Terra i Estels

Irene Goodnight

2011-03-05T23:59:00.000-08:00

Han passat ja dos mesos desde l'arribada de la Irene, han estat dos mesos fantàstics. Cada dia ens ensenya una coseta nova. Als matins és tota somriures, i cada vegada dorm més per les nits. Hi ha una cançó popular nordamericana (Goodnight Irene) que li desitja bona nit. Quan li cantes no para de riure. Bé de fet riu quan li cantes qüalsevol cosa !!!

Punta Alta (3014 m) pel Barranc de Comalespada

2010-07-25T03:48:00.000-07:00

Dissabte 24 de juliol de 2010

Una "supermatinal" (sortida a les 4:15 de Barna) amb sortida a l'Embassament de Cavallers, i més de 1,300 m de desnivell fins al cim sense apenes descans. Arranquem a les 9... i fem la primera parada a l'entrada al barranc de Comalespada. Al fons, els Bessiberris.

Progressant barranc amunt, ens acostem al coll que ens ha de portar a la Punta Alta. L'Albert com sempre ja va al devant.

Des del coll es veu el camí que ens porta al cim. Fa unes voltes encaixonat entre les roques. Cal ajudars-se una mica amb les mans, però tampoc és gran cosa.

Cal travessar una congesta de neu inclinada, i no val a badar perque el terreny és ben dret. El Néstor, a més calça pneumàtic llis... per anar més ràpid ! El Sergi i un servidor hem seguit grimpant per les pedres, i hem superat la congesta per dalt.

Al cim s'hi estava tan bé que ens hi hem estat mitja hora ben bona, hem parlat, menjat, i em fet unes fotografies. Hem estat jugant a posar noms a les muntanyes... es veia el Cadí, l'Aneto, la Pica d'Estats.

Els estanys de Comalesbienes... la nostra opció pel descens.

A l'Albert li feia por que em perdés... gràcies Lou !

New comet C2010 B1 Cardinal

2010-01-24T06:27:00.000-08:00

Having received my new ST8-XME CCD in December of last year, it has been nearly impossible to get decent images with it as the weather has been terrible. However on Friday Jan 22 the weather forecast showed a window of what could be decent skies in spite of the growing Moon. It was a coincidence that a NEOCP object popped up the in the Northern skies (Dec +73º) a difficult area for some telescopes such as some fork mounted designs. Anyway, the object was moving in a cometary orbit of high inclination (100º) according to Ramon Naves calculations with FindOrb. As for the night, the atmosphere was so stable I could even measure stars of FWHM=2, so a very good one indeed!

It was soon pretty obvious NEOCP F1A002 was not star, as the FWHM was consistently higher than those of nearby stars. After adding up far more images of even better quality as the object was culminating the sky, a small coma of 7.5" could be unmistakably measured.

R. D. Cardinal (Rothney Astrophysical Observatory, University of Calgary) was the first to note the object with a 0.50-m f/1.0 reflector. Y. Ikari (Moriyama, Shiga-Ken, Japan, 0.26-m refelctor), D. Chestnov (images taken by T. Kryachko at Engelhardt Observatory, 0.30-m) and L. Buzzi (Varese, Italy, 0.39-m) also noted its cometary nature.

Comet C2007 N3 (Lulin) tail

2009-03-22T02:19:00.000-07:00

Having already seen this comet at its best in the preceeding days (although never really in excellent conditions in Tiana) I could yesterday take some images with the 10 cm apochromatic refractor. With an efective resolution of 3" per pixel, this image will not show most of the detail in the inner comma, but will let you trace the extension of the tail. The images are 75" long each one and calibrated with the usual dark, bias and flat master frames.

Gran nevada al Ripollès (Costabona)

2009-01-18T11:48:00.000-08:00

Fa poca estona que hem sortit de Molló. Primeres llums del dia.

Cap a l'Est, el Canigó i la Vall d'Espinavell, ben nevats fins al fons.

Cap a l'Oest, la Serra Cavallera, el Puig Estela i el Taga (je je, quins records)

El Sergi, en plena forma.

Una bona traça...

El cim, segons la guia Alpina, deu ser el Puig Sistra, 1995 mts.

El Néstor i el Cim del Costabona.

L'eufòria del descens...

Glorious Broughton

2008-11-14T18:51:00.000-08:00

Comet 2006 OF2 Broughton was a beautiful sight tonight in spite of the powerful full Moon in the nighbourhood.

Having waited for too long after terrible weather, I was not going to to let the night pass without spying some of the brightest comets. This one was particularly inspiring in spite of the difficult conditions with the Moon and less than perfect seeing. Enjoy !

Comet 29P/Schwassmann-Wachmann and Spiral Galaxy IC 2269

2008-10-25T20:29:00.000-07:00

Periodic comet Schwassmann-Wachmann (29P) is a funny body of unpredictable behaviour. It frequently shows rather sudden increases in brightness which are followed by an expansive wave of material, only to fade away rather abruptly afterwards.

A very detailed graph of the nuclear activity of comet 29P can be seen at Comets_Obs database. This shows the magnitude of the nucleus using a 10"x10" box.

http://www.astrosurf.com/cometas-obs/29P/multi.htm

A new refinement to this curve has just been added by Julio Castellano at Comets_Obs to try to better understand what is going on in the "core": it consists of an adjustment to the 10X10 magnitude data to account for the absolute distance of the comet .

http://astrosurf.com/cometas-obs/_MHDC/29P/

The most recent outburst of activity ocurred on September 15 (IAUC 8978) and was reported (another first!) by acomplished observer Juan Antonio Henríquez Santana at station MPC J51. His images reveal the comet a two-full magnitudes brighter than previously observed.

