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)…
M51 “The Whirlpool Galaxy”
The Moon with my TEC140 December 2022.Images taken on the 6th and the 7th. The 6th was not quite a full moon and the 7th was just a few hours past full. On the picture on the left you can see that the circle of the moon’s disk is not quite full between the 6 and 11 O’clock positions.Both images were taken with my TEC140 refractor and ASI174M camera through Baader RGB filters.Each capture was of 5000 frames and the seeing was quite good so that I could utilise the best 50% of frames of each capture run. Because of the Field of View with the combination of the F8 focal length of the TEC140 and the chip size of the AIS174M, each capture run through each filter was comprised of a North and South run. I then stitched the two together in Photoshop.Weather conditions were extremely cold at about…
This is a RGB image of The Moon captured at about 20:00 on 15th December 2021 from my observatory in Nottingham using my TEC140 refractor and ASI174MM camera. I captured two capture runs in each filter and stitched the resultant images together in Photoshop. Each video capture file was 9GB in size.