Mercury Over The Fair Barn

Most people have never seen the planet Mercury. Most of the time it is too close to the Sun because, well, it’s the closest planet to the Sun. But now and then the Earth, Mercury and the Sun align just right and you can see Mercury as a bright red dot low on the horizon just after sunset.

Mercury over the Pinehurst, NC Fair Barn

Tonight, 09-Feb-2013 at 6:36 pm I was at the Pinehurst, NC Harness Track short track, and took this image of planet Mercury hovering over the Pinehurst Fair Barn. Mars can be seen faintly just under Mercury.

-- Dalton Hammond

Moon over the 10th tee

Don't believe anything you see on the internet.



The 2009 Harvest Moon — the full moon falling closest to the autumn equinox — did rise in front of the 10th tee around dusk tonight but it didn’t look anything like this. The picture above is a PhotoShopped composite of 3 different pictures I took and edited in order to present a more pleasing visual image. The moon shown is 300% larger than the original.

Think of it as what you should have seen, not what you did see.

-- Dalton Hammond

Unidentified object crosses face of the moon

It must have been a satellite, an aircraft would have appeared much larger. The time was 9:37 PM on September 27, 2009 in Pinehurst, NC. -- Dalton Hammond

Double Star Rigel

Since my $1,200 Nikon won't work right on stars I tuned up my other astrostuff tonight to see if I could split a few double stars with my $79 Philips Toucam Pro webcam and my 8" Celestron telescope.

Our own Sun being a notable exception, most stars are double stars, or even double doubles. The bright star Rigel lives about 770 light years from your bedroom and you probably know it as the right foot of the hunter Orion.

Rigel is the sixth brightest star in the sky, is a noted double and its B companion is clearly evident in this nice image taken from my deck tonight. About 400 1/50th-sec movie images were stacked in freeware RegiStax.

We are looking at the way the star appeared at about the time of the signing of the Magna Carta. Splitting this duo is the equivalent of being able to read the title of this page from three football fields away.

©2009, DALTON HAMMOND

The Planet Venus

At first glance this picture of Venus, taken in Pinehurst, doesn't look like anything to get excited about...except that this is about as good as Earth-based photos ever get because of the planet's heavy cloud cover. And this picture was not taken with my telescope but with my Nikon Coolpix at full optical zoom (about 270 mm).

When Venus is nearest to the Earth it always appears as a crescent, as shown. When it is fully illuminated it is always much farther away and appears much smaller.

This was four separate images, stacked and combined in the freeware program RegiStax.

-- Dalton Hammond

Callisto Transits Jupiter

Sometimes you have to be at the right place in the Universe at the right time.

Early on the morning of August 4th, 2008 despite a thick summer haze I captured this fuzzy image of the great gas planet Jupiter just as the Jovian moon Callisto was crossing in front of the planet. The moon appears as a black dot at the upper right edge and the shadow of Callisto can be seen on the face of the planet just above the image of Callisto. The haze-bloated dot to the left of Jupiter is the moon Io and the moon Ganymede appears to the right of the planet. -- Dalton Hammond

Searching Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence

If you believe what the evolutionists tell you then SETI is spending all this money to discover radio signals from 100 million light years away that could have only been sent by dinosaurs. -- Dalton Hammond

2008 Lunar Eclipse

©2008, Dalton Hammond

Comet 17P/Holmes

Image taken with an 8" Celestron reflector using a Philps Toucam web camera. 1170 images stacked using Registax.



© 2007, Dalton Hammond



-- Dalton Hammond

Moon: Archimedes and Apennines

The seeing was still mushy around my house but here's a what-the-heck view of our friendly Moon taken a few minutes ago. That's Archimedes, the big crater at the left. Montes Apenninus mountain range arcs upward from bottom left.

This was a stack of the best 353 of 1830 images taken with the $79 Philips Toucam Pro webcam working at prime focus F/10 with the Celestron 8" Schmitt-Cassegrain reflector telescope from the Dalton Hammond observation deck.



-- Dalton Hammond