Comet 2009 R1 McNaught

..just a quick one to show what we have in the skies now. Here's last Saturday night's showing of the comet that's set to brighten and pop its head over the dawn horizon during June 2010. As the comet was low in the sky it is not a very deep image. It was quite unusual to be looking at the constellation Andromeda in May.

Pillars of creation.

The black serpent from space

Here is the Snake nebula in Ophiuchus (Barnard 72). I snapped it Saturday night (may 22-3) at about 1 am. It is awesome to see what look from a distance like vast clouds of stars that stop abruptly at some mysterious black boundary. And what's more it's in the shape of a snake! And here the snake is slithering across the heavens towards another even blacker shape. For this picture it was useful to have my remote shutter control timer, so I could go off and drink tea while about 30 x 15" shots were being taken on the 20" scope at f/3. Thanks Keith!

Planets!

We have a good range of planets up at the moment. I trained the recently collimated 235mm Celestron on all of them. I used a -5D Barlow I found lying around and took a few snaps of each planet on my Canon EOS 350D through it, giving a focal length of about 4.5m at f/20. Exposure bracketing was done and I stacked the best few images of each planet. After contrast enhancements and aligning the red, green and blue channels etc., I put all 4 together to compare size for size & colour for colour. I worked my way round the sky from twilight to opposition, i.e. in order of increasing Right Ascension hour. Then I checked out the view of Saturn. Very sharp! I saw a very interesting alignment of moons next to the rings (Monday 12th April), so checked it out on the 20". This was brighter, but fuzzier. I attempted to image the moons but the tracking / vibration wasn't good enough on either scope. Shame - there were four moons above 12th magnitude within about 3 arc seconds.

The Whirlpool

This fine galaxy is filled with fascinating features. The Whirlpool galaxy (M 51) is now climbing high in the sky and can be found near the tail star of the Plough, Alkaid. It is not one but two galaxies, the second (NGC 5195) has been shown by computer simulation to have passed through the main one twice. I am pleased to have revealed in this image the glowing areas of stars surrounding NGC 5195 that are the result of the aforementioned collision. To get this image I have combined the 10 least trailed shots with 19 very badly tracked ones, which I detrailed using Paint Shop's Layer/Darken function. I stacked the first 10, then all 29, and processed them both separately, applying a careful smoothing blur to the faint areas. Only by stacking all 29 shots could I clearly see the filament shooting out at the top of the image. I then cropped both to the same area and blended them in the ratio about 2:1 in favour of the sharper 10 frames. The total exposure time was just 15 minutes at f/3. I was quite taken aback when my stacking program output showed me the extremely deep areas to the left, which have incredibly subtle contrast against the sky background.

Another great thing in this picture is the exceedingly thin splinter of IC 4277, a 16.5 magnitude galaxy hiding just to the left of the main galaxies. This has one of the highest aspect ratios I've seen although it has been a little blurred in the processing. IC 4278 is also here, lying below NGC 5195.

Imaging reveals so much more than the eye will ever see directly. Even the Sixth Earl of Rosse would never have seen anything like this when he made his famous drawing of this object on his 72-inch Leviathan telescope at Birr Castle.

Equinox Sunset

Here, at 6 p.m. old local time on March 21st, our Sun is being refracted up over the horizon at the midpoint of its biannual, azimuthal journey (also known as due West). This astronomical occurrence is called the vernal equinox and has the historical significance of marking the transition to the growing season in the northern hemisphere. In this picture, as well as industry creeping into this once pure event, an aircraft contrail has formed a cirrus cloud that obscures part of the Sun. Both signs of humans' influence on nature. [Canon EOS 350D Ljpg ISO 100 1/4000" 400mm lens @ f/15].

