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…
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…
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…
Sh2-171 in Cepheus Sh2-171 is a star forming region in the constellation of Cepheus in the far northern hemisphere of the sky. Imaged here with Takahashi FSQ85 and G2-8300 with Astrodon HaRGB filters.
M33 is a galaxy about 2.8 – 3 million light years away in the constealltion of Triangulum. Alonf with M33, it is one fo the Lcoal Group of galaxies with which our own Mily Way galaxy shares the local universe. M33 is the most distant object that the naked eye can see, appearing as a ghostly white smudge on a very dark night from clear skies. It is a magnificent spiral galaxy about half the size of our own galaxy. M33 Galaxy in Triangulum I’ve imaged the galaxy multiple times. For example, with the same FSQ85 telescope here and also at a closer image scale with the TEC140 refractor here. This time I have set the galaxy in a slightly wider field by utilising the FSQ85 0.73 reducer. I used the Moravian G2-8300 CCD camera and Astrodon RGB filters all binned 1×1. I did not use a separate luminance channel.…