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TEC140

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Nebulae

M1 – The Crab Nebula TEC140

LRGB_M1

The Crab Nebula – M1 – is the expanding remains of a supernova that was seen in 1054 throughput medieval Europe, The Middle East and China.  The nebula is very distant at about 6500 light years and lies in the Perseus Arm of our galaxy, further out from The Galaxy’s core than The Sun.  It is called The Crab because William Parsons from his Irish observatory who first viewed it in 1840 thought it resembled the outline of a crab and the name has stuck.  The object was first observed in the 1731 and was linked to the Supernova of 1054 as recently as 1913.  Earlier photographic plates from the 1950’s and those taken today show a definite expansion in the nebula in the intervening 70 years. M1 – The Crab Nebula Image Technical Data Imaged from my backyard in Nottingham, UK in the winter of 2017 with my TEC…

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Galaxies

NGC 7814 – The Little Sombrero Galaxy – TEC 140

NGC 7814

NGC 7814 – The Little Sombrero Galaxy NGC 7814 is an edge-on spiral galaxy 40 million light-years away in the constellation of Pegasus.  IT is nicknamed “The Little Sombrero” because of its likeness to The Sombrero Galaxy M104 in Virgo.  Close examination of the picture reveals many tiny galaxies, up to a billion light years away in the depths of The Universe.The dust lanes of the edge-on spiral arms can be easily seen. Image Technical Data NGC 7814 is very remote and so needs a long integration (exposure) time.  This image was captured from my backyard observatory in Nottingham, UK over the course of three nights in October 2019 (a very wet period in the UK and the capture nights were 2,17 and 24).  It took significant dedication to capture the subframes for this image given the dreary weather circumstances  and I nearly gave up on several occasions!  I used…

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Open Clusters

M38 – Open Cluster in Auriga TEC 140

M38

M38 is the third of three Messier Open Clusters in the constellation of Auriga, in the Northern hemisphere of the sky. The other two Messier clusters are M36 and M37. All of them are easily visible with binoculars and are seen as faint smudges against the darker background. If you read my post on the Constellation of Auriga you will see all three of the Open Clusters in the same image M38 Open Cluster Image Technical Data Imaged from my back yard in Nottingham, UK on the 18th January 2020 whilst high overhead from my location. I used my TEC 140 refractor with Atik 460 cooled CCD camera and Astrodon RGB E Series Generation 2 filters. I used my MESU 200 mount guided with OAG. All exposures binned 1×1: Red > 12 x 180s ; Green > 14 x 180s ; Blue > 13 x 180s. This gives a total integration…

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Open Clusters

M39 Open Cluster in Cygnus – TEC140 refractor

M39

M39 is an open cluster, about 1100 light years distant, in the constellation of Cygnus, The Swan. M39 is about 30 arc minutes in diameter, about the width of the full moon. The Cygnus constellation abounds in interesting objects and The Milky Way galaxy flows straight through it. M39 Open Cluster in Cygnus ImageTechnical Data Imaged from my backyard in Nottingham, UK on the 16th October 2019 when it was high overhead from my location. I used my TEC 140 refractor and Atik 460 cooled CCD camera with Astrodon RGB E Series Generation 2 filters. I used my MESU 200 mount guided with an off-Axis guider. All exposures binned 1×1: Red > 15 x 120s ; Green > 12 x 120s ; Blue > 15 x 120s M39 Annotated M39 Inverted I hope you like it! 🙂

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Galaxies

NGC 6946 – The Fireworks Galaxy – TEC 140

Fireworks_Galaxy_LRGBHa2

NGC6946 – The Fireworks Galaxy NGC6946 is located on the border between Cygnus and Cepheus and is a fairly bright galaxy about 25 million light years away. It is dubbed the “The Fireworks Galaxy” due to the unusually high number of supernovae that have occured here – ten – that have been observed during the last century. Typically a galaxy would normally have one per century and it is not known why this galaxy has had ten times the average. The galaxy is quite heavily obscured by dust within our own galaxy and this is probably the reason why it was not accorded the honour of a Messier catalogue number. Image Technical Details Imaged from my back yard in Nottingham, UK, during September 2020 whilst high overhead. I used my TEC140 refractor with Atik 460 CCD camera and Astrodon LRGB Generation 2 E series filters and a Ha (3nm) filter. …

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