FAR AWAY THINGS...

More Quasar Madness

2012-01-30T15:53:00.002Z

A double quasar... Whatever next! I can't work out why it is blue.

Quasar madness.

2012-01-23T23:14:00.004Z

This is not just an 18th magnitude dot. This 'dot' has a red shift of 3.21. That means it is currently 21.6 billion light years away, but it appears in our past 11.7 billion light years away. That's totally messed up when you can't even say how far away it is. It takes far away things to another level. It is a Quasar, a galaxy with a central super massive black hole jet pointing straight at us. I can't express how bright this thing is other than to say that it has an absolute magnitude of -30.0. OK, well I'll have a go. Hang on, I'll get my calculator out... If the quasar was at a distance of, say, the Pleiades star cluster is from Earth, it would appear nine times brighter than the Sun is to us on Earth (caveat: that's probably not an appropriate distance for the calculation). Our universe is only 13.7 billion years old and you're looking back across most of that time, to a time when not only the Earth didn't exist, but the Sun also didn't even exist!

Mars

2012-01-15T20:49:00.005Z

Mars is becoming visible again at long last! Here's a picture from the lovely clear night of Saturday 14th January 2012. Picture taken about 00:30 UT 15 Jan 2012, via a DBK colour camera taking 30 seconds worth of 30 frames per sec at 1/109 second exposure, a 2x Barlow lens, on the 20" scope, masked down to 8". 450 pictures were chosen and stacked, sharpened, and a tweak was made to the blue and green channels to compensate for the difference in focus between these colours. Well that's what I did. I'm amazed how much detail I got given the conditions and fact that Mars is tiny! It is a mere 10.2 arc seconds across, or about 180 x smaller in angular extent than the moon. It is half the diameter of earth, 4200 miles, at a distance of about 83 million miles away. You can see Syrtis Major on the left, the large Hellas basin above it, which is near the south pole. Mare Erythraeum is the dark patch at top, the light gap at top right is Chryse, followed by Mare Acidalia. The large area at centre is Arabia Terra. Below Syrtis Major, is Utopia (just at edge), Boreo Syrtis, Protonilus and then a stretching dark finger along the bottom right, Deuteronilus. The light area at bottom right is Vastitas Borealis (North at bottom).

More delights of Orion

2011-12-26T01:00:00.006Z

The chocolate box of Orion contains a selection of objects from visible to photographic beauties. The area around Alnitak (ζ Orionis) is particularly striking with a good telephoto lens. This particular lens has produced a couple of new nebulae via internal starlight reflections. The spike at top left is Alnilam trying to peek into the edge of the shot. I piggybacked my modified 1000D camera on the club's 9 1/4" scope on a CG5 mount and without guiding, got some 2 minute exposures through an old f/6.3 400mm lens. The RA drive had a wobble with a 10 minute period, causing most of the pics to be slightly trailed, but I managed to stack 12 of them with a combining method that minimised trails. So, here I present 24 minutes of exposure centred on the dark cloud called the Horsehead nebula B33, which protrudes against the hydrogen-red background of IC 434. The blue reflection nebulae NGC 2023 and IC435 can be seen below the horse, shining from within the sooty cloud. The more yellow or pinkish Flame nebula, NGC 2024, appears attached to the other side of Alnitak, and this can be seen, albeit dimly, in telescopes much more easily than IC 434. The grapefruit like colour tells us that it is not exclusively shining in hydrogen red light and there must be some cosmic dust scattering component to its colour, rendering it visible to human night vision.

The Perseus Cloud

2011-12-22T18:38:00.003Z

A dim patch of light emerges from the dark cloud in southern Perseus. This is NGC 1333. I thought I'd have a second try at this object with my modified camera on the 20". I had a good dark night when the object was quite high and plenty of light gathering power. It was a bit of a struggle getting good auto-guiding, as it is a dark cloud and there are not many bright stars nearby to guide on. I did a bit of masking and selectively blurring the dim nebulosity, in order to try to smooth out the background, but started to get into 8-bit processing artefacts. In the final image (33 x 30second & darks, flats, etc.), reddened stars abound in the dark cloud, and the blue reflection nebulosity fades into the darkness around the edges. A few dark lanes cross the nebula and a few spots of activity show up dotted off to one edge. The large dark cloud crosses the centre of the image and background stars appear to peek out to the right edge. The width of this picture is similar to that of the moon.

Breckland Skies in Winter

2011-12-21T12:37:00.005Z

I love the return of these beautiful constellations on freezing cold nights. It was dropping well below freezing and as I looked south out of the dome at Breckland Astronomical Society I could see stars right down to the horizon. There was one star especially low down below the constellation Lepus, which I recognised as Pheat, from Columba the Dove. I couldn't see the other two stars near it - but I grabbed the Canon and gorilla pod and clamped it onto the edge of the dome, pointing south. I found I could fit in all of Canis Major and Orion with the standard lens set to wide. I processed to reduce a bit of the background glow, but it was much stronger towards the horizon. An odd cloud was floating through Columba, which I could see. It wasn't moving fast, and appeared pretty small, but it managed to smear out on this image. There were a few high clouds drifting by which I could only see on the photographs. The camera managed 21 good 15 second shots before the battery ran out of juice in the cold and I stacked them in Deep Sky Stacker. Hence the motion blur across the southern horizon. If you look closely you can see the red R Leporis off the upper right of the main pattern of Lepus, next to a whiter star for comparison. I have not processed to show the Rosette, Horsehead, Flame and Orion nebula.

NGC 40

2011-12-03T12:28:00.002Z

Here's a pretty little stellar remnant that's visible in average telescopes most of the year from the UK. NGC 40, which can be found in Northern Cepheus, shows up very red on film, but is blue in appearance even in large telescopes. Due to this bright redness it shows up very quickly on camera. I got a handful of pictures of 30 second duration, some 10 second and some 3 second, stacked them, then averaged and sharpened them. I think it looks quite a flowery little nebula.

The Intergalactic Wanderer

2011-12-01T22:55:00.003Z

The intergalactic wanderer (NGC 2419) is actually not wandering. It is in a 3 billion year orbit around the Milky Way, which takes it further away than the Magellanic Clouds. It's currently 275 000 ly from us and 300 000 ly from the milky way's centre. I remember reading some notes in"Cirque du Ciel" (actually Cartes du Ciel) that the individual stars are 17th magnitude. Some facts about it don't square with me. I read that this globular is huge, and compares to omega centari (see recent posts), which has millions of stars. It is intrinsically very bright in total and appears as a 9th magnitude fuzz in the scope. But the individual stars must be 17 or so magnitudes below that (because 17 magnitudes = a factor of 6.3 million in brightness), more like 26th mag. Perhaps there is a huge range of brightnesses and the brightest ones around 17th magnitude. It is a big, big thing a long, long way away in any case! I wonder if it can sense the dark matter halo? The cluster lies in the direction of Lynx, near the twin stars Castor and Pollux from our humble perspective. I did a colour blur on this image and upped the saturation, sharpened a bit to make it all pretty. I suspect the colour went a little bit crazy along the way, but I love those colourful, spiky starbursts.

Spooky, Nebulous Fingers.

2011-12-01T22:45:00.004Z

WE pointed the twenty inch at the Eastern Sky, so we could get a nice long exposure without rotation. Rising nice and high is the constellation Auriga, the charioteer, and in its centre lie some interesting patches of nebulosity. The "spooky, nebulous fingers" in this photo are otherwise known as the central part of IC405. There's a nice bright guide star here for us. I got 30 minutes worth of luminance, colour and dark images, using the Atik at -20 C, binning 3x3. I stacked in MaximDL then processed by blurring the colour frames, aligning and colour combining. An auto flat overdid things, so I averaged the autoflat corrected frame with a copy of the uncorrected frame. Next, I ran Digital Development and liked the contrasty effect, so I did the same thing with this. I couldn't mamange to get bright colours, they just don't seem to be there in this object. I think nebula filters Ha OIII Hb are the way to go! I did a small manual detrail using 'layers' and 'darken' on it to get round stars. This object is also somewhere in my past blog. Hopefully this pic is an improvement.

The Lagoon and The Trifid Nebulae

2011-11-24T23:09:00.003Z

Four 5 minute exposures of a favourite region of sky of astronomers was enough to produce this wonderfully colourful and stunning scene. The Lagoon nebula (Messier 8) is below centre, and you can see red hydrogen gas extending out to the left of it. Around that is a dark, twisty channel, with some strange tight turns. That is in turn blocking out the light from the myriad stars of the central milky way in the background. A short hop celestially north lies the trifid nebula (M20), which shows its beautiful colour contrast, and the star cluster M21 appears above that. The darkness to the right is merely apparent due to the blocking of star light by tiny aggregations of molecules, spread thinly, but over such a large volume they collectively cut out virtually all what we see. Other wavelengths of radiation, such as infra red, can shine through these clouds. The 'visible' wavelengths between 0.4 and 0.7 μm were captured with a Canon 1000D with the nearIR-red filter removed, through a Sigma telephoto zoom lens at focal length ~ 300mm, on a well aligned Astrotrak.

