After several days of deluge the sky was clear on Thursday night and last night. There is now a window of darkness between the end of astronomical twilight and the rising of the waning Harvest Moon.
The last-quarter Harvest Moon was captured sinking behind the trees on the Bristol Head ridgeline yesterday afternoon:
Later that evening (Friday) the Milky Way was once again an impressive sight:
This photo was obtained with an OM-5II camera and an Olympus 8mm f/1.8 fisheye lens. A digital low-pass filter was applied in post processing to suppress the faint stars. This is a fisheye lens, so the view extends from the southern horizon up past the zenith and into the northern sky.
The next two images are also fisheye views with similar processing.
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| view to the northwest |
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| view to the north east |
Three objects of interest are circled in the image above. The planet Saturn is visible on the right. In the middle, the galaxies M31 (Andromeda Galaxy, top) and M33 (Triangulum Galaxy, lower) are circled. The Andromeda Galaxy is easily visible to the unaided eye with a dark sky like last night. At a distance of 2.5 Million light years (Mly), it is the farthest easily seen object with the naked eye. The Triangulum Galaxy is slightly farther away at a distance fo 2.8 Mly. At magnitude 5.8, it is theoretically visible to the unaided eye under extremely dark conditions. I tried, but my aging eyes could not pick it out last night. The sky was nicely dark at the end of the observing session, with a measured sqml value of 21.62 mpsas in the eastern sky.
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