Milky Way is now in best position to observe

The beautiful river of stars is now high in the sky. Go out with a pair of binoculars and get your feet wet.

The following 6 panel mosaic represents a week's worth of imaging from 11pm to 3 am each night:

http://www.astromart.com/common/imag...1.jpg&caption=

Will add more panels as weather permits.

UncaImager

Good advice, especially for those with easy access to *dark* skies. I got a taste of scanning that 'river' recently. My two widest field eyepieces provide true fields in excess of 2 degrees with the Beast. The Milky Way is awesome! Stars are everywhere! One view I recall looked more like a sprinkling of tiny, dark 'stars' against a textured white background. It was as if a larger percentage of the field's area was devoted to stars than to darkness between stars! Stars everywhere!

Fascinating image! How large of a sky area is shown? Where abouts in the sky was it centered?

Sketcher,
To sketch is to see.

On Wednesday, July 22, 2015 at 10:40:33 PM UTC-6, Uncarollo2 wrote:
The beautiful river of stars is now high in the sky. Go out with a pair of binoculars and get your feet wet.

The following 6 panel mosaic represents a week's worth of imaging from 11pm to 3 am each night:

http://www.astromart.com/common/imag...1.jpg&caption=

Will add more panels as weather permits.

UncaImager

On Thursday, July 23, 2015 at 6:01:32 PM UTC-7, Sketcher wrote:
Good advice, especially for those with easy access to *dark* skies. I got a taste of scanning that 'river' recently. My two widest field eyepieces provide true fields in excess of 2 degrees with the Beast. The Milky Way is awesome! Stars are everywhere! One view I recall looked more like a sprinkling of tiny, dark 'stars' against a textured white background. It was as if a larger percentage of the field's area was devoted to stars than to darkness between stars! Stars everywhere!

Fascinating image! How large of a sky area is shown? Where abouts in the sky was it centered?

Sketcher,
To sketch is to see.

On Wednesday, July 22, 2015 at 10:40:33 PM UTC-6, Uncarollo2 wrote:
The beautiful river of stars is now high in the sky. Go out with a pair of binoculars and get your feet wet.

The following 6 panel mosaic represents a week's worth of imaging from 11pm to 3 am each night:

http://www.astromart.com/common/imag...1.jpg&caption=

Will add more panels as weather permits.

UncaImager

Since NGC 6888, the Crescent Mebula, is prominent, the field is in Cygnus. since NGC 6888 is about 17 arc-minutes in length, or about 1/3 of a degree, a really crude estimate of the sky area would be about 7 degrees by 7 degrees... am I close, Unca?

\Paul A

On Thursday, July 23, 2015 at 6:10:48 PM UTC-7, palsing wrote:
On Thursday, July 23, 2015 at 6:01:32 PM UTC-7, Sketcher wrote:
Good advice, especially for those with easy access to *dark* skies. I got a taste of scanning that 'river' recently. My two widest field eyepieces provide true fields in excess of 2 degrees with the Beast. The Milky Way is awesome! Stars are everywhere! One view I recall looked more like a sprinkling of tiny, dark 'stars' against a textured white background. It was as if a larger percentage of the field's area was devoted to stars than to darkness between stars! Stars everywhere!

Fascinating image! How large of a sky area is shown? Where abouts in the sky was it centered?

Sketcher,
To sketch is to see.

On Wednesday, July 22, 2015 at 10:40:33 PM UTC-6, Uncarollo2 wrote:
The beautiful river of stars is now high in the sky. Go out with a pair of binoculars and get your feet wet.

The following 6 panel mosaic represents a week's worth of imaging from 11pm to 3 am each night:

http://www.astromart.com/common/imag...1.jpg&caption=

Will add more panels as weather permits.

UncaImager

Since NGC 6888, the Crescent Mebula, is prominent, the field is in Cygnus.. since NGC 6888 is about 17 arc-minutes in length, or about 1/3 of a degree, a really crude estimate of the sky area would be about 7 degrees by 7 degrees... am I close, Unca?

