The Milky Way, looking south. Half of Sagittarius (the Teapot, center of our galaxy) was already beneath the horizon.
The Milky Way, zenith. Summer triangle: Deneb (top), Altair (left), and Vega (right, toward center)
Milky Way and Cygnus, Lyra, and Aquila (basically the same constellations as above, but with a shorter exposure).
Andromeda Galaxy, our nearest neighbor: the fuzzy yellow smear near the center
Andromeda Galaxy: yellow fuzzy streak just above center (why do the other stars look different?)
Beautiful Pleiades
It was getting really cold (38F. NE September!). My camera frosted. Jupiter looks like a shining star with spikes!
After I warmed up my camera with my body temperature, I was able to get this picture of Jupiter and its four moons: Europa, Callisto, Io, and Ganymede (top left to lower right). Please excuse my inability to focus!
Here is something I just learned about the four largest moons: the orbits of Io, Europa, and Ganymede, form a pattern known as a Laplace resonance; for every four orbits that Io makes around Jupiter, Europa makes exactly two orbits and Ganymede makes exactly one. How cool is that!We also observed many nebulae (Ring, Veil, and Dumbbell), star clusters (M13, M11, and M15), double star Albireo (cool colors), double-double star epsilon-epsilon Lyrae (except we weren't able to resolve the double-double), galaxies M81, M82, and maybe others. It is really nice to see all these with my own eyes, albeit professional photographs look undoubtably better, I feel like walking the path of pioneer astronomers. Imagine Galileo Galilei discovering the four largest Jupiter moons in 1610. I see the strips on Jupiter with the help of the telescope. Truly amazing.
All through the night (cold it may be), meteors kept falling (might be from Piscis Australis), and then around 12:56am, while I was reviewing my picture of the Pleiades, I saw a bright light through the corner of my eye. There was it, the brightest, biggest meteor I have ever seen in my whole life, falling ever so slowly in the moonless night sky, with a green flare trailing, in the direction of east-southeast. It was dream-like, so silently, yet felt so close because it was so bright, that I was thinking, "oh no! We are gonna get hit!" I wasn't sure whether I should take cover, though there was nothing to cover me, or to take a photo -- my camera was pointing east-northeast. Before I was able to make the necessary turn, the meteor disappeared. We were absolutely stunned, by our good fortune for seeing such an unusual event. Later in the day there was some confusion as whether we saw the NASA weather rocket launched earlier Saturday night, but I believe we saw a meteor, one to remember.
