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.

Out of this world (literally)

This oddity is where astronomy and art mix.
I wonder if you know what this thing is?
I'll say no more than that this area
of sky intrigues me - what a cosmic field...

Hind's Variable Nebula

Here is one of the other less studied variable nebulae -
Hind's Variable Nebula. There are a lot of very, very faintly glowing clouds surrounding the whole lower half of the picture, but the clouds certainly aren't picked up in this image. So don't go scrutinising it too deeply - instead you can see the void in stars blocked out by dust. The star at the centre is T Tauri, the prototype of its own star class. To me it looks like the starlight is reflecting off a hidden, dark wall of dust to the right (of course there is no 'right' in space!). I thought I would slowly slew the big 20" scope to this nebula near the Hyades and get a few minutes worth of exposure in order to follow on from Gyulbudaghian's nebula (see earlier posts). Unfortunately it was quite low in the direction of a small town, which means it is impossible to cut through the light pollution and get a deep image. Still, I got my first look of it in the eyepiece.

Another instance where a pair of tights comes in handy

Let me explain the title. At the observatory we were discussing how to get some real scientific measurements out of our telescope. It so happened that our expert former-professional astronomer and author member was there and he suggested that we could record the spectra of stars. For this purpose, we have a cardboard circular attachment with what looks like tights material streched over it, which velcros onto the front of the telescope. This is actually a clever but rudimentary diffraction grating that splits some of the light from stars into spectra that radiate out from them. We spent a while looking at bright stars and seeing rainbow starbursts all around them! However, we couldn't make out any colours in the outer spectra as they were just too dark. Our former-pro must have had unique eyes as he could see colour all the way out. At this point I got rather inspired, as I had once looked at a mysterious object called "Campbell's Hydrogen Star". It was an ordinary star to me at the time, except that it didn't disappear when I put a nebula filter in the eyepiece. Here is an image of that object (147"@ISO1600, f=2400mm f/4.8) and its spectrum which I have specially processed by cloning the image, rotating 180º & excluding anything that didn't match, thus highlighting only the spectrum of the object.

Campbell's star is a bright (9m) but very small (5") planetary nebula 2.5º north of the star Albireo, that went undiscovered until the invention of the spectroscope. It has a strong emission of hydrogen lines (see the red, blue, violet bands in the spectrum). Also there is some emission in the middle of the spectrum, presumably from the central star (11m). Maybe a messy picture, but pretty good for a pair of tights.

Northumberland Astro Soc.

Having travelled from Norfolk all the way to North of Newcastle, I got an extremely warm welcome by a friendly bunch of people at the Northumberland Astronomy Society (and free entry and a cup of coffee!). It was a Saturday, there was an entertaining open night talk by a Mr. Jannetta, to the point where it seemed like he had control of the heavens. It was a sharp and clear dusk over Hauxley, near Amble, and we had a nature reserve shed/hide as the club room. This was absolutely ideal as it pointed South across a prettty tidal wetland with a beautifully low horizon- the preferred direction for astronomers! But the best bit was the talk stopped at about 8:13 p.m. and we all gathered along the long window to watch the now superbright International Space Station sail slowly from right to left and "above" the planet Jupiter, which we could also see reflected in the water below. I bobbed down for people behind me to see and I rested my DSLR on the windowsill and got this 2 second snap. The only inconvenience was that I had to try to get back to Leeds by 11 p.m which meant no observing!

The Crescent Nebula

This object is a splatter of red and blue paint flung out from a seething star. Here, the hot star's shed atmosphere is lit up by it's ultraviolet light and fluoresces in hydrogen light. The star is the 7.4 magnitude Wolf-Rayet star, PPM 84423 in the constellation of Cygnus. Just before I slotted the camera into the scope I got a stunning view of this strange arc. I used a 20mm wide-field eyepiece with a Lumicon Ultra High Contrast filter on the 20" telescope (f=2400mm). However, I didn't see the lovely colours shown here. The picture is 9 stacked 30 second exposures, plus flats and darks and the object is called NGC 6888, or the Crescent Nebula. I managed to dismantle my field flattener and insert the lenses into my camera adaptor to convert the f/4.8 scope into an f/3 scope a.k.a a 'light bucket'! The nebula can be found by aiming 1/3 of the way between the bright stars Sadr and Eta Cygni, and moving a tiny bit right. Look for the little W or M - the bright stars you can see in the lower portion of this picture.

