M42 The Orion Nebula

A last look at the Great Orion Nebula for a few months. Unfortunately for me it disappears behind the front of the house about an hour past the meridian so a very limited window of capture now in March.

Anyway a short capture of 20 x 180 and 20 x 30 seconds images taken with the ASI294mc pro on the ED100 via the ASI AIR Pro.  Calibrated and stacked in Deep sky stacker and processed in Photoshop. I am always amazed how smooth the result is and even with a huge crop on the Trapezium the resulting image is incredibly clean. One confession to make though for the pixel peepers, the 4 stars of the Trapezium have been made round removing slight halos from processing.

M96 & M105

 The universe never fails to amaze me of it's vast size and complexity. The 4 large galaxies seen here in the constellation of Virgo contain over a hundred trillion stars between them at an average distance of 30 million light years ish. When you look a little closer though you will see 360 small boxes. Hidden behind each one is another galaxy so distant it has taken the light of some over over 12 billion years to reach us. Every other point of light you see here are stars within our own galaxy.

The Moon 28th December

 

The best 3000 from 5000 frames captured a few nights after Christmas. Using the new updated live video mode in the ASIair pro. A 4 minute AVI was pre processed using PIPP PIPP Planetary Imaging PreProcessor (google.com) allowing the ever trusted Registax 6 to process into a usable image. Processed in Photoshop and sharpened in Topaz Labz. 

SH2-171 Teddy Bear Nebula

 An unfinished project, no doubt something bigger & brighter caught my attention and this project was left on the shelf. The teddy Bear Nebula or SH2-171 is an HII emission nebula and star forming region approx 3000 light years away in the constellation of Cepheus. A very young cluster of stars designated Berkeley 59 located just off centre in the 2 o'clock position is only a few million years old and is the primary source for the nebula. Stellar winds have shaped and eroded columns & pillars of gas to create this wonderful region. The brightest almost central star in the image is not associated with the nebula at 317 light years away. 

As always this image was captured with the ED100 and the ASI 294 Mc Pro with 10 x 5 minute sub exposures controlled by the ASI Air pro micro computer

A night of a blue moon.

Typically three clear nights lead up to a full moon. Less of a concern now for us deep sky enthusiasts especially with the Optolong L-Enhance dual band filter. 

Not a perfect solution by any standards but certainly allows us colour CMOS camera users greater object choice when in light polluted or moonlit skies. I am certainly happy with it anyway. Another chance also to test the Autofocus routine on the ASIAIR pro and the EAF. 

I started the evening with a few technical difficulties. I needed to reload the software from a corrupt disk back onto the AIR, possibly due to moisture build up in the observatory. A new thermostatically controlled heater will hopefully cure the problem. It certainly did for the last obsy. The aim of the evening was to test everything worked again rather than any serious imaging run. So I rotated the dome away from the moon and targeted IC1396  The Elephants trunk nebula one of my first targets with the ZWO ASI294MC pro and initiated the auto focus routine. I have to say it worked flawlessly so much better focus than just with a bhatinov mask. I set it to adjust every 30 minutes for the 2 hours of data . Processed also in a slightly different way but just look at the focus difference. I thought I was happy with the older image (2nd one)

Pleiades

A star cluster known to every civilisation and buried within the folklore across every culture on the planet, The Pleiades or the seven sisters is probably the most recognisable of all the 88 constellations. I think also the best example of a reflection nebula. Containing over a thousand members mostly of hot young stars. Slowly moving through space through an unrelated dust cloud, the dust is illuminated by light and the energy of the stars.

I love the way the dust is sculpted in front of the stars Maia & Merope.

Just under two hours of exposure time captured in 3 minute exposures using the ZWO ASI294MC pro, Calibrated with Flats, Darks and Dark Flats The first real test too using the new auto focus routine with the ZWO EAF focuser. All I can say is incredible, A quick and simple procedure that takes 2-3 minutes and can be incorporated into the autorun of a sequence. You can add a change to focus via temp difference or time. A Video to follow.

M31 Globular Clusters Project

The Andromeda Galaxy (also known as M31 and NGC 224) is the nearest spiral galaxy to our own Milky Way galaxy. Its relatively early Hubble type (Sb) and bright absolute magnitude (-20) make it an important and unique source of information on galaxies of this nature. M31 forms an important testing ground for ideas about massive galaxies and about galaxy evolution, and is ripe for detailed astrophysical exploration. The purpose of this atlas is to make future exploration and exploitation of this galaxy easier by mapping out some of the thousands of objects of various kinds that have been identified in it and by giving photographic and photometric data that will aid in planning and understanding new rese
arch.