Nebulae in Norma

2011-11-24T22:33:00.004Z

When I was collecting my stellar photons from those sparkly, southern skies last summer I rushed back into my little warm chalet to process the photos. I discovered a new nebula in Norma! Well it had been there all along, but I like to think that. It's a personal discovery. It looks like a swooping giant bird. Apparently it is called NGC 6188, and there is another planetary like nebula towards its north west (upper right), which appears as a fuzzy star on my poor resolution picture. You can see zeta Scorpii at the top, along with another one of my personal discoveries, namely a big faint red patchy ring around the whole cluster. Actually come to think of it, the whole picture is teaming with my new 'personal' discoveries. Dark, straight lines. Who said nature doesn't like straight lines? a physics teacher? Well my last few years of astrophotography have shown me many rows of stars in lines that are too straight to be chance alignments. There are a sequence of giant (I mean HUGE and capitalisation of the letters really is quite an understatement), dark, frigid clouds across the picture. Also, there seems to be a tinge more redness down towards where the tree has made its impression on the moving stack of photos that went into producing this image, but that could easily be an artefact of the processing. The atmopheric extinction of starlight shows up with the lack of light pollution, at such high contrast.

The void

2011-11-24T01:19:00.008Z

Sorry for not posting for a short while. I've been looking into the void. Unfortunately, I was aiming for the diffuse irregular galaxy IC 1613 in Cetus (/Pisces) and I synchronised the telescope on the wrong star. It wasn't far away, but instead I got an 11 minute picture of the star Hipparcos 5166 and the brightest object of interest in the field was a distant 16.88(blue) magnitude galaxy NPM1G+02.0042 . I haven't even heard of that catalog. I decided to look up the galaxy on deep sky browser (http://www.messier45.com/). That's what you get when you look in the wrong direction in the vastness of the cosmos. Nothing. (Well that is if you ignore all those stars).
All this despite the lovely, considerate ("health and safety") lighting the neighbouring village hall provides for their car park (and the local few cubic miles of sky). I have spoken to them about this, but they are in no hurry to change or reposition the lights. What a situation for an astronomical society... when you can't control your local light pollution.

Our society's new "star camp" venture

2011-10-26T21:38:00.004+01:00

Here's Cygnus the Swan and Delphinus the Dolphin setting over trees at my society's new star camp site. Unfortunately, the night I choose to camp out with my telescope was the mistiest night of the year. Still, this scene looked rather lovely. This is a composite of 13 images of the constellations setting in the west, in the wee hours.

ζ Scorpii

2011-10-25T00:56:00.004+01:00

2011-10-25T00:56:00.001+01:00

2011-10-25T00:55:00.000+01:00

2011-10-25T00:44:00.004+01:00

Embedded deep in the centre of the milky way is a stunning stellar asterism around the star ζ (zeta) Scorpii. Here I show the area in four levels of magnification taken with various optical pieces of equiment, while in La Palma. The wide view was produced by continuously taking 15 second pics on a little tripod, through a 50mm f/1.4 lens. The next level was 2 minute exposures through a telephoto lens on a low zoom atop an Astrotrak platform that wasn't quite aligned, at f/3. The following image was produced from 4 x 5-minute exposures at nearly full zoom that were possible once the Astrotrak had been aligned. The last picture is a mosaic of two 5 minute pictures taken through a guided 4-inch vixen refractor, using an astronomy-modified Canon 350D.

Space ripples.

2011-10-17T21:33:00.007+01:00

Here's take 2 on an object I virtually started my blog with. That's 200 posts ago. Yes, it's yet another big swirly nebulous thing! 6 x 2 minute exposures on the 20" newtonian at f/3 (focal reduced) with my astro modified Canon 1000D. Then I went back on a moonlit night, reassembled my focal reducer and got some flat fields. They made all the difference, even just as jpegs, which are pre-processed. Andy, you seriously have to try that man, it's a gas. You can see where I had to do my detrailing trick on the stars at the right hand side. This picture demonstrates the reason why you shouldn't expose for over a minute on a flipping "alt-az" when it's pointing high. Field rotation is the reason I focal reduce an already f/5 scope. I have over blurred the fainter regions in processing so I can enhance the contrast just a little bit more. The pretty object is a supernova remnant and what you are seeing is shock fronts as ripples expanding from what I guess is now a black hole or an inactive neutron star, but no one has been able to see much, just a little bit of hot metallic plasma. It all happened just a few thousand years ago, plus the 1500 years or so that it took the light to reach us.

By Jove!

2011-10-05T11:32:00.003+01:00

We stayed up on a crisp, clear night until the dazzling Jupiter rose high in the South at our observatory. We put our cameras on the 20" scope and spent ages tweaking focus and getting sequences of shots. I settled on covering the scope with an 8" mask, positioned at the lower end of the aperture to minimse the seeing distortions. This helps by matching the aperture scale with that of the atmospheric turbulent cells. We got a dimmer, but much sharper picture. I grabbed forty 1/50" exposures using a 2x barlow on this set up, to give an overall focal length of 4.8m at 0.2m aperture = f/24. I used large jpeg format on the Canon EOS 1000D(mod). I stacked 39 in Registax and upon wavelet sharpening, it revealed this wonderful detail. I had some trouble using Registax that wasted many hours, but I got there. Still, I didn't manage to select only the best quality pictures, so all got stacked. The highlight of this night was peering into the eyepiece and seeing the sharpness of the storms, belts, the light pink GRS, and best of all... the moons appeared as sharp disks! I was blown away!

The Jones Nebula

2011-09-30T10:43:00.002+01:00

This is Jones 1. I got a good shot of it in my early days at Breckland Astro Soc. And again, on wednesday night this wipsy planetary nebula was picked up with some 30 second shots on the Atik 383L. I combined about 15 luminance (70% weighting) with 4 of each colour. The Red images showed virtually nothing. A very blue-green large puff of gas, with the central star the bluish one of the little asterism that has gathered there. The star is a white dwarf which is pumping out ultraviolet radiation that is being somehow absorbed by oxygen ions (with two electrons missing), and re-emitted at that turquoise wavelength of around 500nm that our eyes are particularly good at seeing at night. This thing is visible in a large scope, but only just. It lives directly above the square of Pegasus (well it does in my mind anyway).

Bubble, (Hubble?), Toil and Trouble.

2011-09-28T15:34:00.004+01:00

Well it was no toil or trouble last night to attach my modified DSLR to the 20" scope and collect some pretty pictures of the Bubble Nebula NGC 76-somethingorother (I'm getting lazy). - Sorry, NGC 7635. I want to learn all my NGCs but there are too many - some don't even exist! And this picture is certainly nothing like a Hubble view, not even a Hubble palette (which I don't find aesthetically very pleasing). However, it's my best shot of this thing yet, I have posted this object before. I thought I'd go back to DSLRing, for convenience, rather than persevering with the monochrome CCD. It was just 26 pictures and 13 darks at 30 seconds each at ISO 1600, and I was enjoying a cup of coffee during the continuous exposures, of which I rejected none. Nice when everything works!

The cold dark world Nereid.

2011-09-18T02:34:00.002+01:00

I blew up the contrast on my picture comprising 18 1-minute exposures on the Neptune area, taken on Sep 4-5, and aligned it with an adjusted Deep Sky Survey image of the same area of sky(inset). I flicked between them and saw a dot where Nereid was. Starry night pro was a bit wrong, but Redshift had Nereid in the correct place. This is a tiny moon!!! 18.7 mag. My photometric measurements showed it to be 18.9 mag. The main moon Triton (hardly visible in most telescopes) is bright and merged into the glare of Neptune in this picture.

200!

2011-09-07T17:56:00.006+01:00

Congratulations, me! This is post number 200! It just happens to be Barnard's galaxy. I thought we would be rid of opportunities to photograph things in Sagittarius before long, so, on an extremely rare evening when it was actually clear almost to the horizon, I took the opportunity to capture some faint, weird stuff with the Atik CCD camera. This weird stuff is a local, irregular dwarf galaxy, but if you look towards the bottom of the picture you can see three blobs of nebulosity, the one on the left looking like a ring. I haven't researched this object much, I just relish its obscurity.

A long time ago, in a galaxy...

2011-09-06T09:34:00.005+01:00

21 million years ago to be exact. Here's the thing everyone's raving about at the moment. It's when the light from this big bang, in a nearISH galaxy reached Earth. By ISH I mean 1,300,000,000,000 times further away than the sun. I think I spotted it in binoculars. Image from Sep 2 22:00UT. It's rather bright as these things go. It started when a white dwarf star sucks mass of its partner, which causes an instability. That leads to violent nuclear reactions, which cause an incredible shockwave that we are seeing now.

ρ Ophiuchi

2011-08-26T01:37:00.004+01:00

This area looks like a child's painting. It's amazing how something so colourful formed out there on the border of Scorpius and Ophiuchus. It's just 4 x 4 minute pictures through a telephoto lens, looking at an area about the size of the palm of your hand at arm's length. Everything just happened to be in this one place: reflection nebula (top), dark nebula (left), hydrogen emission (right), a red giant (bottom), globular clusters, milky way. Wow! The red giant sitting at the bottom of the picture is Antares and it truly is a huge star. It is 8 HUNDRED times wider than our sun, and about 10 THOUSAND times brighter. It lights up the whole cloud with an orange glow! It is far wider than Mars's orbit. Next to it from our perspective is the globular cluster M4, which of course lies much further away. Personally I like how the star at the right (sigma Scorpii) is blue, yet is surrounded by gas that is fluorescing red. A fainter red emission cloud can be found off the bottom (south) edge of the picture. The maddest thing about this object is that it is REAL. This is a real place, just as real as the chair you are (probably) sitting on as you are reading this. Sure, it is a few hundred light years away and we happen to have a particularly nice line of sight of it, but it consitutes a lot more 'stuff' to the universe than little planet Earth.

Celestial Mire

2011-08-08T14:32:00.003+01:00

Misty Murky Gloomy Pool of Stagnant Slowly Swirling Condensing Churning Fluid. The Lagoon Nebula (M8) is shown in a rather elegant monochrome view through the little refractor at La Palma.