The Glorious Orion Nebula

This was an exercise in using a telescope that doesn't give sharp resolution stars, to generate an extra-sharp picture. The idea came to me at the telescope, while peering at the Orion Nebula. The secret is that it is a mosaic of 15 pictures. Each was a 15-second exposure taken at f/4.8 on the 20" scope during a full moon last year, all except for the central nebula, which was 4 seconds. The Canon Photo Stitch software has never given me an acceptable result, so I spent a few days correcting numerous patches of the background until I decided I'd just make it all an even black. Hence it is not an accurate representation of the sky - no photo ever is. It's still a little grainy in some areas and not a very deep image, but it's so much more aesthetically pleasing to have sharp stars!

Siamese Twins

The Siamese Twins are a pair of overlapping and presumably interacting galaxies aka NGC 4567 & 8. Their magnitudes are approx. 11.7 and 12.1 and they are quite small, 4.6 & 3.1 arcminutes (respectively), because of their large distance of 120 million light years from Earth.
The pulses sent to the stepper motors that drive our 20" scope had just been adjusted to attempt to cut the wobbly, vibrating tracking, so I gave it a test on these fine objects. I did manage to get one reasonably steady 2-minute exposure, but on closer inspection there were slight star trails, in addition to the field rotation limiting the exposure. But overall it was no better, I'm afraid. I had to detrail most of the 30-second images that made up this final image, but a pleasing result nevertheless with a total exposure of 5 minutes at f/3 ish, with quite a misty sky just before moonset. Also in this image at top is NGC 4565 - a 12.0m, 3.2' galaxy and at bottom, IC 3578 - a 15.1m, 0.9', tiny splash of light.

Gyulbudaghian's brightening

Here is an image showing the brightening of Gyulbudaghian's variable nebula, located at RA 20h 45' 55" and Declination +67º 57' 45" in Cepheus. There is clearly more of the cometary looking nebulosity north of the star PV Cephei. The image is a stack of 57 30-second exposures at ISO 1600 and f/3 on the 20" scope, taken on 8th March 2010. But the processing used non-linear stretches and an artificially created and edited flat field to give the most pleasing picture, so in no way is it quantitatively calibrated. It looks wonderful in such a large format and it's nice to have sort of discovered something changing up there in the stillness of space!

The Air Pump

I am now going below the -30º Declination line to reveal a couple of galaxies in the constellation of Antlia, the Air Pump. Imaged from the UK, NGC 3100 and 3095 are both below 12th magnitude in brightness and -31º30' in declination. As you can see, with the low altitude, the atmosphere has shaken the stars into big disks, after realigning the Red, Green and Blue channels as a matter of course. I also spent ages messing around with the background subtraction, as the raw images were a bright milky brown. 27 x 15" f/3, f~1.5m, ISO 1600.

Galaxies in Pyxis

On my southern trawl, culminating a little after Puppis the Poop, comes the constellation Pyxis the Compass. It contained the fine galaxy NGC 2613 (11.2m) and faintly above it PGC 23977 (14.5m). Thanks to the huge aperture and excellent south horizon the telescope could cut through the large thickness of misty atmosphere.

NGC 2452 & 2453, Puppis

I turned the scope to the southerly declinations of Puppis for these interesting and glorious full-colour shots of the cluster and planetary nebula NGC 2452 & 3, respectively. Being near the milky way there are some beautiful star patterns, and a deep orange star on the right. The cluster looks like a backwards lambda to me and the planetary is a tiny or distant little pair of blue lobes.

Makemake

Here's an animation of Makemake, from last Saturday and Sunday nights (March 7, 02:00 & 23:00UT) on the 20" scope. It appears surprisingly bright for an 16.8 magnitude object. Conditions were dark and transparent both nights and I was at quite a high altitude. This little heavenly body was surprisingly easy to find after having imaged Eris (see earlier post) as it lies close to the top dot-to-dot line of Coma Berenices. Makemake, which I believe is pronounced mak-eh-mak-eh, is a large minor planet over 50 A.U. from the sun, which puts it beyond Pluto's orbit, but nowhere near as far out as Eris. I acquired 29 x 30" images the first night, then another 11 the following night, when it was darker and clearer still. -- Hit play to reload the video as it's not set to repeat...and apologies for not adjusting the brightness.