The National Geographic Society generously provided funds to support the preparation of the atlas and to help cover its publication costs. The Kitt Peak National Observatory provided the observing time at its 4-meter telescope, through an assignment to an ``M31 consortium.'' The National Science Foundation, through grant AST 76-17598, partially supported some of the research results that were by-products of the preparation of the atlas. And finally, the University of Washington Press has guided the preparation of the atlas and painstakingly produced it.

The original photographic plates for the project were taken in Oct 1974 with the newly installed Nicholas U. Mayall Telescope

Below is the website to the source of my information

http://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/ANDROMEDA_Atlas/frames.html

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This project was inspired by a fantastic website by Steve Gottlieb who images globular clusters in nearby galaxies. Steve is a deep sky observer who enjoys the obscure and offbeat targets.

 https://www.astronomy-mall.com/Adventures.In.Deep.Space/gcextra.htm

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39 Photographic plates were taken each of 25 minute exposure. Months of painstaking work was done to complete the Atlas and it's list of extragalactic clusters.

I unfortunately do not own anything in the order of the 4 metre Nicholas U Mayall just a modest 100mm refractor that's about 40 times smaller. I accept that a modern CMOS sensor is infinitely more sensitive today that a photographic emulsion. I spent about a week aligning the plates to mine and came up with an amazing 244 Globular clusters in M31 and it's satellite galaxies. It has been a fun project and I would encourage you all to have a go yourself. My Image below.

Heart & Soul Nebula Nebula

I am fascinated by the latest Hubble palette processing for OSC cameras. I thought I would have a go with the Heart & Soul nebulas in Cassiopeia. There are more and more videos on You Tube. Both images are a little over 4 hours of exposure time captured with the Optolong L-enhance filter. This is solely my creative interpretation of that style as I have not figured out yet how to extract the Ha & Oiii from the master and recombine. Every time I have tried it in APP I only get a black & white image despite what the You Tube videos show, something I am doing wrong somewhere..

As always comments are welcome.

Andromeda Globular clusters.

 I stumbled across a great website by Steve Gottlieb https://www.astronomy-mall.com/Adventures.In.Deep.Space/gcextra.htm who has spend some time studying the globular clusters of M31. Several hundred were found categorised and published first by Edwin Hubble in 1932, As many as 509 globulars in M31 have been catalogued based on spectra plates taken at Mauna Kea with the 3.6 meter Canada-France-Hawaii telescope, (Crampton et al, 1985), although recent work indicates that some of these are faint background galaxies. In any case, the M31 globular cluster system does appear to be more numerous than our own galaxy by roughly a 2:1 ratio. This important article provides identifications, positions, magnitudes, colours and radii although no finder charts are given.

A few nights ago I was testing the ASIAIR Pro auto focus and aligned on The Andromeda Galaxy. An hour later I stacked an hours worth of data and stretched it. I was truly amazed I was able to resolve 2' clusters @>mag15. Resolving deeper & longer is a passion of mine and my project a few years ago labelled hundreds of PGC galaxies in the Coma Cluster, this intrigued me from the outset and I had to see how many I could find in M110 (NGC205)

It didn't take long to find them all.

My image is on the left. incredible detail for just 1 hour of exposure. Spectacular rounds stars with of .42 arc second guiding accuracy.

My next project during the new lockdown will be to catalogue the Globulars in M31. I have found quite a few already but it looks like it may take a while.

M33

Some people like dairy milk, some like a Wispa me I love a good Galaxy. How about this one. About 2.8 billion light years away. M33 the Triangulum galaxy is part of the local group. I am sure there is another Astro Geek on a planet surrounding one of it's 40 billion stars looking over the galactic fence at us here. A very diffuse object I can't say I have seen it naked eye, others claim too but a wonderful sight in binoculars and a wide field eyepiece. Five hours worth of data for this one.

Image 1 is calibrated in Deep sky stacker and processed in Photoshop.

Image 2 is calibrated in Astro Pixel Processor and processed in Photoshop.

What an incredible difference.

Veil Nebula

Giant stars are notorious for loosing their mass in the form of a super Nova The source of the Veil remnant was a star that exploded around 7500 years ago, Covering a huge area of sky appox. 36 times the area of the full moon. 

The Eastern Veil below is just a small section of the entire complex with a multitude of it's own nicknames like the Bat Nebula or Network Nebula.

The Western Veil is I think much more photogenic piece of the galactic puzzle commonly known as the Witches broom, Filaments of Hydrogen, Oxygen and Sulphur radiate light at different wavelengths and stretch across the sky in a twisted dance,