The spine of the night

2011-08-04T16:45:00.003+01:00

The Galaxy's spine is defined by tenuous but vast dust clouds, shadowing the myriad of stars beyond them. From this angle, it appears to be resting, asleep, with its back toward us. The North America nebula is over at the left in the constellation Cygnus the swan. Moving right, you pass above Aquila the eagle and Sagittarius the archer, and arrive at Scorpius, which is where the horizon intervenes. Taken with a 180º fish eye lens, a few minutes of exposure at f/2.8 revealed this panoramic view between the treetop and the mountain.

Moon upon a stick (nearly)

2011-07-29T13:14:00.003+01:00

Well, a fence. I love the way the moon has just rested itself ontop of it. Unfortunately, I couldn't get anything in focus because the moon was about 20 MILLION times further away than the fence. I managed to make it into the shot, just, but I was severely out of focus. Not the best shot, but it represents a significant moment on the last day of my hol, on July 2 2011, when the new moon returned, signalling the end of another astronomy month. I wonder, did anyone get the second, deeper, hidden pun in the last post?

Bug

2011-07-21T17:16:00.004+01:00

Here's a shining example (ha, ha) of a planetary nebula. This is the Bug nebula (NGC6302). Its unusual shape reveals a ring of dark material around its middle, containing such delights as calcium carbonate (chalk to you and I). Chalk? Surely, that can only be formed from dead sea creatures' skeletons compressed in to rock and up thrust to form, say, the white cliffs of Dover? (I hear you ask). Well no, here it is, out in the reaches of space, in the constellation Scorpius. This is a fine southern object, captured with the ST8300 on the Relay Cassegrain at La Palma. Looks like a scuttling squirrel to me. A red squirrel! I had trouble bringing the dark and light areas out on this, but found that Digital Development in Maxim did a fine job. Then I had to find a clever way of taking out all the red green and blue hot pixels. Interesting little object, whatever creature it resembles.

More pretty stuff

2011-07-15T16:23:00.003+01:00

Like a glowing flower in space, the Trifid nebula is suspended in the celestial firmament above the Lagoon nebula in the constellation of Sagittarius the archer. Visually, the colours cannot be seen, and in fact look oddly reversed from that on photographs. This is a wonderful photographic target, that rises high in the sky from mid to tropical latitudes, southwards. The combination of colours arises from general 'dust' that scatters the light, reflecting and enhancing the blue colour of hot stars that light it up, and hydrogen that fluoresces at red and blue wavelengths. Much of the hydrogen light is resonant fluoresent, i.e. glowing back at the extreme ultra-violet wavelengths of 121.6nm and beyond (compared with our visible range 430-630nm). However, this harsh, invisible-coloured light is only detectable above the atmosphere. In this light, our galactic neighbourhood would look vibrant. We just get to see the little red portion (656.3nm) on our photos and, visibly only the tiny fraction that is blue(486.1nm) is detectable to our eyes at night. The picture was taken on a Vixen 4" refractor (with some serious chromatic aberration that I've already reduced) and was just 1 5-minute exposure. Compressed quite badly, or as I would say, Jpegged to high heaven!

M83

2011-07-14T16:03:00.004+01:00

This is a massive, swirling whirlpool that peeks above our southern hedges for a couple of hours on spring nights. However, head south and it rises right up into the starry heavens! So people like me can snap it like over enthusiastic nerds. The southern pinwheel galaxy, or M83, is part of a local little group, and it is associated with Centaurus A. It is about 15 million light years away. All those little red flecks in it are vast nebulae of fluorescing hydrogen. This pic was taken with an ST-8 at prime focus of the 16 inch relay cassegrain at f/6. Four luminance frames of 5 mins each, 4 luminance darks, plus 1 binned red, green and blue. Unfortunately, the dark that accompanied the colour images had some ghost stars on it, hence the inverse colours I couldn't quite get rid of. I have tidied up this image a lot as it is. It's been crudely processed for web use but still looks great! For example the core is totally whited out - sorry. Compare it to my previous M83 to see the sheer improvement.

omega centauri

2011-07-14T10:03:00.003+01:00

I just crudely edited the aforementioned close up on the software I have available at this moment. Here it is in all (well most of) its glory!

omega centauri

2011-07-13T17:43:00.002+01:00

Look at this! I could see it with my naked eye. It was named as a star in Centaurus because it's so bright, but it isn't a star. It's hundreds of thousands of them. It's much too far south to see from Britain. We got a great view of this on the first night through the 16 inch relay-cassegrain scope at astropalma. It was elliptical, which means it must be spinning. But I was impressed enough with seeing it outside through binoculars and then finding it by eye. It's a huge and quite close globular cluster happily orbiting away, floating gently around the middle of our galaxy. I got some close ups too. The little blob above it is amazing too. It is the radio galaxy Centaurus A. I didn't know it was so bright. It looks like an inverted galaxy because it has a bright fuzzy circular background and a dark dusty middle. Obviously you can't see it in this picture, but again I have some close ups, so watch this ... space.

Amazing place, amazing lens

2011-07-10T23:54:00.002+01:00

I thought I'd do another little advertisment for my equipment and holiday. The lens used in this 30 second shot covers from Scorpius to Polaris! This view was from the plinth at AstroPalma looking across to the astrotrak and remote dome. I hired the f/2.8 Sigma 4.5mm 180 degree fish eye from lenses for hire, and it JUST (or maybe not?) focused with my modified Canon EOS1000D. The trouble with modifying a camera is that the removal of glass makes a tiny difference to the focus. Fortunately most lenses focus a bit beyond infinity, but with this one the tiny TINY focal length made the focus point crucial and it only just made it to focus with the ring at full turn. Phew! It is impossible to use live view at night with this lens - no star is bright enough and Jupiter wasn't risen from behind the mountain. I had to find a street light in this dark sky location. Fancy that, wanting light pollution? Mad.

Astronomy is such hard work

2011-07-06T15:44:00.002+01:00

Here, the modified Canon 1000D sits atop the AstroTrak, its sensor receiving aesthetically arranged photons, which hailed from a distant nebula, channeled sweetly through a sigma telephoto lens. The only criticism here is also the thing that makes this photo look good - the damned red light! I lost my bit of tape that goes over it. The 350D's light only came on during data transfer, why did Canon decide to switch it on during the exposure?

Backlog

2011-07-05T17:33:00.005+01:00

I have had an amazing trip with 100% clear skies. Hence I was spending my time outdoors rather than blogging. However, now I must go to work and process my pics. I have a selection I've done so far of 'exotic' southern milky way objects. Mm-mm-mm! No that's not millimetres, but if you want to know the mm focal length of the instrument used in this pic - it is only 300! Using a starlight express SBIG ST-8 on this little scope gave us this wonderful wide field of Barnard 72, the snake nebula. I have blogged this object before, but never in this much depth or area. This is a single shot of 5 min. I think the scope is around f/6. At the bottom left just off the edge is the star 44 Ophiuchi, which can be used to find these objects. There is a dark kidney bean or cashew nut shaped nebula that is sitting on a star (B74) , going up and right, you come to B70, B69 and then the super dark B68. Over to the left of this field of view is a wonderful big straight dust lane sticking out of the milky way that I could see with my bare eyes!

Bye bye UK sky

2011-07-01T20:36:00.005+01:00

I am currently enjoying the stunning delights of La Palma skies at a little observatory on the west of the island. The faintest stars I could see were 6.0 magnitude against the milky way and the atmospheric transparency is great. They also have a light pollution law here. Here is a picture I processed of the Teapot asterism in the direction of the centre of our Galaxy. I hired a 50mm f/1.4 lens, which I put on my modified Canon 1000D and stopped to f/1.6, and without any tracking whatsoever I got 16 pics of length 15 seconds atop a little gorilla-pod. Sagittarius is so high here it is easy to see the lagoon nebula (top) without binoculars, among many other objects: omega centauri, the dust lanes across Ophiuchus are obvious and 'strange' constellations like Telescopium. You can't beat coming this far south for views of the milky way.

Spirit

2011-06-17T13:35:00.001+01:00

The end of the Martian Rover, Spirit.

http://roopeshsingh.blogspot.com/2011/05/heartfelt-goodbye-to-spirited-mars.html

Dusty Streak

2011-06-17T01:12:00.003+01:00

I found this unearthly, linear wisp when exploring the outer space behind the sunflower galaxy in Canes Venatici. It’s called NGC 5023, but I had no idea how straight and thin it was, nor how diffuse or hidden its nucleus is. I think some creator was designing something in the sky for us to see. He/she/it drew a line too long and realised he/she/it had made a mistake and rubbed it out. Well it turned out that he/she/it had one of those rubbers that don’t work very well so it left this smudge behind. Or… it could be the creator’s cosmic firework, which is the size of a galaxy, burning up in a black, intergalactic ocean.

Bang

2011-06-10T00:30:00.004+01:00

I can't believe that. My lovely words just all disappeared! It was my best writing ever! I literally highlighted the text then it went white, paused and said "Autosaving draft". The draft was blank. Thanks blogger, I hate you. I hate you. I suppose I better write all that again.

