M74 is a magnificent spiral galaxy about 32 million light years away in the constellation of Pisces. It has quite low surface brightness which makes it quite a hard galaxy to observe. It bears a passing resemblance to M101 I always think, but is much dimmer. M74 Galaxy in Pisces Imaged on 15th December 2022 when to The South. I used my TEC 140 refractor with its field flattener, an Atik 460 CCD camera with Astrodon E series 1.25″ LRGB filters. All on my MESU 200 mount which was off-axis guided. The objective lens was very dirty and I cleaned it the following day. Despite that, the image came out quite nice.This image is made from quite a modest data set comprising the followingLUM > 12 x 300s ; Red > 9 x 300s ; Green 9 x 300s ; Blue > 9 x 300s Which gives a total integration (exposure)…
Rosette Nebula In Very Wide Field Image taken with a Samyang 135mm DSLR lens and QHY268C Colour CMOS camera in…
The M81 and M82 galaxies in Ursa Major showing the background Integrated Flux Nebula. These are a well known and…
The magnificent Pleiades, known to many as the Seven Sisters, is an open cluster in the constellation of Taurus. The Pleiades have been known since the dawn of antiquity and even some cave paintings from 30000 years ago depict them on cave walls. The cluster is 442 light years away and they are about 20 light years across. The exact distance has been a source of debate amongst astronomers for many years but the matter was recently settled using parallax data from the Gaia satellite. Technical Data Imaged with Takahashi FSQ85 refractor and G2-8300 CCD camera with Astrodon E-series RGB filters. It consists of 20 x 300 second exposures in each of those filters to give over 90 minutes in each of the three channels for a combined integration of about four and a half hours. As is normal with any type of cluster, I did not bother with a…
M52 Open Cluster in Cassiopeia M52 is a fabulous open cluster in Cassiopeia. It is set against a huge amount…
The planet Mars captured with my Celestron C925 SCT telescope and my ASI224MC colour camera. I used a Powermate x2…
Jupiter, 7th December 2022 with C925 SCT and ASI 224MC camera I am not experienced with imaging the planets other than the Moon. This image is not going to win any prizes or keep the award winning planetary imagers awake at night! However, it’s a first effort at Jupiter and a foray in planetary imaging to give me some other astronomy options since almost always, when it is clear the moon is bright thus rendering deep sky observing and photography impossible I used my Celestron C925 telescope with a x2 Powermate (a 2″ version). I then used an ADC to try and improve colour correction and to this was connected my ASI224MC colour camera. I tried my very best to “eyeball” the focus the best I could. This is very difficult to do as Jupiter was bouncing around considerably due to quite poor seeing. Jupiter was at about 30 degrees…