I imaged the comet on October 26 early in the morning when the comet was at a decent height above the Eastern horizon. The coma has grown in size to 3.5' and is now more transparent as the material has started to dissipate.

Low excentricity comet C2008 T1 Boattini

2008-10-04T09:33:00.000-07:00

On the night of October 1, a supicious object was posted on the NEO confirmation page. When I started imaging it, there were only few observations by the original discoverer (Andrea Boattini at Mt. Lemmon) and some other observatories. Local conditions were only marginally good (no Moon but mediocre seeing) and the body was crossing a star-populated field, so the only images I could take barely allowed to pinpoint is astrometric coordinates. The real cometary nature of this object was then confirmed by several other observers.

According to preliminary calculations by Brian G. Marsden, C2008 T1 is a very short-period comet that experienced a very close encounter with Jupiter in 2003.

199P/Shoemaker wakes up

2008-08-06T13:48:00.000-07:00

Sometime in the last couple of days periodic comet 199P/ Shoemaker went into outburst. Gustavo Muller (MPC J47) was the first observer to report an amazing brightness increase as the comet went from being a 17.90 mag. object in mid-July to reaching 14.53 mag. (10" arc seconds box) on August 3, 2008. An image of the first report can be seen at his site: http://astrosurf.com/nazaret/images/cometas/199/199-080803-J47.jpg

With the very recent memory of 17P/Holmes in mind (also discovered from the Canary Islands by Juan Antonio Henríquez Santana, MPC J51), I decided to image comet 199P in spite of its terrible location in the sky as seen from my observatory (very near the Barcelona light dome).

A very bright core can be seen surrounded by a tenuous but evident envelope of material. The image is zoomed and no processing has been applied to the stacked image. The photometry is as follows and was calculated in the unfiltered images for different boxes with FOCAS software (by Julio Castellano) against the USNO A2.0 R catalogue.

                     10x10  20x20  30x30  40x40  50x50  60x60
FECHA      HORA          ±     ±      ±     ±      ±      ± 
---------- --------  -----  -----  -----  -----  -----  -----
04/08/2008 20:08:47  14.48  14.26  14.18  14.16  14.14  14.15
04/08/2008 20:08:47   0.04   0.07   0.13   0.12   0.08   0.09

On August 7, 2008 I took more images in spite of the presence of a very young Moon.

Photometry carried out this second night shows a slight decrease of brightness in the 10" aperture but an overall steadiness (if not a slight increase) at the 60" box.

                     10x10  20x20  30x30  40x40  50x50  60x60
FECHA      HORA          ±     ±      ±     ±      ±      ± 
---------- --------  -----  -----  -----  -----  -----  -----
07/08/2008 20:18:48  14.59  14.25  14.18  14.13  14.10  14.05
07/08/2008 20:18:48   0.06   0.11   0.12   0.11   0.15   0.16

Comet C2007 W1 Boatini at its best

2008-08-03T02:59:00.000-07:00

What a difference some months make! Comet Boattini was less of an impressive sight back in march, but is now a very bright body displaying lots of detail, having now passed its closest aproach to the Sun at the end of June at some 0.8 AU.

A screen shot from "Orbitas" (a great free software package from Julio Castellano) illustrates how the brightness of the comet has been increasing as it crossed perihelion.

Last night I left my telescope capturing as many photons as I could, and co-added the images together. The resulting image is very lightly treated with only a log scaling applied. A funny comma shape has been revealed in the last couple of weeks in images aquired and processed by Giovanni Sostero and Gustavo Muller.

The "intruder" at the bottom-left side of the image is mag. 12.5 asteroid Pomona.

Comet 6P d'Arrest near perihelion

2008-07-23T15:45:00.000-07:00

With Comet d'Arrest rapidly approaching perihelion and showing signs of life as reported by several observers, I decided to accumulate exposure of this body on the nights of July 22-23. I added a total exposure of 45' on July 22. The resulting image shows a short extension (tail?) of 28" at PA 227º.

On July 23 I captured an even longer total exposure of the comet. The aim was obtaining and even deeper image of the outter coma. The overall condensation of the coma has a diameter of roughly 21", and a fan-like extension seems to be developing.

Gallinero (2728 m) i Cogulla (2387) des de la Vall d'Ampriu

2008-07-06T23:00:00.000-07:00

Hem passat la nit dormint a la Vallhiverna. Bé, és una manera de parlar, vam arribar a les 2 en mig d'una tempesta de mil dimonis.

La preparació de la motxilla és un moment important... el Sergi s'ha oblidat els bastons

El parking de sortida, i a la dreta el collet que ens proposem anar a buscar.
Al collet hi ha l'arribada del telecadira. Eren 300 m de desnivell sense massa descans.

Al cim de Gallinero s'hi accedeix sense cap dificultat pel fil de la muntanya. La vista ha de ser molt bonica, però nosaltres ens trobem dins un núvol.

Després de baixar al Coll d'Ampriu, ens enfilem a al cim del Cogulla. Són uns 200 m de pujada per un llom de pedres. Aquí es veu la carena i el cim.

Els primers en arribar. El cel amenaçador. Un mos i cap avall!

La Vall d'Ampriu de baixada.