Well...crash, bang, wallop. First it brightened, then fainter, brighter again. What's going on? Well this is a Type II b supernova. It's the little spot on the left of the galaxy. Like any other dying star, its outer layers of hydrogen began to be driven away out into space. Although deep down in the core was a different story. The atoms were frantically and desperately fusing into heavier and heavier elements. Silicon was becoming nickel, which became iron. That's as far as fusion can go. But before much of this was made the helium core alone had reached a point where it's own weight was too much for its atoms. Suddenly, the atoms were crushed and started to mercilessly fall inward to the core. On their way the protons, neutrons and electrons (remember your high school chemistry!) all became neutrons, briefly forming heavy elements like iodine, gold & lead. This was no ordinary ride, the particles were accelerated to thousands of kilometers per second! As the neutrons all neared the centre, they bunched up against one another and made a solid neutron ball. Hitting this brick wall at 1000s of km per second, created a huge, HUGE shockwave that rebounded all the infalling matter back outwards, blasting space with 200 million sunpower of energy. What I saw through my little eyepiece was a point of light. From earth, the view was masked by the outer hydrogen atmosphere. But now this atmosphere has been rendered transparent the full rage of the supernova's energy has come through, causing this second brightening. All of this was happening 23 million light years away, which means it all happened 23 million years ago. Awesome.

The Sun

2011-06-05T23:41:00.004+01:00

Finally I had all the things come together at the right time (well nearly), the right place, the right weather, etc. to use our Solarscope. The Coronado Solar Max was put on an EQ mount on the observatory annexe's flat roof on Friday evening and I set up as the sun was sinking behind some cirrus clouds. Having achieved such a good North West horizon me and the tripod were very visible and got a toot from a passing car. I grabbed a sequence of shots after many test shots and adjustments (position, ISO, focus, exposure), just as the sun emerged from the bottom of the cloud at 19:30 UT (20:30 BST). After initially thinking that even they were overexposed, I found that it was just the custom white balance settings had made it look that way, and the raw files were fine. However, there is still a gradient across the disk of the sun. I think its because we have such a narrow-band H-alpha filter. The granulation and structure on the sun is AMAZING! And you may also notice that it's flattened by atmospheric refraction. I know there are better pics out there but I'm well impressed - this is my first serious attempt.

Processingwise, I input the 11 x 0.04s Canon(modded) raw 10Mpixel files in Registax and they stacked very slowly - it's the only program that worked. I sharpened up the monochome output. I added a yellow colourize, rotated and flipped to correct for the diagonal mirror. Then I masked out the bright disk and turned the atmosphere a beautiful shade of hydrogen red!

Perspective

2011-06-01T13:22:00.004+01:00

The moon (la lune/luna, der Mond, y lleuad, etc.) is seen in such different ways. It's a matter of perspective. I don't mean technically, like lines shrinking away to vanishing points, but a human sense of a different perception. I was walking through a beautiful rural/suburban landscape on a Sunday afternoon (April 10) and I looked up at a tree to see the moon behind it. I had my 400mm telephoto lens with me so I took a pic and to my annoyance the moon was not in focus with the tree. So I carefully focused on each one and spliced the pics together. Typical photography... it's all about seemlessly cheating, but as I was playing around, I had the idea of upping the contrast to the point where it posterized the colours. This made the faint wispy cirrus stand out, and a couple of flecks of dust unfortunately, but I like them. Unfortunately the extra contrast meant I had to be extremely seemless in joining the pics, so after a little tweak here and there I was happy with this. A different perspective on the moon. There are lots of things you could say about this. There's a lot of texture. A round moon caught between spidery, spindly branches and a soft, sketchy cirrus. Hmm I'll shut up now. I just like it.

Supernova

2011-05-30T00:11:00.003+01:00

This is SN2011at in PGC26905 Hydra. I would like to get into doing something useful so I thought I’d make a start by finding what supernovae were out there. I found this on AAVSO.org (American Association of Variable Star Observers). Variable stars are not really my interest, but making an accurate measurement of the brightness (photometry) would give me some satisfaction, and if it were to become easy or routine to measure, it might just become rewarding enough to contribute to ‘citizen science’. I have authored a few papers so am aware of what is required, and it is usually a lot of work and stress being accurate enough. However, with the equipment here in front of me it seems a bit of a shame to use it on frivolous fancy pictures alone (as lovely as they are!). Now we have an Atik, we just need a V filter to speed up the process. The trouble with photometry with a DSLR is the green channel data only approximates a V filter and needs to be corrected using the colour (Blue-Visible) value as well as the atmospheric extinction and field flatness.
I got an estimate of 14.90mag at 2320UT (06/04/2011) but that could have been out by + or – 0.20mag and I didn’t have a good selection of reference star data (error based on differences between reference stars and measured values). If B-V for the supernova is 0 then there is a +0.13 correction, so it is 15.03 mag, if B-V=0.7 then correction is 0. The image was also so blurred that the supernova light mixed with the galaxy and some nearby stars. So there could be another + correction. Still … pretty good for a start, and for a faint PGC galaxy low down in Southern Hydra.

29P/Schwassmann-Wachmann (1) 2345-2351UT 06-04-2011

2011-05-29T23:50:00.003+01:00

This faint comet was swimming through Sextans near Southern Leo and it plunges back through the border into Leo in late June 2011. Normally its feeble luminosity would hover around 13th magnitude, but it had had a little outburst that peaked around the time of my 6x1 minute photos (April 6 2011), putting it at perhaps 12th mag. As is usual with comets to me, they look much fainter. As well as dust in the comet's tail, there is some dust obviously on my camera's sensor.

The Headphones Nebula

2011-05-29T23:35:00.003+01:00

This secretive little critter is lurking in the unlikely constellation of Lynx (the Lynx in case you didn’t guess). For some reason, you don’t normally find planetary nebulae there. It is called Jones-Emberson 1 (PK 164+31.1). The same Mrs Jones, I believe, that discovered Jones 1 in Pegasus. It looks about as faint as Jones 1, although is listed as brighter. As all astro-imagers say “it needs more exposure”; I only got 10 minutes of good enough quality images. Well, yes, it is a noisy (grainy) image, but it is also one of those very pleasing rare and unusual objects. The nebula looks a little bit ‘on the skew’ but is roughly symmetrical, making it not really look like its moniker above. I had to restack this using the super pixel mode on Deep Sky Stacker to get it to pick 10 1 minute frames, rather than the original 8. I’m a big fan of the super pixel mode – it combines the 2x2 colour matrix into one nice coloured pixel, and means I am not over sampling the image as much. Plus it speeds things up by a factor of 4.

The Spindle Galaxy

2011-05-29T23:09:00.004+01:00

It's a galaxy in Sextans (NGC3115). I like the abbreviation for that constellation.

M61

2011-05-29T22:58:00.002+01:00

We got an Atik CCD! Woohoo! It’s a 383+, with an 8.3 megapixel 22mm diagonal Kodak chip. Here is a picture of M61, luminance. Stacked in Maxim from 30 x 1 min pics binned 3x3 (9 pixels read out as 1 for extra sensitivity) with the camera at -10deg C. I’ve processed it so you can see all those extra faint outer spiral arms and galaxies around it. I was struggling to combine the 2 x 1 minute Red Green and Blue exposures with the Luminance – the result is below, detrailed a little. Now we’re just fighting against tracking errors and light pollution!

2011-05-29T22:57:00.001+01:00

...

2011-05-29T22:54:00.004+01:00

This is the same thing as above with the Canon 1000D and focal reducer.

NEBULA CAUGHT HIDING IN CLUSTER

2011-05-29T22:43:00.008+01:00

The star Sirius twinkles on a late winter’s evening. Around it the stars of the greater dog, Canis Major lie. If you imagine a line between the dogs front leg and Sirius, extend it back through Sirius 2 – 3 lengths you will come to the star clusters M46 and M47. This is a close up on the North of M46, with all the brighter stars on the image being cluster members. As you can see there is a planetary nebula (NGC 2438) lying in the same direction as this cluster, which I have brought out in the processing. The nebula is probably closer to us than the cluster, and thus is not really hiding within it. It’s a nice thing to view but sadly we’ll have to wait until late in the year before this curious alignment is in our skies again. I moved the blue down and red up to correct for the atmospheric refraction messing up my pictures of low objects!

Pastel shades of wispy gas

2011-05-29T22:41:00.001+01:00

I stuck an 8 inch mask on the 20 inch to cut down the blurring effects of seeing, not realising that by doing a long exposure would reintroduce the blur. Nevertheless, because I was pointing the scope at such a beautiful bright region of spacetime, I captured a pretty pastel picture of these wisps of gas without diffraction spikes. There is a little tuft on the edge of each star, presumably caused by the central mirror edge protruding slightly into the 8 inch mask. I may have saturated the trapezium at the centre, but the nebula centres have come out deliciously mottled and shaded. Especially, see the star at centre bottom with a deep shadow next to it.

Sombrero!

2011-04-28T23:52:00.005+01:00

The billions of stars that make this wonderful smooth shape, which appears nearly edge on from our Galaxy, lie 29 million light years away, in the south of the constellation of Virgo. This vast stellar city is nicknamed the Sombrero galaxy for obvious reasons. Officially known as M104, you can see the bright nucleus, and sharp, symmetrical dust lane around the edge. There are also 1 or 2 background galaxies visible. M104 has been imaged in infrared light that penetrates the galaxy to show the dust lane going all the way around. It's an incredibly aesthetically pleasing object that 'floats' in the sky like saturn with its ring. It lies quite a way outside (south) of the main Virgo galaxy cluster, but is quite bright due to that nucleus. It is a little smaller than you may expect, and the dust lane can be seen with a moderate telescope from the UK, low in the southern sky in spring. This picture was composed from just 7 x 1-minute exposures on the 20-inch BAS scope at f/3 (along with some daylight flat fields that didn't work). It just looks beautiful to me.

Jellyfish

2011-04-19T01:46:00.003+01:00

Now I’ve got my modified camera – look at all the red stuff it reveals. This is the jellyfish nebula that I blogged before. I can now see all the red stuff - Hydrogen galore! – it’s like taking off a pair of sunglasses. I mosaiced 2 pics here. Both were guided on Propus, which is responsible for the shard of light you can see just off the bottom. The jellyfish gives a lovely impression of the nebula floating in the vast sea of the heavens.

