M10

Well a first for me I think in the last couple of years. 3 yes, three nights clear in a row and no work, so that means 3.00am finishes each night. Tonight would be night 4 but the forecast is for clouds. Oh well it was good while it lasted.

The plan to continue with the E nebula when it rises high enough so for now just 45 minutes 15x 60 sec RGB on M10. It will soon disappear into the tree so very limited time on target. I have a high fence around the house and a tree at due south so anything this low that rises is only visible for an hour or so.

Not a great result but happy I managed to capture it.

Arcturus

Arcturus

Located relatively close at 36.7 light-years from the Sun, Arcturus is a red giant of spectral type K1.5III—an aging star around 7.1 billion years old. Arcturus has moved from it’s Hydrogen to Helium burning to Helium to Carbon phase. The star cools and changes colour to more orange & red, as it cools it expands and sheds the outer layers.

It is about the same mass as the Sun, but has expanded to 25 times its size and is around 170 times as luminous. Its diameter is 35 million kilometers.

Size comparison.

Image credit: Daniel William "Danny" Wilson - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=124244874

 

M12

Not a great deal has changed in the 259 years since its discovery by French astronomer Charles Messier, M12 is a densely packed cluster of hundreds of thousands of the galaxies very oldest stars estimated to be over 13 billion years old, bound by gravity this cluster is 75 light years in diameter or about 435 trillion miles in length in comparison that would be approx. 74,000 yes seventy four thousand times the size of our own solar system of planets.

It took the new horizons probe 9.5 years to get to Pluto so that would mean it would take another seven hundred thousand years before it arrives at the majestic M12.

This image is an RGB combination of 20 x 120 second exposures using all 3 filters so a total of 2 hours combined data, processed in PI.

Considering this for me is very low down and just above the fence line I am very pleased with the result.

Moon 27th April

 

M88 & M91 Drizzle data

 A reprocess of the data now using the drizzled data. I love it.

M88 & M91

It has been a very windy day today, bright and clear but very windy, I wasn't hopeful looking at the weather app today for anything useful tonight. However image capture started at around 21.15 tonight with just a little wind and possibly the odd swirl inside the dome as guiding tonight is around and just under 1.00 arc second, happy with that of course but higher than the usual numbers. Looking at the subs appear every 5 minutes on the tablet, each one battered with satellites. At least I don't have to bin the subs anymore I wouldn't have anything after the first hour.

3 Hour RGB integration

Annotated

Inverted

M88 Crop 24 by 17 arc minutes

M88 Inverted

M91 Crop 19 by 18 arc minutes

M91 Inverted

NGC 4571 Crop 15 by 13 arc minutes

Inverted

  

• Total Exposure:  3 Hours, 12 x 5 Minutes RGB Filters per filter
• Telescope: Altair Astro EDT130 Triplet.
• Image Acquisition: ZWO ASIair Pro
• Camera Settings:  ZWO ASI2600mm pro Gain 100, 0°C
• Accessories: ZWO 7 position Filter wheel
•                Optolong Broadband filters 
•                ZWO EAF
• Calibration Frames: Darks, Flats calibrated.
• Stacking and Processing: Pixinsight & touch ups in Photoshop. 
• Size:   1d 47' 22.2" x 1d 11' 18.0"
• Pixel Scale: 1.046 arcsec/pixel

M5

A reprocess of the M5 data using drizzle, still unsure if I am happy with the difference.

Discovered in 1702, M5 by German astronomer Gottfried Kirch whilst observing a comet, M5 is very nearly a naked eye object, I cannot confess to observing it naked eye myself but visually through a telescope a stunning object. Though the camera even more spectacular resolving stars all the way to the core. Combined as a RGB image displays a wealth bright colourful stars. M5 contains a large number of Cepheid variable stars that have allowed astronomers to accurately to 24,500 light years.

