Author Archive
Thursday, April 7th, 2011
NGC2683
Fifty-one times six minutes weren’t enough to capture a decent image of NGC2683, which might just be a target out of the scope of my equipment.
NGC 2683 is an unbarred spiral galaxy discovered by William Herschel on February 5, 1788. It was nicknamed the “UFO Galaxy” by the Astronaut Memorial Planetarium and Observatory. It is viewed nearly edge-on from Earth’s location in space and is located between 16 to 25 million light-years away. It is receding from Earth at 410 km/s (250 mi/s), and from the Galactic Center at 375 km/s (233 mi/s). The reddened light from the center of the galaxy appears yellowish due to the intervening gas and dust located within the outer arms of NGC 2683 (Wikipedia).
Tags: astrophotography, Canon450D, ED80, galaxy, mgc2683, PixInsight, QHY5
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Thursday, April 7th, 2011
M44
Back to the clusters with an evergreen: M45, aka the Beehive. This image is the sum of 25 six-minute exposures at ISO400.
The Beehive Cluster, also known as Praesepe (Latin for “manger”), M44, NGC 2632, or Cr 189, is an open cluster in the constellation Cancer. It is one of the nearest open clusters to the Solar System, and it contains a larger star population than most other nearby clusters. Under dark skies the Beehive Cluster looks like a nebulous object to the naked eye; thus it has been known since ancient times. The classical astronomer Ptolemy called it “the nebulous mass in the breast of Cancer,” and it was among the first objects that Galileo studied with his telescope
The cluster’s age and proper motion coincide with those of the Hyades open cluster, suggesting that both share a similar origin. Both clusters also contain red giants and white dwarfs, which represent later stages of stellar evolution, along with main sequence stars of spectral classes A, F, G, K, and M.
Currently there is no consensus on the cluster’s distance, with recent sources suggesting 160 to 187 parsecs (520-610 light years). There is better agreement on its age, at about 600 million years. This is equivalent to the age of the Hyades (~625 million years). The bright central core of the cluster has a diameter of about 7 parsecs (22.8 light years) (Wikipedia).
Tags: astrophotography, beehive, Canon450D, ED80, m44, open cluster, PixInsight, QHY5
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Thursday, April 7th, 2011
M101
M101 is a beautiful face-on spiral galaxy. Unfortunately I could only take 11 ten-minute frames of this jewel, and I will certainly do more when I will be able too again. Summer is closing in, and nights are getting shorter and shorter.
The Pinwheel Galaxy, as it’s known, is 25 million light-years away and with a diameter of 170,000 light-years it is nearly twice the size of the Milky Way. It has a disk mass on the order of 100 billion solar masses, along with a small bulge of about 3 billion solar masses.
Another remarkable property of this galaxy is its huge and extremely bright H II regions, of which a total of about 3,000 can be seen on photographs. H II regions usually accompany the enormous clouds of high density molecular hydrogen gas contracting under their own gravitational force where stars form. H II regions are ionized by large numbers of extremely bright and hot young stars.
On photographs M101 can be seen to be asymmetrical on one side. It is thought that in the recent past (speaking in galactic terms) M101 underwent a near collision with another galaxy and the associated gravitational tidal forces caused the asymmetry. In addition, this encounter also amplified the density waves in the spiral arms of M101. The amplification of these waves leads to the compression of the interstellar hydrogen gas, which then triggers strong star formation activity (Wikipedia).
Tags: astrophotography, Canon450D, ED80, galaxy, m101, PixInsight, QHY5
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Thursday, April 7th, 2011
M109
Messier 109 is, to my equipment, an inconspicuous little galaxy in Ursa Major. I don’t have a lot of choice of subjects, this time of the year, and this galaxy, measuring only 7.6 x 4.7 minutes of arc in apparent size, proved to be a tough match.
M109 is the brightest galaxy in the M109 Group, a large group of galaxies located in the constellation Ursa Major that may contain over 50 galaxies. (Wikipedia).
This image is the sum of 35 seven-minute frames at ISO400.
Tags: astrophotography, Canon450D, ED80, galaxy, m109, PixInsight, QHY5
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Thursday, April 7th, 2011
M108 (right) and M97
Above is my take at the galaxy M108 and the planetary nebula M97. Unfortunately you cannot see any of the red outer layers of the nebula, because of the poor sensibility to the shorter wavelengths of my camera.
M97, also known as the Owl Nebula, is one of the faintest objects in the Messier catalog, and one of the four planetary nebulae there. A planetary nebula is an emission nebula consisting of an expanding glowing shell of ionized gas ejected during the asymptotic giant branch phase of certain types of stars late in their life (Wikipedia). M97 is thought to have formed 6000 years ago.
M108, instead, is an isolated member of the Ursa Major Cluster cluster of galaxies in the Virgo supercluster. It has a morphological classification of type SBbc in the de Vaucouleurs system, which means it is a barred spiral galaxy with somewhat loosely wound arms. This galaxy has an estimated mass of 125 billion times the mass of the Sun and includes about 290 ± 80 globular clusters (Wikipedia).
Tags: astrophotography, Canon450D, ED80, galaxy, PixInsight, planetary nebula, QHY5
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Monday, March 21st, 2011
M81
Two blog posts ago I showed a better M81 and M82. They were a good improvement over my first try. I have, since, experimented a little with PixInsight, a program which I intend to purchase because it’s available on GNU/Linux.
The 100% crop of M81 you can see above is the result. You can also see a 100% crop of M82 and the full field.
Tags: astrophotography, Canon450D, ED80, galaxy, m81, m82, PixInsight, QHY5
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Monday, March 21st, 2011
NGC2403
I’ll have to revise this processing, because of a slight green tint in the shadows and an excess of denoise and deconvolution, but I’m glad I set an ambitious target on this easy galaxy that is not so easy with my equipment and sky. The moon was full and brighter than usual, because of a close perigee, so it was time to experiment. This image is the sum of 162 5-minute frames at ISO400. That amounts to 12 hours! At least I was able to finally tame the thermal noise that has always bothered me to no end.
NGC2403 (that you can see in the full field of view of my optic train here) is an intermediate spiral galaxy. That means something in between a barred and an unbarred spiral galaxy. It belongs to the M81 group and is about eight million light-years away.
Tags: astrophotography, Canon450D, ED80, galaxy, ngc2403, PixInsight, QHY5
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Saturday, March 12th, 2011
M81 and M82
About a month after trying for the first time, I took another chance at M81 and M82, two of the few galaxies that are bright enough to be imaged with my equipment from my light polluted skies. This time it’s 32×600″ at ISO400, and a definite improvement.
Tags: astrophotography, Canon450D, ED80, galaxy, m81, m82
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Tuesday, March 8th, 2011
M44
Here’s a picture that proves that no matter how many sub-frames you do, you still need darks. There’s some worryingly low SNR in this image, it being the sigma-kappa stack of 118 sub-frames. But then again, each frame has been exposed for only 60 seconds, so it makes sense. I wanted to try having a really large numbers of frames, and increase the ISO settings. Not a good idea.
Noise at ISO1600 is so much worse, with my Canon 450D, that I’ll rather stick with ISO400.
Anyway, this is an interesting picture. Right behind this beautiful cluster, M44 aka The Beehive cluster, I spotted a tiny (for my standards galaxy: PGC24431. I couldn’t find much about it on the Internet, except that its magnitude is 15.2. You can identify it thanks to this progression:
PGC24431
It’s undeniably it. If you know anything about it, please let me know.
Tags: astrophotography, Canon450D, m44, open cluster, wide field
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