Abell 31

2011-04-19T01:43:00.001+01:00

I know I’ve been going for faint targets, but this one has taken 7 or 8 attempts and exposing various equipment flaws that have shown up along the way. When I finalise the stack of 30 or 40 images, I still see nothing. Possibly a few grainy speckles appear on stretching the contrast. I had to combine 2 or 3 sets of stacks, and keep blurring, brightening, adjusting the variation in the background. It was virtually a month’s project and rather futile really, as there are some much better pictures, with much better equipment out there. Why do I do it? Because I can, and I enjoy persevering with the equipment to see what it can achieve. This thing is so big and faint that it is 0.4% brighter than the overhead light pollution background level (SQM reading averages 21.0). It’s probably even less than that at the altitude I took it at… and I cannot get a decent flat field image! So, all things considered, it might look a bit ugly, but it’s a monster. A strange, old monster that’s dissipating slowly into space. Search for it under PK219+31.1 or Abell 31 (details: 12.2m/17’x16’ – that’s big).

IC 2162

2011-04-19T01:40:00.001+01:00

What the hell is this? It looks like some invisible steam train, But then one cloud looks like a poppy. Don’t overlook the little fuzzy on the left. There is a beautiful juxtaposition with the star at far left, which is too faint to be seen with the naked eye. The object here is catalogued as IC 2162 and it appears here a collection of nebulae which are in Orion’s right arm. I wonder if it is connected with the nearby Monkey nebula (below). It’s a relatively smooth picture, as this was quite bright compared to my other subjects, and high in the dark, clear part of the sky. It took about 10 minute exposures to capture this weird thing.

Abell 29

2011-04-19T00:51:00.008+01:00

Two red arcs take their trip across the southern sky

Unseen to all passers by

They were once a star that started to die

Surely that must be the first poem written about Abell 29 (PK244+12.1)? The nebula is hidden behind a grainy fog because it’s incredibly faint (14.3m/6x4’) and low down in the constellation of Pyxis the Mariner’s Compass. The grain is inherent in the camera. It took about half an hour’s worth of minute exposures at f/3 on the 20-inch with the modified Canon 1000D. Also a lot of teasing and tweaking was involved in the processing. I keep thinking I can see a hint of blue inside the red arcs. Hmm… a bit of an achievement from the UK, this one.

Abell 21

2011-04-19T00:45:00.002+01:00

This large planetary nebula is more of a ragged, asymmetric set of vast gaseous arcs strewn across the outer shell of a little dying star’s former atmosphere. The star is tiny, and shining with an extremely hot blue colour (at magnitude 15.9). If you look carefully, you can see the little blue dot at the centre of the arc. The picture reveals some blue oxygen and hydrogen (beta) emission nearer the centre and more reddish strands further out – presumably hydrogen (alpha) and some sulphur ions. This nebula is known as the Medusa nebula (Abell 21, PK205+14.1) and is located in the South of Gemini. I see Barnfield Bob (see friends) has beaten me to blog an image of this. His optics and tracking are quite superior to the twenty inch I use. Still, I think this stack of about 20 minute-long snaps (+ flats & darks) has revealed a lot of detail in this object. I have tried imaging this object before several times and not been happy with the result on the non-converted camera and unguided scope. I have seen it visually in the scope, and it is quite impressive (the scope is the impressive thing!). It was relatively easy when high in the sky on a dark winter’s night, although an Ultra High Contrast filter was necessary to reveal the ghostly, filamentary details.

By observing, we introduce a human element to what’s really there.

2011-04-07T16:40:00.003+01:00

On one of my rare moments of astronomy time I was aiming the big scope to a patch of nebulosity I had seen in the south of the constellation Monoceros, the unicorn. It was supposed to be the seagull nebula, but I was slightly off in my positioning and was attracted to this rather brighter nebula to the upper right instead. It was around the star HIP34116 (a mag. 7 sub-arcsecond double) and it looked like a heart on my camera, but on processing the heart shape appeared again in a larger form. I’m sure it’s not just me that can see a heart. What’s more, a broken heart! A giant heart-shaped nebula - it always amazes me what stuff is up there. However, hearts don’t really look that shape, I’ve seen quite a few dissected. The shape, called a cardoid (for reasons you may well suss out), is a name for a type of mathematical curve, θ = r². I conclude thus mathematics is related to biology (and that was via astronomy). P.S. As I'm posting this, a Radio 4 programme on maths in biology has just come on.

Sigur Rós

2011-04-07T16:35:00.002+01:00

This is the rosette nebula (NGC 2237,8). A beautiful rosy coloured object, with filaments, dark lanes, dusty blobs, and meandering, snaking streamers all lit up by a bright cluster of stars at the centre of the central chasm (NGC 2239,2244). It looks like a tunnel, as I am trying to imagine it in three dimensions. I see one of the stars, the bright one at the centre I used to guide the telescope, is slightly yellower than the others. This object is depending on what instrument you are using, annoyingly or satisfyingly large. By annoyingly large, I mean that it won’t come close to fitting into my camera field on the big scope, even with a field-widening lens on it. If you are slightly more impressed with the sharpness of the stars on this pic, it is because I had to mosaic 4 pictures together. As is usual, I don’t want to spend all night on the scope and so I just took one single 1 minute exposure on each quarter of this final image, and merged them all, manually at home. Just 1 minute exposure - that’s nothing, for such a wonderful amount of detail. Perhaps I should do a 3x3 or 4x4 mosaic to get even more of it in, but the astronomer has precious little time. Here is a rough calculation of the time astrophotographers have to work. 60% it is too light because of twilight or the sun is up (depends on latitude). 50% of the time the moon is up, making it too light. 50% of the time it is inconvenient to get to the observatory (plus we need to sleep). 70% of the time it is too cloudy (depends on how much cloud your country loves). 50% of the time your equipment doesn’t work or doesn’t work properly. That’s 40% x 50% x 50% x 30% x 50% = 1½%.

Retro Computer Games

2011-04-07T16:32:00.002+01:00

Here is my latest one of the Pacman Nebula in Cassiopeia, captured with about 5 minute exposures on my modified Canon 1000D on the ‘big scope’. He is eating the pills (the stars), although there are quite a few more of them here than in the 80’s arcade game. The nebulosity is more extensive thanks to the camera filter removal (the modification mentioned above). The nebula looks like it has been trailed or blurred, but it actually is like that. The dust lanes have a very wispy appearance. The prominent one is the dark spot at the top, which you can take as the ‘eye’, although I prefer to see the eye as the bright blue cluster (NGC 281). Not a very long exposure was required for this one – I even picked it up in a single 1 minute shot through a 135mm f/2.8 lens and a bit of processing. However I could have done with a fractionally wider field and a better angle.

So faint… it isn’t actually there.

2011-04-07T16:26:00.002+01:00

George Abell spotted his 17th splodge on the deep sky survey in this location and classified it as a faint planetary nebula (a fluorescent stellar corpse) of 18.5 magnitude. This is in the realms of extremely dim, 1/40th as bright as Pluto, and Pluto is 1/2500th as bright as the faintest star you can see with the naked eye, and that is dimmed further by being smeared over a small area. The red smear across the top of the photo represents a lesson in how to be careful when taking space photos. It must have been caused by the red computer mouse light from across the dome! When you get into the realms of extremely dim everything’s too light. Phones are out of the question and monitors must certainly be off. Plus there’s an annoying LED that comes on my new camera while it’s exposing. How dumb. Notwithstanding the distracting straight line upper right of centre, I have marked the location and size of the nebula on the photo, where I can sort of half-imagine a very faint reddish ring. Well this was later classed as not a nebula at all it was a plate flaw, which was obvious and just to the left of my marked area. Is it a circular collection of stars below the detection limit of the instrument? Or is it just that the background ‘static’ noise in my camera has fortuitously created a false nebula in combination with a computer mouse?

Celestial bodies and the oddities of their motion

2011-03-20T19:30:00.003Z

Here is a picture of the sky some minutes after sunset on 19th March 2011, looking west across the city of Norwich. Actually it is a combination of 16 pictures through the 135mm lens on the Canon 350D. I didn’t combine in the usual way by pinning the stars down, but by just placing one on top of the other and each time just choosing the lighter of the two pixels from above or below. The result, I hoped, would tend to minimise the cloud by preferentially letting the lighter sky through. Luckily the camera was very still on its tripod through this period in which I was graced with a passing interested chap who had popped home to bring his wife along, at which point a plane decided to make my picture sequence a little more interesting. I wonder whether the crew and passengers knew that they were passing so close to the planet Mercury, the upper “star” and whether it looked like a huge bright ball out of their windows. I jest of course.
The 16 pictures show the even descent of Mercury and Jupiter (the lower “star”) at the angle of <37.5º caused by the earth’s rotation. Mercury is at its widest separation left or west of the sun and the plane of its orbit pokes up northward from our perspective at spring dusk making it higher for us in the northern hemisphere. Mercury at this point is the same distance as the sun. On the other hand, we are waving bye bye to Jupiter as it is way beyond the sun and so is ‘sinking rapidly into the twilight’. The twilight is getting earlier as we approach summer, and the orbit of the Earth is moving so that the sun appears to approach Jupiter, which looks as bright as Mercury, but is 6 times further away. Mercury is moving more rapidly around the sun (88 days long is its year), so it appears to move with the sun and will stick around for a few more days, until it decides to pop up in the dawn sky for those nearer the southern hemisphere. While all this is happening in a darkening sky, I can see the Orion Nebula, Sirius the Dog Star, and in the cold wind the so-called supermoon is rising behind me. The closest point of its orbit has happened to coincide with full moon as it’s swinging around us on Earth. From my perspective on this rotating spheroid, Jupiter had disappeared and been replaced with a very bright patchy grey face shining through the trees. Naked-eye astronomy is pretty inspiring sometimes.