• Total Exposure:  1 Hour, 30 Minutes ( 30 x 60 sec in the R,G & B filters)
• Telescope: Altair Astro EDT130 Triplet.
• Image Acquisition: ZWO ASIair Pro
• Camera Settings:  ZWO ASI2600mm pro Gain 100, 0°C
• Accessories: ZWO 7 position Filter wheel
•                ZWO Broadband filters 
•                ZWO EAF
• Calibration Frames: Darks, Flats calibrated.
• Stacking and Processing: Pixinsight & touch ups in Photoshop. 
• Size: 44 x 33 arc minutes
• Pixel Scale: 1.05 arcsec/pixel

Spider Nebula (update)

Started in December last year with some lovely 5h 50m of Ha data, I have managed to capture some Oiii & Sii data as well during January. 4 hours from each filter will give me a total of 11hrs 50 minutes to produce an SHO image. A JPEG of each processed image. Looking at them now I have done a star reduction on the Ha.

Ha

Oiii

Sii

Combined data 

Also a starless version just because I love the way it looks.

Photo Details

• Total Exposure:  11 Hours, 50 Minutes ( 46 x 300 sec Ha, 48 x 300 sec Oii, 48 x 300 sec Oiii Frames)
• Telescope: Skywatcher Esprit ED100
• Image Acquisition: ZWO ASIair Pro
• Camera Settings:  ZWO ASI2600mm pro Gain 100, 0°C
• Accessories: ZWO 7 position Filter wheel
•                Optolong narrowand filters 
•                ZWO EAF
• Calibration Frames: Darks, Flats calibrated.
• Stacking and Processing: Pixinsight & touch ups in Photoshop. 
• Size: 2.26 x 1.38 deg 
• Pixel Scale: 1.41 arcsec/pixel

Stephans Quintet.

A project started at the end of October last year with my now sold 100mm scope, and will be finished this year with the new 130mm. NGC 7331 and Stephan’s quintet are a fascinating group of targets. This is a huge crop of the original image(a) now just less than one by half a degree at a pixel scale of 1.44 arc sec per pixel(b).

The enigmatic galaxy at the top is NGC 7331 a wonderful example of a spiral galaxy located some 40 million light years away in the constellation of Andromeda. The half a dozen smaller galaxies behind are a good deal further away at on average of 350 million light years distance. The light you see here left when Earth was in the Paleozoic era when Amphibians left the water to first roam the land. A time long, long, long before the dinosaurs emerged, lived and perished.

However, the objects of interest that inspired this image are located below. A visual group of 5 interacting galaxies known as Stephan’s Quintet. 4 of which are interacting with each other 270 million light years away and one NGC 7320 that is in the foreground at just 40 million light years.

The strange morphology of these galaxies has been defined by several theories including a head on collision between two of the group NGC 7318 & 7319 causing a tidal shock in the intergalactic gas. You can see clearly the stream from 7319 that is larger than our entire galaxy and moving at a million miles per hour. This was followed by a collision between 2 more galaxies and all contribute to the chaos of what you see. There are very few of these galactic interactions visible and they have helped astronomers over the years refine the physics & theories into galaxy interactions.

The image you see here is a composite exposure of just one hour using the green filter on the mono camera. The idea is to capture data in the Red, Green & Blue filters to produce a full colour image. This is programmed ready in the Autumn when the constellation rises again in the East.

A handy finder chart shows the location.

The Little red box on the sky map is the field of view for my old telescope. The new scope will have a smaller box giving higher magnification. I hope it gives you an idea of how small these objects are. 

M3

 First discovered in Dec 1764 by French astronomer Charles Messier, M3 is again a globular cluster with over 500,000 stars and an age of a mind blowing 11.4 Billion years old. Easily visible in binoculars or a telescope.

12 x 2 minute exposures in RGB channels combined in Pixinsight. Core Brightness reduction in Photoshop.

M53

 

M53 is one of about 250 globular clusters belonging to our Milky Way galaxy. At a distance of 60,000 light years, M53 is one of the more distant clusters. The globular contains many older red stars, but it also has a number of blue stars. Such young blue stars are fairly uncommon in globular clusters.

One atypical feature of this image is that I collected all of the sub exposures for this image when the Moon was89% full. Usually I don't photograph Broadband targets when the Moon is out, as the bright light from the Moon washes out the faint parts of most images. However, I was able to capture this image fairly well, because globular clusters consist entirely of stars. Almost all of the stars are individually brighter than the background light from the Moon.

Image capture was 12 x 3 minute exposures in the RGB filters and Pixinsight processed.

In the same field of view from the full frame NGC5053 is a much fainter cluster of stars a  little closer at 57,000 light years, very faint tidal streams suggest some interaction between the two in the past.