Weird Wild

Here's Comet Wild from 01:30 20/2/10 looking particularly weird. There are two tails, one of which is curved in a strange way from this line of sight. The sub-frames looked like the coma was smeared out left-right. I fiddled a bit with the processing to reveal more of the faint tail at the expense of the coloured background, which is probably the result of a light pollution gradient, or an out of date flat field. It is 9 x 30" pics on the 20". Wild is visible in the morning sky in the constellation Virgo.

Comet Schwassmann-Wachmann 1

Here's a current shot of Comet Schwassmann-Wachmann 1, which has been in 'outburst' recently. It looks a bit like Holmes did, as it has an expanding shell. The image was taken at about midnight on 20/2/10, is linear and results from 19 x 15" + 1 x 30" stacked light frames at f/3 ish on the 20". It is currently about 11th magnitude in W Leo.

IC 342

For those of you that are checking this blog to see how well the 20" telescope performed after it's mini-service, then the answer is ... pretty well. It may be a little louder and a play a slightly different tune while it's working but it is much smoother and hasn't been this easy to image on for a long while. We had what most telescope users expect, stars that keep pretty still for 10 30 second frames. There was some trailing, but not much, and not all that dancing about that I've been used to recently. So thanks - we got a lot of interesting pics taken last night. Here's one of them - a far out IC object called IC 342. It is a faint face-on galaxy in Camelopardalis and it is seen dimmed through the milky way's dust. So it may be close and 21 arc minutes across, but is only 9.2 magnitude. Only the middle spot showed up on the 30-second sub frames. So it was a bit of a swine to find; we successfully used a 14.2 magnitude galaxy as a GOTO/reference object!!

IC 289

Here I am pointing out an overlooked object. It's not in the Herschel 400, the Caldwell catalog, nor the original New General Catalogue. It lies less than 3º from the easily visible (4.2m) star CS Camelopardalis, which is itself a ridiculously overlooked (double) star in the 'unfashionable' constellation of the giraffe. CS Cam doesn't have a Bayer letter designation, or even a Flamsteed number and lies an unmeasurable distance away. Still, IC 289 is a lovely little(!) 12th magnitude planetary nebula - the same magnitude technically as the Owl nebula in Ursa Major, which I find a bit hard to reconcile. The nebula itself is actually over the border in Cassiopeia. There are some lovely coloured stars in the field. There is a weird pattern over to the left, which is the Southern side, centred on a 9th magnitude brightish star. Moving slightly toward the corner, there appears to be a streak or 'hair' next to the 14th magnitude star. This is actually a little row of 5 stars, all in a neat line, that are just unresolved. Just below the 9th magnitude star is a faint reddish galaxy, looking a little smudgy. I find this image an exciting little exploration of space! Details: 20" @ f/3, ISO1600, 2½' on Canon EOS 350D, linear.

Comet Siding Spring

On another frustrating night trying to control a confused telescope with a very rigid operating system I still somehow managed a few shots of Comet Siding Spring. We got a visual sighting of the comet before imaging. I had to star-hop to it through northern Boötes. It was not obvious at first that it was in the field of view and I may well have gone past it a couple of times. But this process was made much easier with the charts from heavens-above.com. The view was later improved greatly by putting in the zoom eyepiece. I find it very interesting that undermagnification causes the perception of less contrast, and even contrarily makes objects invisible while more light is reaching the back of your eye. The tracking was a serious problem, we corrected it for a few minutes using drift correction, but later on the scope ended up thinking it was about 25 degrees from where it was and nearly knocked over the step ladder. The frames were 6x15 and 2x30 seconds at f/3 ish on the 20" and I still had to be detrail by 2 or 3 pixels after stacking. Not bad for a low altitude comet dimmer than 10th mag and a slightly misty night.