The supermoon is doing weird things to us all

2011-03-20T19:21:00.008Z

It’s so bright!!!!! Ahhhhh! There are a lot of weird things being suggested about the supermoon. Crazy tides (well slightly bigger tides, yes that’s true). But the spate of disasters? No. Nor is it anything to do with the end of the world in 2012. It is just the moon… a little bit closer to Earth than usual… and at full moon… Still, there’s always fear of the unknown…. Aaaah! Panic! Technicially it’s the brightest moon for years, but by the tiniest amount. The same went for Mars in 2003. The word for the closest point on an orbit around Earth is perigee, and the furthest, apogee (geo-). This goes for the sun: perihelion and aphelion. Also, any lunar probes would have an periselene & aposelene. A bit like an apex. In these pics the moon is at perigee and 356 577 km away. Canon350D ISO400 135mm f/2.8 10”, plus f/16 1/640” for detail.

Modified EOS 1000D vs EOS 350D

2011-03-13T21:36:00.002Z

Here is the crab nebula, a supernova remnant that exploded in 1054AD(our time), and was witnessed as the ‘daylight star’ in China. It is a nice target to image for a test, as it contains red filaments surrounding a blue cloud. The red light comes from “hydrogen balmer alpha”, which means an electron in an excited atom of hydrogen drops from quantum level 3 to level 2. The blue light mostly comes from “hydrogen balmer beta”, which is from 4 to 2, a larger drop in energy giving a more energetic photon of light, i.e. a ‘blue’ photon is more energetic than a 'red' one. The purposes of “modifying” a new 1000D (thanks dslrastromod) is to enable most of that alpha light to get to the camera sensor. Roughly 4 times as much. You can see that effect here in this before and after shot. It’s not a proper comparison as the first one was about 10 x 30 second pictures on a 350D, and the second was 6 x 1 minute pictures and both could have been taken with different background brightnesses. But I think you can work out how pleased I am to have improved my astronomical capabilities by such a large jump.

Blip… there goes another star.

2011-03-02T23:25:00.002Z

I remember being shown this amazing object for the first time in a new 12 inch Dobsonian at Norwich Astronomy Society by a guy who knew his way around the sky and had just hunted this thing down. There was quite a queue after quite a quirky astronomical quest. This object lies in the constellation of Cassiopeia - the Queen of Ethiopia, and you would think it easy to find: "just past the ‘W’ shape, to 4 Cas, then across a bit, past the cluster M52"… but I can never find the damn thing by star-hopping. On this occasion I had the luxury of a computer, which takes the challenge out of it, but my sky knowledge is useful every time there is a system error. With autoguiding on the star in the frame above, the position of this object in the sky allowed 1 minute exposures before too much rotation occurred. A few of these later, I revealed the blue bubble cast out by the star’s stellar wind, set against the surrounding interstellar redglowing hydrogen. There is also the strange, pinkish bar close by the central star, which is itself offset slightly from the centre of the bubble. It looks like this enraged star is hurtling along while blasting away 10 light years of space around it (that’s a 30 million million mile radius) with its fierce radiation.

'Icy' 348

2011-03-02T23:20:00.003Z

By the star Atik, in the constellation of Perseus, hides this faint reflection off interstellar dust. It is now thought that Atik is not associated with this reflection and that the cluster within it, IC 348, lights it up. Giving a very icy visual impression the reflection nebula is on the other side of the cloud I showed you in the last post. The dazzlingly bright Atik looks so much closer to us than the nebula but you must bear in mind stars have a vast range of luminosities. While it is visible as a shimmering point of light here, and to the naked eye above the Pleiades in the autumn, winter and spring, the star is actually two - a blue giant, with a blue dwarf orbiting it in 4 ½ days that mutually distort each other into rugby ball shapes. And the larger is indeed luminous, as it is probably a good deal greater than 1000 light years away AND it has dust in the way. Otherwise known as just plain old ‘omicron Persei’, Atik is referred to in a certain fictional account as having a system of planets surrounding it, colonised by a race of giant horned toad creatures, where the 8th planet is ruled by the despotic leader, Lrrr.

Looking into the vast pit of darkness

2011-02-06T22:31:00.004Z

In the south of the constellation of Perseus lies an immense cloud of dust that light cannot penetrate. It is about 600 light years away and weighs more than 10,000 suns, although perversely, the individual dust particles are mostly less than a thousandth of a millimetre across. Beyond the dust is so dark that you can’t see where the edge is, other than the sudden absence of stars. A glimmer of light emerges from the near edge of this cloud. The glow was given the imaginative name of NGC 1333. This was for the purposes of cataloguing, but given its intriguing, ethereal appearance I bet someone out there has called it something. There are some super deep pictures of this on the web, and had I used a red-sensitive camera I would be looking at some sparkly bits to the lower edge of the picture. All that shows up on my picture is a very faint line near the bottom.

The lion's head galaxy

2011-02-06T22:26:00.002Z

…a lovely galaxy that lives in the head of Leo, the lion. Here’s my new and improved version – like it? It’s still not perfect, but I took one of these before the autoguiding camera and new motors and it’s not a patch on this picture. You can see the smudge of light coming from galaxy UGC 5806 (thanks barnfieldbob) and a couple more faint, tiny (I suspect I really mean distant) galaxies to the lower right. This galaxy is surprisingly easy to see and should have been picked up by Charles Messier before William Herschel discovered it. You can see a giant nebula within this galaxy – NGC 2905, which (I think) is the blob just off to the lower right. The galaxy is classified as SBd (barred spiral) because there is a diffuse, broken bright white bar full of star clusters and nebulae across the centre.

Kohoutek2_1 a.k.a. PK173-5.1…catchy name.

2011-02-06T22:17:00.003Z

The reason this nebula hasn’t got a decent name is because it is faint and quite amorphous unless, of course, you like one of the names above. The nebula’s feeble 13.8(photographic) magnitude light extends quite a way: over a 2.2 arcminute-sized smear. This planetary nebula is a bit of a cosmic mystery insomuch as it's difficult to tell what type it is. It was difficult to photograph, mainly because I aimed my telescope perfectly, but it appeared after development at the lower edge of my picture. My original calibration was with a poor flat field, which was not good at the edge, although I had done a good job processing: blurring, increasing contrast and masking the stars, background removal etc., etc.. You can see the purple noise where the background subtraction went a bit wrong and the glow on the right from the camera sensor’s amplifier. I show you here the cropped edge of the picture where this glob of stellar snot was hiding. There’s a distinctive pattern of stars on the left that one could use as a sign post. I might try and find this ‘faint fuzzy’ visually on a good night, as it is 12th magnitude to the eye and high in the sky just below the outline of Auriga the charioteer.

Through the telescope

2011-01-31T02:51:00.002Z

Here’s my best picture yet of M97, the owl nebula that doesn’t look like an owl. It looks smoother than most of the pictures on this blog because it is linear, i.e. I haven’t messed around with the brightness scale to enhance the secret, dark, hidden objects. The view of this beautiful green planetary nebula is much more than you will see through the telescope; the three stars at the centre are very difficult to see visually. In order to gauge the brightness, the stars to the left and right of the nebula are 12th and 14th magnitude, and the 15th mag star just below has a 16th mag galaxy hiding behind it! I also picked up the edge-on sliver of a galaxy to the left. A faint patch of red can be seen on the edge in the direction of this galaxy. This is a lovely big planetary, glowing mostly in light from the bizarre space form of oxygen: O2+ ions. For those of you with an interest in chemistry, this is a state that does not exist in detectable levels on earth. The shape looks like two overlapping circles offset diagonally a little way. This is possibly just a near top down view of the two symmetrical lobes that were ejected from the dying star thousands of years ago. Image was 6 x 90 seconds at f/3 on the 20” telescope.

IC 1470

2011-01-31T02:38:00.002Z

Just over the Cephean border from M52 and the Bubble nebula in Cassiopeia lurks IC1470. Down on my charts as being 15 arc minutes wide, it is just a little pink square with one bright half containing a star. There is some structure within it, that’s hard to see with the fuzziness of the optics. There are as you may notice some bluish patches of what looks like ‘reflection nebulae’, where starlight is scattered off interstellar dust. A couple of smudges appear at centre left and a curly patch next to the bright blue star on the right. I guess this nebulous richness is because we are looking much further across our galaxy into the outer (Perseus) spiral arm where things therefore look smaller and closer together. I still find it amazing when stars line up into pretty patterns, like the beautiful curly ‘X’ at centre left just under the faint blue nebulae. Also there is a curly arrow shape just above centre. I wonder if this is just chance alignment, or are they associated?

Moonset 8-1-11

2011-01-26T00:42:00.003Z

As I ascended into the dome and opened the shutter, I noticed that the moon was close to setting. I lowered the big scope down to near horizontal and used the hand-pad to follow the moon. This 2 second untracked shot at ISO 400 and f/3 allowed me to capture enough of the moonlight, which was by then an attenuated orange colour, so that it scattered off the edges of the branches. The tree in question was across the road on the other side of a large field 227 metres away. The difference in focus between the moon and the tree was enough to dilate the lunar crescent into a fat banana.

