Jeff Lightyear

Jeff Moreau is a physics teacher and photographer who lives in Parkesburg, PA and does most of his w

10/17/2024

10 minutes with the telescope on Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS) in Parkesburg, tonight :). It's got a notable anti-tail!

06/16/2024

While catching some fireflies and having a little fire in the backyard last night, we also had the telescope out to appreciate the moon. A good night :)

04/13/2024

*Prominent Prominences*

A solar prominence (sometimes called a filament) is a structure made from plasma and magnetic fields that reaches out from the Sun's surface, often in loopy or arc-like shape. It is not a solar flare or CME (Coronal Mass Ejection). I dove into my eclipse photos just now to see what kind of prominences I might find through some processing.

Here's one from right after totality began, where the prominences that are along the top are most visible. This is exactly how the raw coloring showed up on my camera!

(Note: I just finished up a homework assignment for the week, so I "earned" the privilege of going back into my eclipse photos to process another one :) )

04/10/2024

*Bailey's Beads, 1 Frame*

I grabbed a single frame from one of the videos I posted on Monday, cropped it, and tried to display it in a way that would be more easily appreciable. I still think I prefer the cinematic feel of the videos, but... this is a clear way to see what is being referred to, even if it loses a little bit of resolution-quality.

The moon is not a perfect sphere. It has craters. As the sun was peeking out from behind the moon, it came through the craters on the edge first. That's what you're seeing here, along with a bit of a solar prominence, as well.

04/08/2024

Today was a success! Here's some totality shots from Plattsburgh, NY. There's a diamond-ring as the sun went behind the moon, another as the sun was coming back out, one in the middle of totality, and then a landscape shot over the marina I was at on Lake Champlain.

03/22/2024

*Space Station Solar Transit*

This is a 3-second loop. If you treat the sun as a clock and look down at about 6:30 at the start of the loop, you'll see a black blip cross over edge of the sun. At the end of the loop, you can see the blip leaving the sun at about 3:00 on the clockface. There are 7 astronauts in that blip. (You're looking at the International Space Station)

I drove about 8 miles from home yesterday evening to put myself into the path where the transit would occur. When I pulled over on the side of the road and set up my telescope, I had a clear line of sight between myself and the sun with 5 minutes to spare before the transit would begin. And then with 3 minutes to go, the sun started to dip into the distant tree-line. It was too late to pack up and move to a different location, so... this is what I ended up with!

It was a good task for my solar filter and ZWO SeeStar S50, but hopefully I'll be able to capture a more unobscured transit some other time :)

12/13/2023

*Into the Blue*

Here's an image I shot last night from my back porch, over the course of about 25 minutes of exposures. You're looking at a section of Pleiades (Messier 45), a star cluster that's only about 444 light years from Earth.

Nearly-Last-Call for my 2024 Aerial Photography Calendars. Four left! Please see comments or previous posts for details :)

12/10/2023

I was doing some pretty short exposures (relatively speaking) of some of my favorite deep-sky targets on Friday night with a semi-new far less powerful, but far more portable telescope. Fun stuff :-D

Once more... Info on my 2024 calendars will be in the comments. I still have several left!

11/28/2023

*Sunspots and Spotty Clouds*

I took some pictures of the sun in the school parking lot after school, today. The naked sun shows off the sunspots a bit better, but I like the partially-covered sun for some added interest, as clouds passed by. What's your preference?

Reminder! I still have a limited number of 2024 Aerial Photography calendars available for sale. Go visit this link to answer 3 questions and purchase one, if you are interested: https://forms.gle/Zokv4r8zXL2YVmZb7

11/07/2022

*One Trillion Neighbors*

When we look at the night sky, ALL the individual stars we see are within our own Milky Way Galaxy. The closest large galaxy to us is the Andromeda Galaxy (Messier 31) seen here on the left side of my photo, and there are one trillion stars within that "nearby" neighbor. That just blows my mind. And when I say "nearby", I should clarify that this galaxy is about 2.5 million light years away from Earth.

While I've shot this target a fair number of times, this is a new image from about 3 hours of RGB light-collection last week. The blurry object on the right side is another galaxy referred to as Messier 110 and the bright blob in the bottom left is Messier 32. Both of these are satellite galaxies of Andromeda.
Camera: ZWO ASI 1600MM Pro
Scope: Skywatcher 150PDS

10/26/2022

*Subtle to Spectacular*

In the realm of astrophotography, aiming towards this target (the Orion Nebula - M42) almost feels like cheating. I mean, yeah... it took ~2.5 hours of running my camera and an extra hour of processing, but the comparative splendor of this region compared to so many others... it just doesn't seem fair.

Beyond the spectacular Orion Nebula (which I've even shot with a regular camera/lens, instead of a astrophotography-camera/telescope), this framing also includes the Running Man Nebula (Sh2-279) as the slightly more subtle, but no less beautiful entry of star-forming wonder. Careful observers might also note that M43, Mairan's Nebula, is also right up against M42.

This is all in natural-color, as the naked eye or a regular camera might perceive it. I shot the image in RGB, using 30-second exposures in the separate wavelengths, stacking those together, and then combining them afterwards. The camera was running from about 1:30am-4:00am during one clear morning last week.
Camera: ZWO ASI1600MM
Scope: Skywatcher 150PDS

09/07/2022

*Separated Since Birth*

You are looking at part of the "Cygnus Wall", a large section of nebulae (area where stars are being born) in the region of the sky where we see the constellation of Cygnus. The actual nebula is about 2200 light years from Earth. I just shot this in my backyard using about 4 hours of monochromatic narrowband data. I used the Hubble palette, meaning I mapped Sulfur-ii data to Red, Hydrogren-alpha data to Green, and Oxygen-iii data to Blue. I wonder if there's any chance that the James Webb Space Telescope will popularize a new palette or some new wavelengths for amateurs to use!

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Parkesburg, PA
19365

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http://jeffmoreau.smugmug.com/

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