14 Tauri occultation

Update from below...
I drove out to the observatory at midnight on a working weekday night, set up my tripod outside and pointed at the star 14 Tauri. I took continuous 10 second exposures around 00:56 am, while I watched the star through binoculars to see if there was an occultation by the asteroid below. Frustratingly, some high cloud drifted past just at the wrong minute, and made the star hard to see clearly, and it could well have disappeared for a second or so without me noticing. I was on the northern edge of the possible error limit of the occultation 'shadow' and as was likely, saw no disappearance of the star. After reviewing the camera shots there was no noticeable dimming of the star on 'film', but of course, it could have disappeared between shots. Also, unusually, during the crucial minute, some chatty cyclists came by. This disturbed me to look away from the binoculars and then I had to refind the star, so I can't say for sure it didn't disappear! Here's a picture with 14 Tauri labelled. It is quite impressive that Flamsteed could see this star without optical aid.

Asteroid occults 6m star...tonight! (Feb 2)

http://www.asteroidoccultation.com/2010_02/0203_1248_20579.htm

Just a one-off alert for astronomers across UK to test the accuracy of this little asteroid's orbit. (no picture, sorry!)
1248 Jugurtha, mag 14.6 astreroid will rapidly obliterate the light from the sixth magnitude star 14 Tauri (HIP 17408), which is just below the Pleiades. The event will occur at about 12:56 a.m to a few select areas across Wales, the Midlands, and East Anglia, possibly including London.

NGC 2683

There is no name for this galaxy as far as I know, but I discovered it on a sky ramble once with my 8" SCT just north of the constellation Cancer the crab. It was close to a little asterism in the shape of a kite. It sounds weird, but I thought of it as the crab-kite galaxy. I drew a lovely sketch of it, but now I have finally had the opportunity to take a piccy of it and even better, the picture shows a subtle texture detail. It is a lovely near edge-on galaxy, which always looks pleasing, with a subtle blue hint and other subtle splodges of colour towards the centre. There's even 2 little galaxies hiding near it! One of them being the 16.5 mag PGC 24945 (L). It's quite an overlooked galaxy because it's as bright as the brightest members of the Virgo cluster, but living isolated on the southern border of Lynx, it gets missed. It's surprisingly easy to find - just look for 'the kite' at the northern edge of Cancer, north of the star iota Cancri. It is 1ºN of sigma Cancri.

Eclipse to see out the decade

I tested out my new christmas present - a tripod with an old 400mm lens on my EOS. On new year's eve, I hopped outside my door and waited for the clouds to part, which they obligingly did to reveal a moon in mid partial eclipse. I spent quite some time squatting, craning my neck and shivering in the freezing cold. This picture was taken at 19:16 UT on 31/12/2009. I found the optimal ISO setting to be 400, because I closed the aperture to about f/18 for better focus and I stacked 4 short exposures. I enhanced the contrast to push the brightest spots to full brightness, and the moon starts to get lost in the umbra, so it appears fully black. This eclipse shows the range of brightnesses across the penumbra and shows the fuzziness of the shadow of the earth, caused by the half-degree angular size of the sun.

Pea in a haystack

Here's a strange one for you. A little green nebula right next to one of Messier's largest clusters, M34 in Perseus. It appears that some of the stars associated with the cluster have spilled on to my image of Abell 4 here, as it is dusted with some quite evenly-bright and evenly-spaced stars. When you've got access to a 20" scope, you should try out the Abell planetary nebulae if you want a challenge. I was blessed with a clear night so I used it wisely. PS Spot the galaxies.

Ares

Here is my picture of "the god of war", Mars, on the day after boxing day. It was taken the same night as the antennae pics below. An unusually still night and the planet was quite high in the sky. It turned out that it was only 12" across. I stacked 20 large jpegs on the Canon 350D at f/4.8 on the 20" (fl=2400mm) at ISO 100 and 1/800" exposures. I have blown up the pixels 4 x for comfortable viewing. I also took 20 raw-format pictures, converted them and stacked all 40 and got a slightly less pleasing result. I probably should have known how to use registax better and selected just the best few.

