Monthly Archives: January 2020

Jan 18 2020

A Wide Field Orion Taking on Taurus

Winter is the Orion time…. time to get a wide field camera taking snaps of the winter sky. Here is a wide field frame of Orion with his nemesis, Taurus the Bull. This was a process-image of seven 15-second exposures at f/3.5 28mm, ISO10000, with automatic dark frame subtraction using a Nikon D810a on a tracking mount. Post processing was done in PixInsight to stack the images using median combine, flatten the background, correct color, then crop and save off as a JPG with the correct histogram. Some graininess was removed in Photoshop in the end.

This shows Orion with its definitely-fading Betelgeuse (upper left shoulder), the Orion Nebula, The Barnard Loop, The Rosette Nebula, Sh2-264 (Lamda Orionis Ring) and NGC2175 (upper left).   Click on the image for full size.

Orion and Taurus Wide Field 2020-01-18

Orion and Taurus Wide Field 2020-01-18

For an annotated picture:

with titles

Jan 15 2020

Betelgeuse is Fading

There has been a lot of buzz on the net about the star, Betelgeuse, Alpha Ori… the red supergiant in Orion’s shoulder (or armpit as people might prefer). It is a well known, bright red, supergiant, and it is a well known variable with a long period. Of late, it has been fading rather unusually for its regular patterns of ups and downs in brightness. This fading has everyone charged up…. you see, the star is old, near the end of its life. Stars of this high mass are supposed to supernova… BOOM! The trick is to know when. We have little idea on that, so any changes seen in stars like this make us get realllllly focused. Below is a snap of the latest observations of Betelgeuse’s brightness in V taken from the AAVSO. You can go see this data for yourself at http://www.aavso.org, and entering “Alfa Ori” sans quotes into the “Pick a star” field on the lower right of the page. Select plot light curve after that.

AAVSO V filter light curve of Betelgeuse

AAVSO V filter light curve of Betelgeuse

Orion with Betelgeuse as it would appear at 9:00pm from mid-northern latitudes tonight (January 15)

Orion with Betelgeuse as it would appear at 9:00pm from mid-northern latitudes tonight (January 15)

Orion with Betelgeuse as it would appear at 9:00pm from mid-northern latitudes tonight (January 15)