Thursday, April 13, 2023

Venus, Pleiades, & Lens Flare (Oops)?

So my wife and I were vacationing in Santa Fe staying with her sister and brother-in-law whose house happens to border Santa Fe National Forest. I brought my wide angle portable setup and saw that Venus was very close to M45, The Pleiades Cluster, and decided to see if I could get a decent image before it went behind a tree. I did have the 200mm Canon Lens but not the counter weight for the iOptron Skyguider Pro or guidescope so exposures would have to be limited to 15 seconds. I managed to get twenty seven exposures which correlates to six minutes and forty five seconds so I was not expecting much but when I looked at the raw data on the computer I saw what looked like a small comet.

I did some checking but could not find any information about a comet in this region. In addition, the amount of movement in the almost seven minutes seemed fast (approximately 0.8 degrees in 6-minutes). Another thought I had was a meteor but it would be too slow for it to be that. Lastly, if you look closely, the object appears as three broken fragments but I am not positive of this as the single exposures show it as one unit. If this is the case then the breakup may be just an artifact from the comet Alignment function in PixInsight.

As expected, with such a small amount of exposure time, the noise level was quite high and there were gradients especially since I did not use any flats. Because of this I had to do a lot of processing gymnastics. Before realizing there was a comet or whatever it is, I thought this was going to be an easy object to process.

If anyone has any idea what this is please let me know in the comments. I have also attached it as a video animation (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zgiMmfDuAE).

Date & Time:
10-April-2023, 9:27-9:42pm MDT

Addendum:
The Figure 1 is starting image and Figure 2 is the image from 15 minutes later. Venus does move a bit but not corrosponding to the unknown thing (reflection). Although maybe that is all that is needed.


Figure 1 - Start

Figure 2 - End

Venus, Pleiades, & Something? 
Dates: 4-10-23
Camera: Canon T3i/600d modified
Telescope: Canon EF 200mm f/2.8L II USM Lens
Barlow: None
Focal Length: 200mm
f/4 with stepdown rings
Focal Reducer: None
Mount: iOptron Skyguider Pro
Filter Wheel/Drawer: none
Filter: none
Focuser: none
Autoguiding: none
Exposure: 27 x 15
Gain/ISO: 1600
Processing: ASIAIR Pro, PixInsight, Photoshop, StarXTerminator, NoiseXTerminator, GHS,
GradientXTerminator, BTX.

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http://youtube.com/AstroQuest1

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