Lonely ball of stars

Having had that adventurous astronomical thought "where will I explore next?" I recalled a guest speaker mentioning the Intergalactic Wanderer. It is a lonely globular cluster, NGC 2419 in Lynx. It can be found by going a little way north of the star Castor, and it is just 10.4 magnitude and 6.2 arcminutes across, because it is more than a quarter of a million light years away in deep space. That means it is many times further away than any of those stars in the photo. The view of our galaxy from within the cluster would be pretty stunning but not like you'd imagine from sci-fi films. It would be something like our view of Andromeda but 10 times larger. This picture comes to you via the stacking and processing of 15 x 10 second exposures on the 20-inch at ISO 1600 and f/3.

V838 Monocerotis

V838 Mon is a star that went extremely bright for a few days in early 2002. Usually 16th magnitude, it reached 6.75 magnitude. At a distance of > 6 kpc this made it temporarily the brightest star in the Milky Way. Astronomers noticed a few days after it had faded that there was a brightening in the infrared. It turned out this was a light echo from the surrounding interstellar matter. You can google 'light echo' or 'V838 Mon' and you may well be familiar with the set of Hubble pictures, taken during successive months. Well, I thought I would try and hunt it down and see how it was doing. Not a lot. Never mind. That's mostly what happens in the universe.

in the wee hours

I got an early look at the dark, spring sky the other night. I went down to the observatory at 2am. This was the only non-moonlit clear free period I have had where it has been safe to travel, i.e. above 0ºC, just. I got the scope ready well before the moon set at 3am. It is a better time to observe, because a few people will actually turn their lights off and headlights become very scarce. Although there were a few flashes of lightning and a little mistiness to the upper atmosphere it was pretty still air and Mars looked surprisingly detailed, with 2 surface features visible and a lighter polar region. When I looked it up, the diameter was only 12"! However, as per usual, the scope did not track well enough for photography. I was getting nice 1/800" ISO 100 pics of Mars, but when it came to long exposures the wobble looked terrible. I had a quiet* battle with the tracking for a couple of hours until during an ascending slew, the declination motor decided to scream and stall on me (* the motors actually make a loud, quirky, metallic noise while tracking). After a gentle push, I found that a bit of weight on the scope helped.

By this time, the constellations Crater and Corvus (the cup and the crow) were up in the south. Scanning my cerebral databases I headed towards the Antennae galaxies. So here is my picture. Taken around 5 am, about 24 reasonably tracked pics of the Antennae galaxies (NGC 4038 and NGC 4039), at 30" exposure, ISO 1600, f/3(ish), stacked, processed and tweaked. It's a fascinating object and the word 'object' is a bit of an understatement. The faint 'antennae' are stars flung out by the combined gravitational interaction of the merging galaxies' stars. In the centre of the galaxies there are bright patches that are zones of star birth triggered by gravitational shockwaves in the material, brought about by the galactic collision. To reveal the antennae was well worth putting up with the freezing wind blowing on my face for 5 hours.

Frosty cloud

I haven't been able to get to my observatory despite some lovely clear skies! Ice and Snow, minus 4, minus 5... Oh well, even if I did make it the light pollution is 10 times worse because the snow reflects street lights up into the sky. Plus I'm saving petrol (carbon). I created this misty effect by building a mask using the luminance value, inverting it and applying a 5 pixel gaussian blur. Any guesses as to what this mystery object is? (Hint: there's an easy way to cheat).

The Geminid Meteor Shower

I caught a Geminid on film during the mostly cloudy night of Sunday the 13th of December. It's a game of luck to get meteors on film. During my imaging stint, which comprised of exposing a camera on a tripod, I saw several Geminid meteors. But only on the way back home at about 00:30 I saw a beautiful green firework shooting slowly down to the east. Through thin cloud, this thing was amazingly bright, it must have been about mag -4. The one I got in this photo I didn't see - it is the only one I got out in about 30 photos! It'a a bit rubbish, but there was plenty of activity and I thought I would 'report' it on this blog.