Deeper still

Here's the latest 82 images of Gyulbudaghian's Variable nebula stacked with a more carefully taken flat field. Just thought I'd share it with you. Look around the red star PV Cephei in the dark 'hollow' at the centre - can you see a jet shooting out below and slightly to the right? This is the nebula I'm looking for - not the vast billowing clouds swallowing up the stars at the left. It's madly overexposed as I couldn't resist turning up the contrast!

Obscure Nebula - looking deeper

We had compared our images of Gyulbudaghian's Variable Nebula (HH 215, GM 1-29) and neither of us could see anything definate. It was the last deep-sky night for a fortnight as the moon was setting at 11pm as a distorted deep orange almond sinking behind the horizon. So, I was inspired to take another good bunch of 30" pics. All in all, I stacked 46 (including the previous pictures - below) to get a total exposure of over 25 minutes at f/4.8 on the 20" telescope. Here is the result. This picture is improved enough for you to see the Herbig-Haro jet HH 415 and the background nebulosity is clearer. HH 415 can be found by going below and slightly left of the bright blue star right of centre to find a bright-looking 13th magnitude star. There is a very faint star just below this and the object is the small streaky blur just below that. As for the main object around PV Cephei (just below centre), I still can't really see much there. With this picture, I increased the saturation, as it had somehow dropped during processing. So now the colours of the stars are revealed and they are stunning! This is especially useful on PV Cephei, which is clearly revealed to be a dim red colour, sitting in its dark patch of nebulous dust. Who knows what magnitude it's at now!?

The Helix Nebula

Contrary to what I've seen written, the Helix nebula is not the closest planetary nebula to us. It is one of my favourite objects but it is quite elusive, as it can only been seen at certain times under good conditions from UK and I had a good window of opportunity the other night. I took several shots, about 60 in all I think, 45 of which were good enough to stack (22x30",22x15" + 1'). The main trouble is that the nebula is so diffuse, it was barely visible on the individual pictures because of LIGHT POLLUTION! The worst culprits round here seem to be rural industry and carelessly aimed, wasteful and unnecessary security lights. So, to combat this, I stuck in a 40mm eyepiece on the 20" (60x) with a Lumicon UHC filter screwed on and the detail in the helix's structure was amazing and the centre of the nebula was filled in with a cool blue glow. I've done a lot of careful processing on the final image, as the flat fields were not as flat as I'd have liked (I took them on a white door indoors). It still looks quite noisy I think, but it's a beautiful object that I've been waiting a long while to photograph this well.

Gyulbudaghian's Variable Nebula

In this picture of Gyulbudaghian's nebula, North is down. It was ~ 8 mins worth of exposure on the 20" scope nearly overhead (5x1' + 6x30" + 17"). The nebula, which was discovered to be variable in 1977, has been very, very faint recently. The white lines point to the star PV Cephei, which is also faint. If you compare it to a previous image you will wonder what has happened to it... Strange star! (image courtesy STSci)

M19, the elongated globular cluster

Just a quick post to keep the blog ticking over. M19... A curiously elongated globular. One of my sharper images on the 20", but still a but fuzzy. I had to play around with the colour, as Deep Sky Stacker decided to give the midtones a green tinge when it stacked the pics. If I remember right, this was about 10 x 15 second shots on the 20", when it was tracking well, with darks and a flat. As far as globulars go this one is very close to and slightly further away than the centre of the galaxy, and we're looking at it through a plethora of distant stars and a bit of dust. It's an impressively big and bright cluster and it can be seen in binoculars at magnitude 6.8 in the constellation Ophiuchus. But why is it elongated? My instinct tells me it's tidal forces from the centre of the galaxy, but that's pure speculation.

