“Solar System” collection
C/2022 E3 (ZTF)
Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF)
Pretty comet almost at its closest approach to Earth, about 42 million km away. The weather was unforgiving, -10°C with just a brief window of opportunity. We can always capture it next time it returns, in roughly 50.000 years…
2022 Planetary Alignment
Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and the Moon
In June 2022 all of the planets came into alignment. It is exceedingly rare that all planets would be visible at the same time. They formed a large arc of over 100° on the morning sky.
The Eyes
NGC 4435 & NGC 4438 / Arp 120 and asteroids!
NGC 4435 is a barred lenticular galaxy currently colliding with NGC 4438. Both are about 52 million light-years away. There are 3 interesting trails visible in the image below. These belong to a minor planet and two asteroids. Can you find them? Only a handful of people have ever seen any of these objects!
Sun
Sol
Some fun: from 13 measurments on the raw images we get 1244.23 pixels as the Sun’s diamater. The pixel size is 4.06μm in this sensor so the size of the Sun’s image on the sensor is 5051.57μm (5.052mm). The focal length of telescope is 550mm. The Sun was 151,801,908km away when this image was taken. To get the diamater of the Sun: 5.052mm x 151,801,908km / 550mm = 1,394,369km (which is only 1% off of the best available measurements).
C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE)
Comet C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE)
In this no-so-great-picture the comet is about 104 million km away, speeding at 54.000 km/h. The core is about 5 km in diamater, the tail is over 87.000 km long.