James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) at destination

James Webb Telescope (JWST) arrived on the 24th of January at it's destination, an orbit around the Lagrange L2 point at about 1.5 MKm from Earth. Below, a 60 minutes time-lapse made from 60 images of 60 seconds each taken today. JWST can be easily identified as the moving point against the background stars. Apparent magnitude about 16.5, it will change depending on the sunshade orientation towards to the observer.

Asteroid 1994 PC1 flyby

The asteroid 1994 PC1 flyby "near" the Earth -today at about 1% of the distance Sun Earth, it's closest approach to earth. 

Video composition from 81 individual 3 second each images taken from the Carpe Noctem Observatory. A combination of tracking on stars, beginning and ending, and tracking on the asteroid, center has been used so the asteroid can be easily distinguish from the background stars.

About 1994 PC1

Geminids 2021 (II) !

 Yes!, a few more meteors were detected on the 13th Dec night. Upto +750 !

+750 Gaminids + 2 plane long trails can be easily identified around the center of the image.

Geminids 2021 !

 Last night, 12th to 13th Dec, +450 meteors detected, tomorrow more ?

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.