\Paul A

OOPS, typo... Crescent Nebula :)

On Thursday, July 23, 2015 at 8:10:48 PM UTC-5, palsing wrote:
On Thursday, July 23, 2015 at 6:01:32 PM UTC-7, Sketcher wrote:
Good advice, especially for those with easy access to *dark* skies. I got a taste of scanning that 'river' recently. My two widest field eyepieces provide true fields in excess of 2 degrees with the Beast. The Milky Way is awesome! Stars are everywhere! One view I recall looked more like a sprinkling of tiny, dark 'stars' against a textured white background. It was as if a larger percentage of the field's area was devoted to stars than to darkness between stars! Stars everywhere!

Fascinating image! How large of a sky area is shown? Where abouts in the sky was it centered?

Sketcher,
To sketch is to see.

On Wednesday, July 22, 2015 at 10:40:33 PM UTC-6, Uncarollo2 wrote:
The beautiful river of stars is now high in the sky. Go out with a pair of binoculars and get your feet wet.

The following 6 panel mosaic represents a week's worth of imaging from 11pm to 3 am each night:

http://www.astromart.com/common/imag...1.jpg&caption=

Will add more panels as weather permits.

UncaImager

Since NGC 6888, the Crescent Mebula, is prominent, the field is in Cygnus.. since NGC 6888 is about 17 arc-minutes in length, or about 1/3 of a degree, a really crude estimate of the sky area would be about 7 degrees by 7 degrees... am I close, Unca?

\Paul A

Yes, you're close.

On Thursday, July 23, 2015 at 8:01:32 PM UTC-5, Sketcher wrote:
Good advice, especially for those with easy access to *dark* skies. I got a taste of scanning that 'river' recently. My two widest field eyepieces provide true fields in excess of 2 degrees with the Beast. The Milky Way is awesome! Stars are everywhere! One view I recall looked more like a sprinkling of tiny, dark 'stars' against a textured white background. It was as if a larger percentage of the field's area was devoted to stars than to darkness between stars! Stars everywhere!

Fascinating image! How large of a sky area is shown? Where abouts in the sky was it centered?

Sketcher,
To sketch is to see.

On Wednesday, July 22, 2015 at 10:40:33 PM UTC-6, Uncarollo2 wrote:
The beautiful river of stars is now high in the sky. Go out with a pair of binoculars and get your feet wet.

The following 6 panel mosaic represents a week's worth of imaging from 11pm to 3 am each night:

http://www.astromart.com/common/imag...1.jpg&caption=

Will add more panels as weather permits.

UncaImager

Each panel is about 4.5 x 6.7 degrees wide. There are 6 panels (3x4.5 and 2x 6.7) There is some overlap of the panels. The area is about 11 x 11 degrees and runs just a few degrees south of Sadr. You could get almost the whole area into one widefield binocular view. The nebulosity is very faint and probably out of reach visually except for the Crescent nebula which you could see with a good 7x50 or 10x70 bino.

It's interesting to me that the entire stretch of Milky Way is infused with H-alpha emission. There is almost no place where you could not record any. In order for the fainter stuff to show up in an image you have to suppress the bright starlight that makes up the galaxy. Then you suddenly see the interweaving filaments of hydrogen everywhere. It looks like vanilla swirls in chocolate ice cream. Most of this stuff is not shown on star maps, and I'm wondering if the cosmologists really know just how much is in our galaxy and how much mass this represents.

While we are on the subject of cosmology, the latest theories du jour are trying to come up with missing mass and contributing it to dark matter that somehow is exactly in the same place as the galaxies, yet do not interact with ordinary matter. Could some of this missing mass be buried in black holes like the one in the center of our galaxy? Do they really know how much the Milky Way black hole weighs (i.e. its total mass?).

Not only does this black hole gobble up whole stars, but it also captures photons that cross its event horizon. Normally these photons would fly around and eventually interact with other matter (like our earth) and liberate electrons on our detectors, thus not lost to the universe. But all those that happen to fly by a black hole are lost forever, thus reducing the net amount of radiation in the observable universe. Does this mean that the universe is slowly losing overall luminosity?

UncaPonder