A magnificent spiral galaxy with TEC 140 and Atik 460 Many astronomers consider NGC 2903 the best and brightest galaxy that isn’t included in the famous Messier list and are surprised Messier himself didn’t include it in his catalogue.  It is very photogenic and brighter than several other galaxies that are included in Messier’s list such as M65 and M66.  It is located in Leo to the right of the “sickle” of Leo and is about 30 million light years distant. Full resolution image here (opens in a new tab). If you open the full resolution image you will see many tiny, remote galaxies in the depths of the Universe. Technical Detail Imaged with my TEC140 telescope and Atik 460 CCD camera with Astrodon E series LRGB filters on the 25th and 26th March 2022.  The data set is as follows with the luminance binned 1×1 and the RGB at…

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)…

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…