Comet C/2014 E2 Jacques Animation

With 24 exposures, each 4 minutes long, it is possible to animate the comet’s movement among the stars. Just process the photos individually and import into photoshop as an animation, then export as an animated GIF. Just click on the image to view…

C/2014 E2 Jacques Animation
24 x 4min exposures of comet C/2014 E2 jacques assembled as an animation

Comet C/2014 E2 Jacques

An assembled version of the imagery I took of comet C/2014 E2 Jacques. 24 x 4min exposures, stacked in Images Plus and final processed in Photoshop. While traces of the tails were visible, I was unable to preserve the faint signal in this processed color frame.

Comet C/2014 E2 Jacques
Comet C/2014 E2 Jacques, 24 x 4min with a Canon 6D and a TV-76mm scope

The Tails of Comet C/2014 E2 Jacques

The tails are faint!

I have talked to a couple folks who have observed the comet in mid-sized telescopes, 14 and 24 inch, instruments. One thing they note is the absence of any visual tails on this otherwise bright comet. In processing the imagery from last night I can see the tails, but only in a very strong stretch of the data.

Below is an inverted version of mostly the green channel. Both the ion tail and dust tail are visible, but they are truly subtle. The ion tail is visible as a streak going to the right in the image, quite thin and straight, extending well over three degrees. The dust tail is visible as a wide are below the coma in this image.

Still working to properly the process the full image, the data looks very good so far.

C/2014 E2jacques Inverted
The faint tails of comet C/2014 E2 Jacques, stack of 24x240s exposures, Canon 6D and TV-76mm

Keck Observatory Gives Astronomers First Glimpse of Monster Galaxy Formation

W. M. Keck Observatory press release…

After years of searching, Yale University astronomers have discovered a window into the early, violent formation of the nuclei of the Universe’s monster galaxies. After spotting a potential candidate with the 2.4-meter Hubble Space Telescope, the team of astronomers pointed the 10-meter Keck II telescope, operated by the W. M. Keck Observatory, to witness the turbulent, star-bursting galactic core forming millions of stars at a ferocious rate. The data collected during their five day run in Hawaii offers important clues about the galaxy’s development as it was 11 billion years ago — just 3 billion years after the Big Bang. The research is being published today in the journal Nature.

GOODS-N-774
This image shows observations of a newly discovered galaxy core dubbed GOODS-N-774. Credit: NASA/ESA
Galaxy formation theories have long suggested that monster elliptical galaxies form from the inside out, creating their dramatically star-studded central cores during early cosmic epochs. But scientists had never been able to observe this core construction — until now.

Only the most powerful telescopes have the ability to look back far enough to gather this important insight. “It’s a formation process that can’t happen anymore,” said Erica Nelson, Yale graduate student and lead author of the paper. “The early universe could make these galaxies, but the modern universe can’t. It was this hotter, more turbulent place — these were boiling cauldrons forging stars.”

Continue reading “Keck Observatory Gives Astronomers First Glimpse of Monster Galaxy Formation”

Comet C/2014 E2 Jacques

A bright comet is always a good reason to drag the telescope out of the garage. In this case it is comet C/2014 E2 Jacques, currently about magnitude 7 in Cepheus. The comet is rising over the house about 9pm and available for shooting from my usual driveway setup location.

Setup went pretty smoothly, I have not changed anything in the basic configuration for a while. Shooting the Canon 6D on the TV-76mm scope. I did have some issues getting the autoguider to calibrate. The low magnification and high latitude meant the the calibration moves are just too small. Realizing that this also meant that any potential guide errors would also be small, I just shut the autoguider off. No guiding errors are visible in the four minute exposures.

C/2014 E2 Jacques
Comet C/2014 E2 Jacques on the evening of 27Aug2014, single 240s exposure with a Canon 6D and a TV-76mm telescope

Yes, the shot looks pretty bad… The frame is a quick process of a single sub-frame, just a white balance and curve adjustment in Photoshop. As I write this there are 13 completed exposures with another 17 to go. I do not think I will complete the sequence, I do need to go to bed sometime soon, I have to head to Hilo early tomorrow morning for a conference at Gemini.

Given a couple dozen good exposures I should be able to produce a much better image than is seen here. So far all of the sub-frames look good indeed, nice signal to noise, a bit of nebulae showing near the comet, and maybe a trace of the wispy ion tail. It will be a few days before I have a chance to properly process the image.

Merging Galaxies in the Distant Universe Through a Gravitational Lens

ESA/Hubble press release…

H-ATLAS J142935.3-002836
Galaxy H-ATLAS J142935.3-002836 seen in a composite of Hubble and Keck 2 data, credit NASA/ESA/ESO/W. M. Keck Observatory
The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and many other telescopes on the ground and in space have been used to obtain the best view yet of a collision that took place between two galaxies when the Universe was only half its current age. The astronomers enlisted the help of a galaxy-sized magnifying glass to reveal otherwise invisible detail.

These new studies of the galaxy have shown that this complex and distant object looks surprisingly like the well-known local galaxy collision, the Antennae Galaxies.

In this picture, which combines views from Hubble and the Keck-II telescope on Hawaii (using adaptive optics), you can see a foreground galaxy that is acting as the gravitational lens. The galaxy resembles how our home galaxy, the Milky Way, would appear if seen edge-on. But around this galaxy there is an almost complete ring — the smeared out image of a star-forming galaxy merger far beyond.