The Perseus Galaxy Cluster

2011-01-26T00:39:00.004Z

I count 55 galaxies, although some of those smudges that look like faint stars are probably galaxies as there are supposedly 190 of the blighters. This is one massive concentration of galaxies. The cluster is centred on galaxy NGC 1275, or Perseus A, and is surrounded by a cloud at a temperature of millions of degrees, in which bubbles of relativistic plasma are being produced from the galaxy’s active nucleus. These are effectively sound waves at a pitch of Bb, 57 octaves below middle C! To the right of the two large ellipticals at the centre lies a galaxy with some strange structure that I can’t quite reveal with my equipment and 14 1-minute exposures.

NGC 2174 - the monkey

2011-01-25T01:01:00.006Z

For something I had barely thought I could image, this thing surely turned out to be a beautiful assortment of coloured environments. It is also a well balanced photograph. There’s the blue Hydrogen-beta coloured smooth centre, dominated by the bright (7½m) star. Surrounding that are some dark grooves, some dark blobs, intensifying towards the pinkish-red edge, where some surrounding foreground dust blocks the light from us. Floating out towards the top is a smallish brighter nebula, with a different shade of blue, and a similar companion lying out in the dark dust cloud. And then over to the left is a strangely angular piece of deeper blue glowing cloud with its own little cluster. From this angle and zoom the nebula doesn’t live up to its name. The monkey nebula is a wonderful half degree sized nebula located above Orion’s right arm.
Later: I heard tha apparently the monkey's head is looking to the right with an upturned nose - doesn't look much like a monkey to me!

The toothpaste nebula

2011-01-25T00:59:00.001Z

In this photograph, the small, spectrally dispersed planetary nebula IC 418 in Lepus has appeared to jump, creating a stripe of a familiar looking toothpaste.

IC 1871, well... part of IC 1871.

2011-01-25T00:53:00.003Z

I plonked the lumbering 20” light bucket where I thought the middle of a nebula was. After processing 15 exposures of 30 seconds I could see a swirl on the right hand side of my screen. Only after seeing that my flats weren’t up to the job and retaking them using diffused moonlight, I just revealed some very faint, large structure, covering the whole frame. Some of the patches may still be due to optical differences but I have missed the main other structured part of this nebula (to the lower right) and the nebulosity in this part is very dim. It just shows that this nebula is far too big to capture with the ~40 arc minute sized field of the Canon on a 2.4 metre focal length scope and I should check exactly what I’m pointing at in future (difficult at the time). Plus it is far too red for much of its light to penetrate the cyan filter glued on top of the camera’s sensor.

Scary blobby pink “Space Thing” with eyes!

2011-01-25T00:51:00.001Z

Yes. I’ve taken a picture of the time tunnel they ran into in Star Trek. Let’s hope Earth doesn’t get sucked in. I started by departing on a walk starting from the star 4 Cassiopeiae, hopping across to Cluster M52 and thence locating the “Bubble” Nebula. In the past, on a visual scan of this area with an ultra high contrast filter, I kept happening across a nebula in the other direction to where the Bubble Nebula was. This was NGC 7538. Recently I got the chance to take its picture.

Giant Space Jellyfish!

2011-01-02T23:27:00.004Z

I focused and tracked on the bright star Propus in Gemini (η Geminorum), and got a set of 1 minute exposures of the area to its left, as it was rising in the eastern sky. On the first night I got home, processed the image only to see intriguing, blobby strands of red across the picture like the tentacles of a giant jellyfish. I went even further to the left on my next observing session and this time picked up the jelly-like body. I had a lot of trouble combining the two pictures, and the overlap was at a strange angle, as the two images were taken at different times. I’ve cropped and rotated it so Propus glints beautifully as if lighting the jellyfish from below.

The moons of Saturn

2011-01-02T23:19:00.003Z

I was looking back over last year’s images and discovered I’d managed to reveal the Saturnian moons Mimas and Hyperion. Admittedly, Hyperion, a porous moon full of deep holes is hard to see, but is one of the blobs of ‘noise’. I had to chop off Iapetus, which was clearly seen, along with a 13th magnitude star, way out to the right. This view was obtained at 2250UT on 10 May 2010. From left to right you have: Titan, Rhea, Dione with Hyperion pretty close to its lower left, Saturn, Mimas, Enceladus. Tethys was behind the planet at this time. The shallow ring angle and reasonable seeing helped pick out these tiny moons. This brings my Saturnian moon total to 9. The outer moon, Phoebe, on an earlier image, is now thought to have produced a huge outer ring causing Iapetus’s dark side. Mimas is an amazing object, with a huge crater like the death star, and it causes the Cassini division in the rings.

An artistic view of the Horsehead

2011-01-02T23:10:00.004Z

The red glow, normally visible behind the Horsehead nebula is severely reduced by the Canon’s filter, and appeared noisy. In addition, the colour was uneven with the poor flat field I had used. This one I obtained by shining a lamp onto a translucent film held over the scope’s aperture. I haven’t investigated whether the rainbow came from the flat or the star Alnitak (ζ Orionis), although from its position I strongly suspect it was from the starlight bouncing off the drawtube and interacting with my focal reducer lens elements. After applying a colour gradient removal, this beautiful optical effect was revealed with a wonderful colour balance and the dust clouds in the lower part stood out as a more 3D landscape from which the giant, black horse’s head protrudes. The horse has a red glow around the top of its head and a green glint reflecting off its dusty forehead. I differentially blurred the darker regions of the image more, to give a soft looking background, while still preserving the detail in the stars and glowing strands.

Cone Nebula

2011-01-02T23:00:00.002Z

I found a bright star to follow, where I knew that a nebula lurked. So I set to work exposing my camera and guiding on the star at the top of the Christmas tree cluster in Monoceros the Unicorn (NGC 2264). A few 2-minute shots later (plus all the computer processing of course) I can reveal the image. The flat field image didn’t work too well again, so forgive the brownish blob around the centre. It’s hard to do these on a 20 inch Dobsonian. There are some colourful spikes on the cluster’s stars, some bluish nebulosity to the North and a pinkish nebula to the South. The latter is the Cone nebula. You can see the dark shadowy sector where some dust has got in the way of the nebula and blocked the light from the bright star, preventing the tenuous atomic hydrogen gas from fluorescing at its characteristic red and blue wavelengths.

Comet Fishing, by Malcolm Hartley

2011-01-02T22:54:00.003Z

I cast my metaphorical rod into the waters of Monoceros, the Unicorn to find once again the huge comet Malcolm Hartley had discovered, swimming along the Milky Way. This comet has confined itself to the river of the night. I had spotted it near the double cluster in Perseus from a secret ultra rural site where I met with fellow astronomer friends, and now it had made its way through Perseus, Auriga and Gemini, heading for the double clusters of M46 and M47 in Puppis. Standing on an old Yellow Pages, I craned my neck up to the eyepiece to see a rather diffuse and dim glow. I snapped a quick sequence of 10 second shots, on which I could still see the movement when I flicked through them. Image taken 02:00UT 15/11/10.

California here we come

2010-11-17T22:52:00.001Z

This is a little bit of the California nebula (NGC 1499) taken with the autoguided 20" scope. I combined 6 x 90 second exposures. It makes sense in theory to get as long exposures as possible, because it's not just a case of taking more shorter exposures. With the longer exposures, there is less noise, because a large part of the noise is from reading the sensor. The problem we have is rotation, which limits the exposure time until you see stars forming short trailed arcs at a distance from the guide star. Therefore, we can only do long exposures in the East or West. Had my camera been modified for astronomy, this picture would be full of bright red nebula.

As it is, it is pink, but still lovely.

NGC 1501

2010-11-17T22:47:00.002Z

Little close up of the best few 30 second subexposures of this quirky green ring living up in the faint northern constellation, Camelopardalis. The camel-leopard is a giraffe, of course. I processed it with patience in Registax, which is great at sharpening, but doesn't seem to be able to rotate and stack, nor stack dark frames. So I cropped it.

Galaxy hiding behind star

2010-11-17T22:43:00.002Z

This is Mirach, in Andromeda, blazing away as a bright, 2nd magnitude star, 200 light years away from us. In the same line of sight, absolutely unconnected, lies NGC 404, a faint 10th magnitude galaxy that is rather hidden in the glare of Mirach. The galaxy is many millions of light years away, but the smudge we see is only 1500th as bright as the star, and that light is spread out so as to make it yet harder to see. This picture is exposed and processed so the difference is nowhere near that great. Good things, digital images!

NGC 6905

2010-11-17T22:41:00.003Z

Here’s a little planetary nebula in Delphinus. Another one of my ‘unusual’ objects, not in the sense that it’s difficult to photograph, but not many people would think of photographing it. It was visible as a little ring in the 20” and I could just see the central star. Wow! There are two brighter arcs to the west and east (top left and bottom right in this orientation) and there are faint extensions (ansae) to the north and south, that show up better on longer exposure photos.

The Fireworks galaxy (NGC 6946 in Cepheus)

2010-11-17T22:35:00.001Z

In this little Catherine wheel of a galaxy there have been lots of supernovae, hence the title. It makes us wonder why there aren’t as many in our own Galaxy, the Milky Way. But we realise we are IN our galaxy, and it is full of DUST. I use the word full loosely. The dust blocks our view of the majority of our galaxy, and so we’re unlikely to have seen all the supernovae that have gone off in the last few hundred years. So come on, Betelgeuse or rho Cassiopeiae, give us a nice show soon.

Stefan’s Quintet (Pegasus)

2010-11-17T22:34:00.001Z

This little galaxy group is a challenge to see in most amateur telescopes. However, I have seen all 5 galaxies in our 20” scope. It’s rather trailed as it was taken before the auto-guiding camera was used on the big scope. Also it was high in the sky so the scope had to spin rather quickly to keep track of it. Consequently, there is some rotation, which appears to pivot around the star at the top. This is a sign that the computer did not quite know exactly what position the telescope was in. Looking at this group makes me wonder how our own local group would look from a planet there. It would be a patch of dim smudges in a large telescope, dominated by Andromeda, the Milky Way and M33, rather further apart.

