Stephen Kirk | SK Astro

Galaxies 23 March 2023

M81 / M82 Group and IFN with Samyang 135mm

The M81 and M82 galaxies in Ursa Major showing the background Integrated Flux Nebula. These are a well known and popular pair of galaxies and can be seen with binoculars. I’ve imaged them here in a very wide field with a DSLR camera lens – the Samyang 135mm connected to a G2-8300 CCD camera and filter assembly using Astrodon LRGB filters The cloudy dust that is visible is not passing cloud! Rather, it is the extremely faint dust and gas that exists in the space between the galaxies – in intergalactic space. Hence it is called the Integrated Flux Nebula or IFN. It is extremely faint and is only visible with very long exposures and integration times. Careful processing is needed not to inadvertently cut it out of the image. M81 and M82 and IFN Technical Data Imaged in my back yard in Nottingham in March 2020 with Samyang 135mm…

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Open Clusters 23 March 2023

The Pleiades (M45) with FSQ85 and G2-8300

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. This amount of exposure is necessary to bring out the faint dust clouds through…

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Open Clusters 22 March 2023

M52 with FSQ85 and G2-8300 Camera

M52 Open Cluster in Cassiopeia M52 is a fabulous open cluster in Cassiopeia. It is set against a huge amount of nebulosity that spans across the constellations of Cassiopeia and Cepheus. In this image The Bubble Nebula can be seen at the four o’clock position with respect to M52 and many other objects in the Sharpless Catalogue of nebulae are also visible. These are detailed in the annotated version of the image below. The square red box on the finder chart on the right represents the image Technical Information Imaged from my backyard in Nottingham, UK on 28 November 2021 with a FSQ85 refractor and a Moravian G2-8300 cooled CCD camera with Astrodon HaRGB filters on my MESU200 mount guided with OAG.All image data is binned 1×1:Ha> 9 x 300s ; Red > 9 x 300s ; Green 9 x 300s ; Blue > 9 x 300sImage capture is with NINA and processing in PixInsight…

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Planetary 22 March 2023

Mars 14 Dec 2022, C925 and ASI224MC

The planet Mars captured with my Celestron C925 SCT telescope and my ASI224MC colour camera. I used a Powermate x2 barlow lens to give a higher image scale together with an Atmospheric Dispersion Corrector (ADC). A total of 12000 frames were captured using Firecapture to a SSD drive on my capture PC. I used Autostakkert to process the best 20% and then PixInsight to bring out the details with 8 wavelet layers. A bit of unsharp mask afterwards to sharpen it up a bit. Mars was to the East of the meridian and about 40 degrees in altitude. From my backyard in Nottingham, UK. I am quite new to using the ADC and what I did was use the colour alignment tool in Firecapture to “tune” the ADC to get the colours all as perfectly aligned as I could.

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Planetary 25 December 2022

Jupiter, 7 December 2022

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…

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