M92 is considered to be one of the oldest globular clusters in the Milky Way with it's 300,000 stars forming over between 12 & 13 billion years ago. The entire cluster is 100 light years wide and any planet orbiting one of those stars would live in perpetual daylight, never knowing the larger universe that exists beyond.
The light June nights can be a very difficult time to image deep sky objects, if the moon doesn't interfere then the lack of darkness here at 52 degrees is just as bad. A few years ago I imaged the NGC7000 region in a mosaic capturing both the North America Nebula and the Pelican as well. This time would be a little different with more focal length I knew the Cygnus wall would frame up quite nicely. Over a period of 4 nights I have managed to capture around nine hours of data using the ha and Oiii filters in the hope to produce a HOO image.
I will be capturing data using my Optolong narrowband filters inside the Zwo 36mm filter wheel.
The Cygnus wall is a small part of the overall North America Nebula, The nebula is an emission type intermixed with a wall of dust, the final region covers a huge 70 light years.
My rig like most are under sampled using 3.76 micron pixels on the 130mm refractor so when processing I use a 2 drizzle integration. The downside to this was leaving it overnight to process the data in WBPP
Single 180 second Ha frame
Single 180 second Oiii
I have long known about the ARP (The Atlas of peculiar Galaxies) but not known a great deal about the Hickson group of galaxies.
I was playing with Stellarium looking for a new group of galaxies in Leo when I by chance found the Hickson 44 group. As always I do a google search and check out what the group looks like and found the group to be really interesting.
The Hickson 44, after Canadian astronomer Paul Hickson, is a group of gravitational bound four galaxies about 100 million light-years away in constellation Leo. Other names include the Leo Quartet and the NGC 3190 Series. The two spiral galaxies in the center of the cropped image are edge-on NGC 3190 with its distinctive dust lanes, and S-shaped NGC 3187. The bright elliptical galaxy lower right is NGC 3193 the spiral in the center lower portion is NGC 3185.
Just 12 x 3 minutes per RGB filters used here, so a little over and hour and a half in total. Very pleased with the result and definitely worth a deeper view next spring.
Holy smokes, sometimes you just need to stop in your tracks and just behold the beauty, majesty and enormity of space. M16, The Eagle Nebula or more commonly known as "The Pillars of Creation" is probably the most iconic and well known images of deep space and the legacy of the Hubble space telescope. First captured by Hubble back in 1995. The "Pillars of Creation" is a star forming cloud of Hydrogen gas 90 trillion kilometers wide. The tiny section in the centre of my image resemble fingers, stalagmites of condensing clouds of Hydrogen gas and dust forever reaching into the darkness, lying deep within and not visible to conventional cameras are eggs or incubators of newly formed stars ready for birth in a few hundred million years.
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
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.
Image credit: Daniel
William "Danny" Wilson - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=124244874
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.
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
A cosmic wanderer, Comet Tsuchinshan-Atlas or more commonly known as Comet A3 has traced its elliptical path through the solar system, a j...