Hartley 2

2010-11-17T22:30:00.002Z

Here is a picture of the Comet Hartley 2 from 10th October (not very current). Perhaps it should be renamed Harley 2, because of its ability to move during the time it takes for its picture to be taken. The green colour comes mostly from the molecule C2. Hmm... I wonder what that smells like. I tried to process to give the most coma and tail, but probably have included some optical artefacts due to not using a flat field correction to the image.

I (also) see 405... and it is VERY interesting.

2010-11-03T23:14:00.003Z

Disclaimer: apologies 'littlebeck'... I couldn't resist posting this first. I'm in a rare mood for blogging, and I thought this picture couldn't wait any longer for its submission into the blogosphere. For the reader, we were both attendant at the ultimate test of the 20"'s guiding using an STV camera - a 5 minute exposure on an alt-az scope, and this pic didn't actually come from my Canon EOS 350D. I was impatiently waiting to test my own camera and its focal-reducing adapter before imminent cloud arrival (see IC410 post). Here is my stack of the 5 good 5 minute shots of IC405. This is such a wierd looking patch of sky, and in this instance the Canon's lack of red sensitivity has enhanced the colour contrast between the different parts of the nebula. The nebula is otherwise known as the Flaming Star Nebula, and this is just the centre surrounding the 6th magnitude star in the shot (the faintest star you can see, unaided). This star was the guide star and was responsible for the STV units loud beeps as it corrected the telescope's position. (P.S. I'm currently listening to Radiohead: Everything In Its Right Place and reading too much meaning into song lyrics).

I see 410

2010-10-31T23:09:00.007Z

IC410 is the little patch of nebula in Auriga that I used to test the autoguiding mechanism of our big scope. I used 1 minute exposures; we previously had success with 5 minute exposures, but I was playing safe. The flat field pictures I took afterwards using a diffuser and skyglow seem to have added a lot of noise to the picture and it still required more tinkering with the background, hence the patchiness. I'll have to play around with using false or smoothed flats. This picture used 17 x 1 minute exposures at ~ f/3 on the 20", darks & flats. The Sky Quality was only 20.66 mag/sq" (a bit disappointingly light), which didn't help. This was taken after the successful (see 'littlebeck') 5 x 5 min picture of the centre of IC 405.

A winter spectacle seen on an autumn predawn

2010-10-27T17:31:00.002+01:00

ON this wide picture of the Great Orion Nebula complex, you’ll see the beautiful clouds of gas and dust reflecting and fluorescing the light from the bright blue stars at the centre. If you step back and take in the grand scene, all 10 square degrees of it, you will start to see among the bright blue stars, a few little orange stars. And then, towards the lower right, a few of the background Milky Way stars start to creep into shot. Fingers of opaque, black dust can just be made out streaming off to the right, by virtue of the incursions of stars visible behind it. All of which gives you a clue to the real size of this patch of interstellar material. I find it very odd how a vertical line of four different types of object have arranged themselves on the sky like this, for us to see (check out Messier 8). Not bad for a 2 minute exposure (18/09/10).

Conjunction of jollity and magic

2010-10-27T17:24:00.002+01:00

According to Gustav Holst, Jupiter is the bringer of jollity, and Uranus, the magician. Here we can see the two planets on the same photo, and not just that, but with moons. Jupiter is overexposed and overprocessed, so much so, that you can see its reflection in the lens. There is only 1 degree between the planets at this time. Uranus compares well in brightness with Jupiter’s moons. I couldn’t see the planet with my naked eye as it’s still too light polluted and/or misty here. Despite being easier to find, Jupiter’s glare contrarily makes Uranus more difficult to see.

Mercury Rising

2010-10-27T17:18:00.002+01:00

It was the coldest night for ages, about 3 or 4 ºC, but finally at about quarter to six I saw Mercury emerging from the cloud tops near its eastern elongation from the sun. This is a stack of 4 pics that were slightly out of focus, but the composition looked better. Mercury was in Leo, hovering below the lion's front paw.

Ganymede's little shadow

2010-10-07T23:30:00.004+01:00

Sorry for the delay, but no mirror = no posts (also no clear skies). My own "little" Schmidt-Cassegrain Telescope has had motor drive problems so not many pics from that either. However, I did manage to see Mercury and Uranus with it on 18th Sep at dawn from behind the sand dunes on the east coast. The picture I chose to post was taken that morning, when Ganymede started to cast a little shadow on the edge of Jupiter at about 4:20. The Canon was inserted directly into a 2x barlow lens on my 8" Meade SCT, creating an effective 4m focal length at f/20. A few raw-format subexposures at ISO 100 were stacked.

Green eye

2010-09-06T13:00:00.005+01:00

I bet there are not many people out there that recognise this object. To me, it looks like an evil green eye. Not quite as evil as the terrifying Mayall-Cannon 18! (Here I refer to Paul Money's favourite pics lecture part 2). I suppose it's possible to plate-solve the stars and if you did this you would find this object lies somewhere to the left of Cygnus. It is Abell 78 and there is a hint of an outer part below it. I decided to stick to RAW format for this one, where I sacrificed time and memory for less noise. It is a faint little nebula, only about 14th magnitude and spread over just under 2 arc minutes.

Little ring galaxy

2010-09-05T00:39:00.004+01:00

This is the last image made with the big telescope before the mirror was taken for an emergency realuminisation. It's a wierd 'little' galaxy 72 million l.y. away in Pegasus, with a bright yellow nucleus and a detached blue ring surrounding it. There is a larger halo, that doesn't really show up in this image, comprising of 31 only 12 second images at f/3. I was having issues with the tracking so I had to keep the pics short, but on closer inspection, each image still had slight star trails or a touch azimuthal shake or wobble. You can see the colour of the nucleus compared with the star nearby. It's about a 7' x 9' field centred on NGC 7742.

Tempel 2

2010-08-23T20:57:00.007+01:00

Here's a pic of a comet that's floating around in Cetus at the moment. On the spur of the moment I used my mobile to visit the heavens above website for charts and pointed the big scope at it. It was difficult to get a decent photo, mainly because it was quite low down in a poor quality sky. Compared with the usual capacity of the 'big' scope to gather light from 17th magnitude galaxies for your camera, you wouldn't imagine 10P/Tempel 2 to be as bright as 8½ magnitude (~2800x brighter). I've always found comets much harder to see than their magnitude suggests. Maybe it's their diffuse nature that makes them so elusive.

Distant galaxy cluster

2010-08-23T01:38:00.004+01:00

This cluster is a vast factor of ~ 3,000,000,000,000,000,000 times more distant than the meteors in the pictures below. It was taken on the newly driven 20" telescope in my usual way. It is centred on NGC 7242, a 12th magnitude galaxy, 2½ arc minutes across, the rest being about 15 or 16th magnitude and there is even an unlabelled 17th magnitude fuzzy spot (beneath the '72' of the label 7240), PGC 68416. There are a few other galaxies around this area, which is a small way South of the star 1 Lacertae, and I thought I'd get a quick pic while it was passing overhead.

Perseid 11:55pm Wed 11th Aug

2010-08-18T17:26:00.003+01:00

Taken with a fish-eye lens on a Canon 350D from Salthouse Heath (1 minute exposure).

FAR AWAY THINGS...

More Quasar Madness

Quasar madness.

Mars

More delights of Orion

The Perseus Cloud

Breckland Skies in Winter

NGC 40

The Intergalactic Wanderer

Spooky, Nebulous Fingers.

The Lagoon and The Trifid Nebulae

Nebulae in Norma

The void

Our society's new "star camp" venture

ζ Scorpii

Space ripples.

By Jove!

The Jones Nebula

Bubble, (Hubble?), Toil and Trouble.

The cold dark world Nereid.

200!

A long time ago, in a galaxy...

ρ Ophiuchi

Celestial Mire

The spine of the night

Moon upon a stick (nearly)

Bug

More pretty stuff

M83

omega centauri

omega centauri

Amazing place, amazing lens

Astronomy is such hard work

Backlog

Bye bye UK sky

Spirit

Dusty Streak

Bang

The Sun

Perspective

Supernova

29P/Schwassmann-Wachmann (1) 2345-2351UT 06-04-2011

The Headphones Nebula

The Spindle Galaxy

M61

...

** NEBULA CAUGHT HIDING IN CLUSTER **

Pastel shades of wispy gas

Sombrero!

Jellyfish

Abell 31

IC 2162

Abell 29

Abell 21

By observing, we introduce a human element to what’s really there.

Sigur Rós

Retro Computer Games

So faint… it isn’t actually there.

Celestial bodies and the oddities of their motion

The supermoon is doing weird things to us all

Modified EOS 1000D vs EOS 350D

Blip… there goes another star.

'Icy' 348

Looking into the vast pit of darkness

The lion's head galaxy

Kohoutek2_1 a.k.a. PK173-5.1…catchy name.

Through the telescope

IC 1470

Moonset 8-1-11

The Perseus Galaxy Cluster

NGC 2174 - the monkey

The toothpaste nebula

IC 1871, well... part of IC 1871.

Scary blobby pink “Space Thing” with eyes!

Giant Space Jellyfish!

The moons of Saturn

An artistic view of the Horsehead

Cone Nebula

Comet Fishing, by Malcolm Hartley

California here we come

NEBULA CAUGHT HIDING IN CLUSTER