BAN #190: Block Andromeda, Coyote alert

06 February 2020   Issue #190

Pic o’ the Letter

A cool or lovely or mind-bending astronomical image/video with a short description so you can grok it

Oh, do I have a treat for y’all this week. You pay for this issue of the newsletter, so you deserve something special.thank you.

There are objects in the sky that become iconic and get tons of images of them taken because, well, they’re incredible. The Orion Nebula, the M13 globular cluster, Saturn. I’m sure you can name a few.

When it comes to galaxies, the most obvious one is M31, the Andromeda Galaxy. The closest big spiral to our own visible to the unaided eye, cool through binoculars, taking shape in a small telescope, and an obvious spiral in big ones.

But then you get someone who has amazing talent, uses a phenomenal telescope, and attaches to it a really solid camera, and what you get is jaw-dropping spectacularness:

Oh, yeah. Now mind you, I had to shrink this for the newsletter. Click here for the 2265 x 2265 pixel version, which is amazing.

This was taken by my friend Adam Block, using an exquisite Takahashi E-180 telescope with an Apogee digital camera. It’s a 24 hour exposure (!!), with 8 hours on each filter of red, green, and blue.

I love comparing images like this to what I see at the eyepiece. You can clearly see both companion dwarf elliptical galaxies, M32 (nearly swallowed by starlight directly to the left of M31’s nucleus) and M110 (below and to the right). From mildly light polluted skies I can see both satellites, but what’s visible in M31 itself barely reaches them. Most of what you see here takes a bigger ‘scope or a long exposure to see. Incredibly, the galaxy is huge in the sky; this image is very roughly 4° across. The full Moon would just cover the very center of the galaxy.

And the detail! The dust lanes, the pinkish glow of star-forming nebulae, and the countless stars in our own galaxy in the foreground. Wow. You can even start to see the flat disk of the galaxy starting to warp up and down at the edges, a known feature of many spiral galaxies, including our own.

If you want to learn more about Andromeda, I’ve written about it many times (try here, and here, and especially here). And you should definitely follow Adam on Twitter, since he links to his new images pretty often. And don’t you worry, I’ll be posting lots more photos of his both here in the newsletter and on my blog. He keeps producing ‘em, so I’ll keep showcasing ‘em.

Oh, and scroll up. That image of M81 is his, too. :)

Red in Tooth and Claw

I live in rural Colorado, and we get nature here

I’m usually the first one up in the house, but the other day my wife had some errands to run and got up before me. By the time I got downstairs she had already let the dog out to do her usual morning sniffing-at-rabbit-poop and voiding waste management routine, and right after my wife left I started gathering my wits about me to make myself breakfast.

As I did, I looked out the window and my plans changed rapidly.

[Credit: Phil Plait]

This healthy specimen was trotting along about 200 meters away from the house, moving along some of the snow and ice that had stubbornly refused to melt after a big snowstorm we had two months ago (we had drifts nearly a meter deep in some places). I hadn’t let the goats out of their house yet (that’s done after my bowl of cereal every morning) so I knew they were OK, but I couldn’t be sure a coyote wouldn’t go after my dog. And I could see it eyeballing her as she was playing in the yard.

So I ran outside, got her inside, then ran upstairs and grabbed my camera. The autofocus struggled a bit, which is why it’s a bit fuzzy, but I kinda like the effect. I didn’t have time to adjust the focus, since the coyote was on the move — this was the only shot I got of it stopping to take the measure of its surroundings before moving along again; every other photo I got was it just sort of moseying along.

We hear coyotes way more often than we see them (when they hunt they make a yipping sound that’s both interesting and eerie, and sometimes followed by the scream of the animal they just nabbed, which is extremely unsettling), and they’re just a fact of life around here. You keep your cats and small dogs inside, for example, and we had to make sure we had a safe place for the goats after sunset (we built a small shed for them in the center of their pen, with wood shavings to sleep on and heat lamps for the times the temperature drops down too far). The horses are not a problem; woe be unto any coyote that thinks a horse makes a good meal. They’ll have a hoof-shaped hole through them before too long.

So we take precautions, and otherwise share the land. It’s their land, too, and they were here before we were anyway. I don’t feel the need to feed them with my pets, but they’ll do fine on their own — heaven knows we have enough rabbits and prairie dogs around here for them; I often see coyote poop next to the prairie dog mounds in the horse pasture. Clearly they’re OK, since this one looks to be in fine shape.

And honestly, it’s nice to see some balance in nature. We could use a lot more of it.

Et alia

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