Geminids 2020

Last night the Meteor Cam at the observatory detected +580 meteors corresponding to the Geminids. See the 580 images stacked into 1 single image below.

Leonids meteor shower: while we sleep...

What happened last night above the observatory ? 

Imagine we take a movie of the whole night sky, +12 hours, with a high sensitive camera and group in one single frame those moments when a meteor is detected by the camera. See the result:

Leonids 2020 trails detected during the night of 16-17 Nov. First light Meteor Cam at the observatory.

In the above synthetic image, created by combining up-to 157 individual images in one single image, we can find more than150 trails. Most of them correspond to meteors and some fireballs (a firewall is not more than a meteor brighter than any of the planets). That is a meteor shower!

The bright arcs corresponds to the individual stars movement as the camera is fixed pointing to North West. Note the Polaris star trail, a small half circle in the top right of the image. Why half circle ?...

New Supernovae SN 2020uxz at NGC 514

Below two images of the Galaxy NGC 514 area. 

• In the top image, a single 300s unfiltered capture acquired the Oct 23th 2020, marked in the center with a visual magnitud ~13.5, the Type Ia supernovae 2020 uxz. This type of supernovae are super energetic final destructive event for some stars resulting from the collapse of a white dwarf when it gets the Chandrasekhar limit and becomes unstable exploding violently. From here the star will evolve to either a black hole or more likely to a neutron star.

• Just below the previous one the much older image from (c) The Digitalized Sky Survey NIR released May 2019 database. Obviously both stars and galaxy are much more prominent since the professional instruments used are much more sensitive, but even in that case, there is no trace of any star at the supernovae position.

Before-After image comparision using Aladin Sky Atlas.

Below some basic spectroscopic low resolution analysis of the supernovae. Typical supernovae Ia absorption features identified for Si and Fe:

Spectra of the Supernovae extracted using Star Analyzer 200 low res. grating and RSpec realtime spectroscopy software.

El cometa C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE) el 20 de Julio

Abajo imagen del cometa casi en su plenitud visual el pasado día 20 de Julio. Dada la dimensión aparente de la cola del cometa esta no cabe en el campo fotografiado de casi 1x1 min de arco.

Supernova en la galaxia M61 (2020jfo)

Esta supernova fue descubierta el pasado día 9 de Mayo desde el Zwicky Transient Facility. La octava detectada en esta galaxia desde 1926.

Para mas información, ver interesante artículo en la publicación de Sky & Telescope.

En la reciente imagen superior tomada desde el observatorio Carpe Noctem, se observa la brillante supernova, sin embargo en la inferior tomada anteriormente desde un observatorio profesional en Nuevo Méjico (SDSS) no se observa.

Fragmentación del cometa C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS) - II

Fragmentación del cometa C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS)

En la imagen tomada el 12 de Abril  del cometa se aprecia la fragmentación del núcleo en forma de de pixeles más brillantes (marcados en trazo amarillo) que destacan ligeramente sobre la coma del cometa.