Lyra – The Amazing Sky

July 30, 2014

Mt Kobau Milky Way

The Milky Way towers over the pine trees and sagebrush of Mt. Kobau in the South Okanagan, BC.

It’s been a fine two nights renewing friendships and seeing stars at the summit of Mount Kobau near Osoyoos. I’ve not been here for a dozen years but the timing worked out this year for me to visit the annual Mt. Kobau Star Party, the first star party I attended back in the 1980s.

It’s a rough road to the summit but the reward is a beautiful landscape and skyscape.

The main image above is from Monday night and takes in the Milky Way from horizon to zenith, from Sagittarius to Cygnus. I used a 15mm lens and Canon 5D MkII riding on a new Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer tracking unit, which worked beautifully.

This image, similar to one I took a few nights ago at the Table Mountain Star Party, is a 360° panorama of the land and sky at the Kobau summit. It is a stitch of 8 segments, each 45-second exposures at ISO 6400 with the Canon 6D and 14mm Rokinon lens.

Unfortunately, it shows the light pollution glows from Osoyoos and Oliver that have grown over the last 3 decades and now impinge upon the Kobau skies.

This image is a tracked closeup of the Cygnus and Lyra area of the Milky Way, taken with a 50mm lens and the 5D Mark II riding on the Star Adventurer for a stack of five 10-minute exposures. It is rich in the red nebulosity of the Cygnus spiral arm and takes in the field that the Kepler satellite stared at for 4 years looking for alien planets.

I’m heading home but the star party continues all week, building to the weekend when most people will be attending, under prospects of clear skies and warm weather.

September 12, 2013

The Summer Triangle Stars

The trio of Summer Triangle stars flank the Milky Way in the dying days of summer.

I shot the featured image above two nights ago on a perfect late summer night from home. Skies were dark and transparent, with no aurora and little airglow to taint the sky.

The image takes in the Summer Triangle stars of Vega (top), Deneb (left) and Altair (bottom). Vega and Altair straddle the summer Milky Way, but Deneb lies right in the thick of it, way down the Local Arm that we live in. Vega and Altair are nearby normal stars, only 25 and 16 light years away. But Deneb is a blue supergiant, shining from 1400 light years away, and one of the most luminous stars in the catalog.

The Milky Way through this area of sky is riven by twisting lanes of interstellar dust. A particularly dark patch sits above Deneb at top left. Then below Deneb the Milky Way gets split by the Great Rift that continues down into Aquila and Ophiuchus at lower right.

All along this part of the Milky Way, particularly around Deneb, the camera picks up a string of glowing red nebulas where stars are forming. The red comes from hydrogen atoms emitting deep red light, as hydrogen is wont to do.

Summer Milky Way from Backyard (Sept 9, 2013)

This image is from a couple of nights earlier. I used a wider angle lens to take in the full sweep of the summer Milky Way, from Sagittarius skimming the horizon, to Cassiopeia past the zenith at the top. You can see the Summer Triangle in the top half of the image, the part of the sky now overhead on early September nights from the northern hemisphere.

I took both shots with a filter-modified Canon 5D MkII placed on a little iOptron SkyTracker for tracked long exposures (4 to 5 minutes). The main image was with a 24mm Canon lens, the bottom image with a 14mm Rokinon lens.

September 25, 2011September 25, 2011

The Stellar Triangle of Summer

When the Summer Triangle sinks into the west, we know summer has come to an end. While the stars of the Summer Triangle are now high overhead from northern latitudes as the sky gets dark, by late evening the Summer Triangle is setting into the west.

These three bright stars are an example of stellar variety:

– At bottom is Altair in Aquila the eagle. It’s a white main-sequence star 17 light years away, fairly nearby by stellar standards. Leslie Nielson and his crew went to Altair in the 1950s movie Forbidden Planet.

– At top right is Vega, in Lyra the harp, a hotter and more luminous blue-white star than Altair, making it appear brighter than Altair, despite Vega being farther away, at 25 light years distant. Jodi Foster went to Vega in the movie Contact.

– But the third member of the Triangle, Deneb, at top left, is an extreme star. It appears a little fainter than Vega, but looks can be deceiving. Deneb is actually a luminous supergiant star, putting out 54,000 times the energy of our Sun. Deneb is about 1,400 light years away and yet, due to its fierce output of light, appears almost as bright as Vega. Light from Deneb left that star in the 6th century. I don’t know of any movie heroes who went to Deneb. The name means “tail of the Swan,” hardly a romantic destination for space-faring adventurers.

Look toward the Summer Triangle and you are looking down the spiral arm of the Milky Way that we live in. The stars of that arm appear as a packed stellar cloud running through Cygnus the swan, the constellation that contains Deneb.

I took this shot Saturday night, from home, on what turned out to be a very clear night, once some clouds got out of the way in the early evening. This is a 4-image stack of 8-minute exposures, at f/4 with the 35mm Canon lens, a favourite of mine, on the Canon 5D MkII at ISO 800. I added in exposures taken through a soft-focus filter to give the added glows around the stars to help make the bright stars and their colours more visible.