The Northeast Astronomy Forum 2023 (NEAF) : we've been there !

Dubbed the largest astronomy fair in the world, the Northeast Astronomy Forum held in the surrounds of New York City is indeed a nice place to be. This year we decided to attend, mainly to promote our telescope hosting service "Deep Sky South", but also because one should never miss an opportunity to visit the fascinating city of New York.

Yes, our booth is somewhere among the many exhibitors who attended the 2023 edition of the NEAF...

Whatever the circumstance, we never forget to connect with the heavens : the view below, taken from Brooklyn, shows lower Manhattan behind the Brooklyn Bridge but, can you glimpse the tiny white dot up in the sky ?...
This is planet Venus ! (click to enlarge)

Photos: Cristian Valenzuela / Observatorio del Pangue - April 2023

Lately, at the Observatorio del Pangue...

First, you arrive at Santiago de Chile...

...then you want to travel North and meet our clear skies !

Photos: (1)Eric Escalera (2)Jean Pichon / Observatorio del Pangue

In this column we display some of the most relevant news, pictures, or feelings happening around the observatory.

For a complete information on the place and the proposed programmes, you can visit our "facts" pages, listed at the top of the blog.

...and lastly, as to check if we really are as famous as the below picture suggests, don't hesitate to visit us, we'd be delighted to welcome you...

March 26th, a rare cosmic encounter...

Ceres is the first asteroid discovered, and still the largest body in the asteroid belt of the Solar System. Now dubbed "dwarf planet" (together with Pluto), its average distance from the Sun is slightly over 400 million kilometers.
M100 is a magnificent face-on spiral galaxy in Coma Berenices, distant of roughly 60 million light-years, that is some 1,5 million of million times farther ! And even so, they succeded to meet... at least from our perspective : on the evening of last March 26th, Ceres crossed in front of M100 in our sky, in a rare event not to be missed.

The picture below was taken at the beginning of the pass, with Ceres just "touching" the most external spiral arm of the galaxy. It is visible as a very bright spot at the upper left of the galactic nucleus.

Photo: Cristian Valenzuela / Observatorio del Pangue - March 26th, 2023
Canon 60D at prime focus of SCT Meade LX200 16" reduced at f/6, total exposure 10 minutes. North is up

Astrophotography at Pangue : season 2023 begins...

The complex of nebulae around the Eta Carinae star field, referred as NGC3372, is fascinating when viewed in good conditions. The picture below was taken in one of those perfect summer nights : it reveals the many details available in the extended area. The separate bright patch at the upper right corner is labelled NGC3324, and the tradition in Chile says that it mimics the profile of the Nobel prize winner poetess Gabriela Mistral... Look also for the intense, curiously still unnamed, dark nebula toward the bottom of the field.

Photo: Cristian Valenzuela / Observatorio del Pangue - March, 2023
Canon 60D at prime focus of 71mm refractor, total exposure 25 minutes.
North is up

ZTF, the "Green Comet"

By the end of 2022 it was scheduled to be spectacular, with a potential of being visible to the naked eye in February, but it didn't... Nevertheless, comet ZTF (C/2022-E3), named after its "discoverer" (Zwicky Transient Facility), is an interesting object, since it is returning supposedly for the first time in some 50,000 years ! Indeed it must have witnessed some great changes in our civilisation...

We could observe it wandering from Gemini to Taurus, still shining at a magnitude of 6.4, that is just under the limit of visibility for human eye.
The picture below shows the bright, extended coma (left side) followed by the flared, irregularly shaped dust tail (right side). The green color of the coma, rather common on comets, is due to the presence of diatomic carbon (C2), while the brownish (reddish?) tint of the tail is produced by the usual interaction of sunshine with dust.

Photo: Cristian Valenzuela / Observatorio del Pangue - February, 2023
Canon 60D at prime focus of SCT Meade LX200 16" reduced at f/6, ISO 3200, total exposure 10 minutes.

A pair of distant stellar explosions, both bright enough for visual telescopes...

Supernovae are quite rare in a given galaxy, but astronomers use to detect hundreds of them every year, by surveying a large sample of galaxies. Below are two of them, detected almost simultaneously.

The first one, labelled SN2023axu, is located not far in the sky from Sirius, the brightest star. We captured it when shining at a reasonable magnitude of 14.6, within the outskirts of the tiny galaxy NGC2283 (CMa), distant of some 33 million light-years.
To identify the supernova among the stars, you may need some help from the bottom picture, where it is marked by the two lines...

The other one, labelled SN2023bee, shown up in a more distant galaxy, NGC2708 (Hya), located some 85 million light-years away. Even so, at a magnitude of 13.4, it looks much brighter than "axu", hence evidencing a much more powerful stellar explosion... Hereafter we display a picture that we took near its maximum magnitude, followed by the marked view to identify the supernova :

Photos: Cristian Valenzuela / Observatorio del Pangue - February 24th, 2023
Canon 60D at prime focus of SCT Meade LX200 16" reduced at f/6, ISO 4000, total exposure 14 minutes. North is up.

A private event at the observatory / edition 2023

After a hiatus due to the pandemic, we get back to the tradition of taking a picture of the sunset right behind the domes of the Cerro Tololo Interamerican Observatory (CTIO), allowed by a very precise alignment between the Sun, the CTIO, and our own observatory.

This "private event", visible exclusively from our observing room, happens twice a year (on November and February) : here are some views of the last February 8th event which, for the first time in years, displays some nice sunspots on the solar surface...

Photos: Cristian Valenzuela / Observatorio del Pangue - February 8th, 2023
Canon 60D at prime focus of 71mm refractor f/5.3