Sunday 9 January 2022

My Bucket list.

Ok so lets talk about distance particularly the speed light. 

In a vacuum,  we know that light travels at 670,616,629 mph. So If a little context is needed light from the moon takes 1.3 seconds to arrive at our eyes, Saturn is 1.3 light hours away a measly 0.0001505453985955772 light years distant. So what is a light year?

quite simply the distance light travels in a year 5,878,625,370,000 that's nearly 5.9 Trillion miles. Ok so back to the point I wanted to make IC434 or the Horsehead nebula is an immense cloud of thick dust obscuring star birth inside it and in galactic terms the Horsehead is an insignificant 3.5 light years in diameter but when you compare that against our solar system and our distance to Saturn it would be a huge two hundred and twenty one thousand three hundred and forty four (221,344) times the distance. 

If you ever needed reminding SPACE IS BIG.

My image was captured 2 nights ago at my home observatory with about 4 hours of data. Over the years I have taken many images of this target and I was lucky enough back in April of 2015 to appear in an episode of the Sky at night celebrating Hubble's 25 year Anniversary. One ticked off my bucket list anyway.



Stack of 40x 3 minute Ha frames.


My new laptop has amazing processing power, attempted several times previously to process a starnet++ starless image, it failed several times, introduce Mr Dell and it processes a colour starless image in less than 2 minutes, a chunk of star reduction and hey presto a lovely update to mt=y first process.




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