It was pretty clear last night and I know we’re getting to prime Milky Way core viewing season, so I snapped a few. This was just a single frame, processed with darktable and PSP. I’m going to try and do some stacking this Summer to see if I can’t get a more detailed, less noisy image.
Bortle class 4 in Michigan.
Here’s what the minimally processed RAW looks like.
After the smoke finally cleared (a bit at first, but I went back to imaging despite some long-lingering smoke) it has been back to the usual “why is it only clear when the moon is full?”. Anyway, been working on a few projects:
This star-forming cloud of gas doesn’t have a cute nickname - it’s just known by its catalog designation Cederblad-214. Shot with the AT130EDT at f/7, about 8 hours worth with a duo Ha/Oiii filter.
This star-forming cloud of gas does have a cute nickname - the Elephant’s Trunk Nebula. Shot with the AT65EDQ at f/6.9, about 17 hours with the duoband filter plus 3 hours of full-spectrum for proper star colors (layered in with a mask). This is my first multi-year project, as I started collecting data last Fall and finished it up this year. The bright orange star is really an interesting object. Known as Herschel’s Garnet star - despite the ‘garnet’ name, orange is an accurate color rendition. It is one of the physically largest known stars. If it was at the location of the Sun it would extend out all the way to Saturn’s orbit. Giants like this live fast and die young - it will go supernova “soon” (in the cosmic sense).
The central star in the nebula bubble one of about 500 known Milky Way “Wolf-Rayet” stars. WR stars have already passed through the red giant stage. When the star became a red giant (~300,000 years ago) it shed an expanding cloud of gas. After collapsing into a very hot, hydrogen-poor star it is emitting a fast and intensely strong stellar wind - which is catching up to and ionizing the earlier cloud of hydrogen (red) and oxygen (the wispy blue). This was shot with the small scope - AT65
The Bubble Nebula is a different kind of gas bubble. Its central star is young and very hot. The gas bubble is being contained by the surrounding hydrogen gas (which I assume is part of the hydrogen nebula that coalesced into the star). This one with the larger AT130.
Incredible pictures and effort. Wow. I too adore the little facts about stars and astronomy.
For example I was reading that the bottom left foot of Orion (facing us), one of the brightest stars in the sky, is Rigel. Featured often in Star Trek, it looks like just a bright star, but it is 870 light years away. Serius is also bright but its 8.6 light years away. You know where this is going. Rigel turns out to be 50,000 times brighter than the sun, and thats only in the visible spectrum. In UV its 300,000 times. If Rigel was as close as Alpha Centauri it would be as roughly as bright as a full moon, but focused from a point source for much greater effect. Would the UV cause blood and other bodily fluids to glow green in our landscape?
What Bortle skies are available to you, and do you travel regularly for pictures? I’ve been a bit annoyed with the few good viewing days this Fall in Ontario. Venus has been great all year though.
Thanks, Scott! The multi-year project isn’t really any more effort than anything else - the data just sat on a hard drive until I was able to add more.
My yard is in very bright suburban light pollution. On a Sky Quality Meter, and it typically reads about 18.8 magnitude / arc-second^2. Most people go by https://www.lightpollutionmap.info for their definition of the Bortle scale, and by their scale I’m right at the high B6 - low B7 transition. That’s one reason so many of my images use a narrowband filter. Some day I hope to go all-in with a mono camera, but that’s $$$$ when you add in the cost of quality Ha Oiii and Sii filters.
The local club has two Bortle 4 sites, both are about an hour’s drive. I go there, but not nearly as often as I’d like to. It’s not just the overhead of packing up all the gear - it’s also that they’re both pretty isolated with spotty cell service (so my wife prefers that I go when other club members also are there), and it’s either darn cold to be out just sitting around for hours or, when it’s warm it doesn’t get dark until 10 or even 11pm (the problem with being on the western edge of a time zone…).
Three more (can you tell I had a stretch of reasonable weather?)
IC 63 goes by the nickname “The Ghost of Cassiopeia”. Too bad I didn’t quite get this done in time for Halloween. Astrophotographers typically try most anything to keep bright stars out of the image, but Gamma Cassiopeia is why the nebula looks like it does. The reflection component is light from the star, and radiation from the star is both ionizing and eroding the cloud of hydrogen gas. Gamma Cas also has a fun nickname. It goes by Navi, which is not an Arabic name like most named stars. It was commonly used for navigation by the early astronauts, and the name Navi was coined by Gus Grissom.
This was taken with the AT130, combining broadband and Ha narrowband.
One galaxy shot. “Galaxy season” is normally our winter, when Earth’s night side points mostly away from any part of the Milky Way, so the gazillions of other galaxies are not obscured by all the local stars and dust. But even in Summer some parts of the sky are away from the plane of the galaxy. This region of Pegasus is one of those. This image is pushing the limits of my focal length and light pollution. The largest galaxy in the field, NGC 7331, is about 40 million light years away. Together with four small surrounding galaxies (all ~300 - 350 mly) go by the informal name the “Deer Lick Group” - named by an amateur who was observing them from Deer Lick Gap in the mountains of North Carolina.
The small cluster of galaxies in the upper-right are known as Stephan’s Quintet (discovered by Édouard Stephan in 1877). Four of the five are actually interacting gravitationally - basically pulling each other apart.
I don’t have a telescope that is suited to high-quality planetary imaging, but the other night I dabbled with shooting Jupiter. Took 4 minutes of video at ~100fps using the AT130EDT with a 2x barlow and the little color camera that is normally the guiding camera. Pop the video into a program called Astrosurface that aligned and analyzed all 25,000 frames, picking the 2500 sharpest. It stacked those, then performed some sharpening-type manipulations.
Very nice! Interesting how planetary is almost a different hobby; it’s basically taking photos of small objects during the day, vs largish objects at night. Also compliments on your prior 3 images.
Jupiter and the 4 moons serves as an viewing conditions and calibration test for me; I’m visual observing only. With my telescope’s 650mm focal length, I can use my 7mm eyepiece for 92x magnification - decent for seeing some bands on Jupiter if I can keep the brightness down. But I really need to use the 2x Barlow at 184x magnification to get close enough for details. At that point however, atmosphere and collimation, and the fast movement of Jupiter through the eyepiece, are all issues. Especially since I have only 130mm aperture on my scope. Most nights I’m better off sticking to the 7mm on its own. Or buy a bigger telescope…
Yes - a rather different hobby. Serious planetary is the realm of 11" SCTs (but even bigger is better).
One should always buy a bigger telescope :) But for me, the 5" refractor is the biggest, heaviest thing I am comfortable lifting onto the mount. Someday maybe I’ll get the itch to move to an 8" newtonian or SCT, but for now I enjoy the simplicity of the refractor.
If your scope is on a basic dob mount, then yeah, you’re limited a lot by the need to nudge to track things.