Polar Mesospheric Clouds a long way South

On our observatory meeting night, we were treated to the usual clouding over and sprinkling of rain, while we were inside chatting. I was upstars in the dome, hoping we would be able to see a star or have something to point the scope at. We were watching a clear patch start to roll over revealing the twlinkly red star Antares and there were some cirrus-like clouds appearing right across the sky as the twlilight was fading at about 22:00 BST. I presumed they were cirrus but as the sky grew darker I realised they had some wonderful wave like patterns in them, and they continued to stand out from the darkening sky. They were Noctilucent clouds, covering the whole sky at 52 degrees North! I ran to the car while they faded to fetch my Canon 350D and took a few shots with it resting on a chair seat on the observatory roof, pointing NW. This particular shot taken at 22:36 on 15/07/09 is 1/5 second at ISO 1600, f/5.6 and about 35mm focal length (48mm @ 35mm-equivalent) with auto dark subtraction on. I continued at 4 seconds and ISO 100 thereafter for better noise, but the composition and scale of this earlier display looked the most impressive.

What was in front of the Space Station?

The Shuttle mission STS-127 has been delayed several days by bad weather, so what was the mystery object 30 seconds ahead of the International Space Station when it flew over Southern Britain at 23:07 UT(GMT) on 12/07/2009? Quite bright, it is clearly in the same orbit because the trails just appear to touch on this 30 second picture, as they did in the consecutive pictures. Take a look as it passed below Arcturus, viewed from just North of Norwich. Remember the light from the satellite has been spread out across its path and the ISS appeared much brighter than Arcturus.

Messier mosaic

Here is a 4x3 snippet of my new Messier object mosaic. Each picture is a 300x300 pixel image I have taken of the object. Some are awfully low in altitude from 52ºN. It's surprising how different each image is. Each have their own image processing challenges, whether it is light pollution subtraction, bringing out faint spiral arms, or eliminating the blurry disc effect on the small globular clusters. I learned that not all globulars look alike, and they all look impressive with a 20" scope. I used different magnifications for different objects, e.g. M24 in Sagittarius is huge! I have arranged my mosaic as 11 rows of 10, so each column ends in the same digit - but it's not complete. Here is a complete section so you can guess what columns and rows I have shown - if your astronomy knowledge is up to it, that is!

My best shot of Pluto yet

Pluto still has a place in our mind as a planet, but it's just too small. Smaller than the moon, a little bit brighter, but about 12,000 times further away. It is about 3,000,000,000 miles away in this photo and the light from the sun that's reached it is having to come all that way back in to us. It's amazing we can see it at all, because that light is the 'lucky' portion that has reflected almost straight off the rocks or ice on its surface. But nevertheless, it is clearly visible when you capture 30 seconds worth of those photons by bouncing them yet again off a 20 inch highly silvered mirror in a hole in a dome in a field in Norfolk. Pluto's moon, Charon, would also be visible if it didn't lie within the small circle of fuzz around the image of Pluto.

Hydrogen Balmer α

Apologies for not blogging for so long. I blame the summer twilight, and my new project. Since I got a reasonable picture of M83 (not the best of pictures - see below) I realised I could produce my own Messier mosaic. Unfortunatetly, this will take me the best part of a year, because I started in May. However, I am nearly there with the images - I have well over 90 of the 110 now and it's looking good. So I thought I would see what pictures I have that I am more pleased with. One of those I took last year with a single hand-guided exposure of about 6 minutes through a 400mm f/6.3 lens onto Kodak Elite Chrome 200 film. This was scanned directly from the slide film by Mike B, a much, much better quality scan than the crude messy job I paid the commercial photo processors to do. The field encompasses the star Sadr in Cygnus, M29, plenty of nebulosity and clearly shows the Crescent nebula - you can use it as a chart how to look for it. So here I've attached a higher quality *.bmp file for your perusal. As you can see from my previous images the Canon EOS's filtered sensor isn't a match for even ISO 200 film at the wavelength of Hydrogen Balmer α emission, 656 nm. Seriously want a modified one, but serious lack of £££!