparently, the reset fixed the immediate startup problem because Seestar powered on normally afterward. But now another glitch appeared. The Seestar app on my Android tablet seemed to have trouble connecting to Seestar's internal wifi. The app would say connection had been achieved, but then it contradicted itself when I closed the connection dialog windows. When the dialog windows were closed, the app said it needed to connect with Seestar. This had never happened before! After several connection attempts the app finally acknowledged an established connection, but why in the world would it start misbehaving like this? I always hold the tablet very close to Seestar while connecting, so distance isn't a problem. Fortunately, once a stable connection was made Seestar seemed to operate normally for the remainder of these observing sessions. 

After capturing M31 on March 11th I eventually moved the telescope from the front porch to it's usual backyard observing position. Anticipating interference from neighbors' spotlights, I installed a newly acquired lens hood and erected some light-blocking barriers around the telescope. As the night progressed it turned out to be one of those rare occasions when no spotlights glared, so precautions were unnecessary. The first image acquired was the following 60-minute exposure of galaxy M51, the "Whirlpool Galaxy". I was surprised to find this 60-minute exposure not much better than a previous 25-minute exposure taken on March 7th. It made me wonder if longer exposures were worth the effort.  

Edge-on spiral galaxy NGC 4565, the "Needle Galaxy", in the constellation Comas Berenices was my next target. It showed up nicely in the following 30-minute exposure. A small 14th magnitude galaxy, NGC 4562, sits at the end of a curved string of 5 stars to the right of the brighter galaxy. The separation between the two is about 13.3 arc minutes.

Although I previously captured globular cluster M53 alone on March 7th, I wanted to see if I could include a nearby dim globular cluster together with M53 in the same field of view. The next image is a 30-minute exposure with bright M53 at the top and diffuse NGC 5053 at the bottom. They are separated by 57.7 arc minutes.

My final target for the night was planetary nebula Abell 21, also known as the "Medusa Nebula". I installed the light pollution filter for this object and took the 60-minute exposure shown next. Stars look slightly out of focus. Perhaps I should have engaged the autofocus before starting the exposure. As I've found in other nebular Seestar images, the red color looks disappointingly dull compared to images produced by experts.

Observing conditions on March 11th were near perfect - no Moon, no clouds, and all neighbor lights were off. But I'm getting nervous about the increasing number of glitches occurring in Seestar operation.