Eris 2

Here's the second pic of the animation as it doesn't work.

New record for the Society's 20" telescope

Being able to image the solar system's faint outer moons Triton, Hyperion, Phoebe has whet my appetite for obscure astronomical targets. I set to work looking for the solar system's outermost visible object, Eris (I still liked the name 'Xena' better). Eris is 96.7 astronomical units away. This is a crazy distance! Three times that of Pluto. It's therefore receiving 1/9th the light, and only 1/9th of THAT light will get back to Earth. This object really pushed the limits of my imaging system. This comprises of stepper motors, worm gears, an MS-DOS program, an Alt-az hand built Newtonian telescope, a field flattener and a Canon EOS 350D (at about 8ºC). The site is now fairly light-polluted but we have a dome. Eris was about 30 degrees up in the South when these images were taken (13 days apart). It has only moved a few arc minutes (mostly parallax shift) in this time because it is so far away and that is how it evaded detection before Jan 2005. It has a moon, Dysnomia, discovered Oct 2005. Using the moon to 'weigh' Eris, it is now known to be more massive and also larger than Pluto, thanks to Hubble's impressive measurement of its size. I really had to optimise the stacking and processing of each of these images. The second image (Eris on right) is noisier, despite more (43 (cf. 32)) 30 second images. These are cropped and put together into an animated gif.

See "littlebeck" blog on my links - for the necessary images that reassured me that my blobs were Eris.

Art stolen from the sky

This is the current most wonderful piece of art I have stolen from the sky. It has a happy, pleasing quality about it. I can’t say why. Maybe it’s because it’s just pretty, or it’s because of the sheer otherworldliness of it. For instance, that bizarre Y in the middle. I enjoy the slight imbalance of the picture, it was intentionally cropped that way. The dark blobs on the right are made so much more interesting. Behind them is a little pocket of pink glow trying to shine around the edge. The two blue stars at the bottom are like incisors. They are top 2 of a little cluster of stars far out to the east of Orion. That cluster is the way to find the Rosette Nebula, which encircles them and is much bigger than I can fit on my pictures. I suppose I could pan around the area and get lots of images, but I haven’t come across a way of making seamless mosaics yet as in my opinion Canon’s Photo Stitch does a pretty clumsy job, especially for space art. I write this with appropriate ambient background music on: you could feel the sky, on geogaddi by the Boards of Canada. Definitely a case of the old adage ‘a picture paints a thousand words’ so I shall stop now!

The Pac-man Nebula

This is a significantly shaped cloud of glowing gas.

M33

Here’s my latest picture of M33 on the society’s 20" scope; an improvement on the higher res. mosaic in terms of smoothness and aesthetic appeal. I just managed to squeeze it into the field of view using the Meade focal reducer lenses and tilting the camera. It’s quite surprising that this galaxy is the size of the moon. It is one of those vast celestial objects on the dark shores of the world visible to human eyes. Its visibility is strongly dependent on the sky transparency and the scattering level of light pollution. I’ve never seen it with my bare eyes, only the nearby cluster NGC 752, although it only takes the tiniest telescope to see M33. Big telescopes will reveal very subtle patches of brightness within its spiral arms. In other words, it really looks nothing like the photograph. To the lower left of centre is a HUGE nebula many, many times larger than our Galaxy’s Orion Nebula that has its own New General Catalogue entry.

Nuisance lighting

Industrial estates, some farms, large houses and gardens near the observatory seem to be pumping out wasteful amounts of light all night with only the cost of electricity to deter them. Where is the respect to nature and the environment? It’s high time to raise awareness of this issue, give encouragement to switch off or angle lights downward, or to start enforcing rules preventing light trespass and waste. With regard to security lighting… does the light really make the place more secure? At the observatory I prefer to leave the outside light sensor off to hinder would-be burglars being able to see what they’re doing. Studies (CfDS) already show that lights do little for crime prevention. The steady increase in lights filling in all the remaining dark spaces on the countryside map now includes lights that can leave a bright spot in your eyes from a distance of half a mile. To me these look at least 500 Watts per light. They include a certain “farm” on the Watton road and some ridiculously dazzling construction lights on the A11. Worst of all is Wymondham industrial estate – what a horrific waste. I am pleased that by pure luck the light on the industrial estate near me has just been removed. That one casted eerie enlarged shadows of passers by across my door! The picture above is of the school beside the observatory - who for some reason left their lights rudely shining across to the observatory’s al fresco telescope area.

Sun Dog

I rediscovered this picture of a parhelion or ‘Sun Dog’ on some beautiful wispy, icy clouds. It looks like it was taken some time in spring based on the position of the sun. This optical phenomenon is caused by flat hexagonal ice crystals refracting sunlight by 22º. The effect can also cause a halo at this distance from the sun, and even the moon. Light dramatically reflects off the ghostly swirls above it and the contrast in the background blues makes a lovely composition.

A galaxy...in just 2 minutes

Here’s a picture of M81, a galaxy similar in size to our own Milky Way, 12 million light years away in Ursa Major. It is also known as Bode’s Nebula as it was discovered before the idea of galaxies outside of our own. I got this wonderful final image with just four 30 second exposures at ISO1600 & f/3. It’s processed in a non-linear way with boosted contrast between the faint spiral arms and sky background, and also to show some detail in the dust lanes around the centre. In fact I have blackened the sky which was its usual muddy brown colour. Visually, through a telescope, it appears to me as a bright central nucleus surrounded by a hazy ellipse. The spiral arms are too faint to see so the full size is not visible. Very near by in the sky is M82, a galaxy showing lots of structure but I always find tracking down M81 a bit tricky.

Big scope peers into the depths of our spiral arms

Abell 20 is a faint planetary nebula in Canis Minor near Monoceros, which is nearly as wide from our perspective as the beautiful Ring nebula in Lyra. The main difference is that this one is about magnitude 14.7, nearly 6 magnitudes fainter and only 1/200 th as bright! It needs a hefty telescope like our 20” to help gather and capture its elusive photons, most of which are a delightful turquoise shade of doubly-ionised oxygen. The central star looks quite busy but only appears so from our distant vantage point. It is magnitude 16.5. Apologies for what looks like green rain falling diagonally across the picture. It is an artefact of some detrailing I did and the over-processing required to see the “faint fuzzy”.

Gassy young stars

This is me peering deeply into the Pleiades cluster. So deep, even with my field widener attachment, that I could only see two of the stars within the cluster. And this field is 40 arc minutes across. Now, obviously, this isn’t a properly deep picture, like you would see in some expensive CCD camera advert (that doesn’t give a price), or a magazine pic of the week. But to me it is deep, because it shows lots of blue clouds floating about between the stars, reflecting their spectrally blue cosmic light. It wasn’t a long, or particularly well tracked set of camera exposures, but it’s the subject I’m interested in, and my aim is to maximise the aesthetic appeal of the final picture. Contributing to that appeal is a particularly quirky set of flare lines coming off the star Alcyone at the left that provides a skewed detail to the picture. The streaky nebula at centre is named after the star, Merope which is only 30% as bright as Alcyone.

Messin' with filters

Lumicon’s 1 ¼" UHC filter is a superb addition to my visual astronomy toolkit. I’ve seen the stringy, fluorescent shockwaves of the supernova remnant in Cygnus, the North America nebula, and now I have faintly seen the glow behind the horse head nebula. But for photography it is a bit disappointing. The light is mostly rejected - it seems to be too narrowband for good imaging and the light really should be collimated first for it to block the correct wavelengths. I can’t quite work out why the photographic result should be so different to the visual experience at the eyepiece. Any comments welcome. I did 5 exposures that tested the tracking of the 20” scope (60-90 seconds each). Detrailing, stacking and processing resulted in this faint but fairly decent picture of the Horse head nebula's Hydrogen Beta (H-β, λ = 486.1342 nm) emission.