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North American and Pelican Nebulae with Samyang 135mm lens and QHY268C Camera This is my first ever image capture with the excellent NINA software.  I used my wide-field rig which consists of the Samyang 135mm lens and QHY268C OSC camera using an IDAS 2″ LP filter.  The wide angle view brings out the North American nebula (NGC 7000) and The Pelican nebula to its right very nicely.  There is also a lot of other background luminosity in the image.The image set is a modest 18 x 180s exposures captured in August 2021, all the data being binned 1×1.  Pre-processed and processed in PixInsight with a few tweaks in Photoshop.

Simeis 147 (Sharpless Sh2-240) sometimes called The Spaghetti Nebula is a supernova remnant of a star that exploded forty thousand years ago.  It sits across the border of Taurus and Auriga and is a huge object, about six moon widths across.  It is located about 3000 light years away.  Because of its extremely low surface brightness it was only discovered as recently as 1952.  It is an exceptionally difficult object to observe visually and to have any hope of seeing it with your own eyes at the eyepiece requires extremely dark skies (Bortle 1), specialist filters, immaculate seeing and transparency and extreme dark adaption of your eyes.  This rules out almost anywhere near civilisation.  Personally speaking, I have never known any astronomer who has seen it visually.  Even with photography it requires very long exposure times to bring out any detail. Simeis 147 Image Technical Data This image was created…

The California Nebula – NGC 1499 – is a vast hydrogen gas emission nebula about 1000 light years away in the constellation of Perseus. It is named as such because of its vague resemblance to the US state of California. It is an extremely faint, large and diffuse object, about four times the diameter of the moon. It is almost completely invisible visually without specialist filters and was not discovered until the advent of astrophotography in 1884. The nebula shines by reflecting the light of the bright star Markib. It shines red because Hydrogen atoms, when excited by nearby bright sources like stars, emit or re-radiate light at the 656nm wavelength which is in the red part of the spectrum to our eyes. The California Nebula Image Technical Data The California Nebula is so large that most telescopes cannot get the nebula in the field of view, nowhere near in…

Collinder 399 or Brocchi’s Cluster is offered nicknamed “The Coathanger” for its striking resemblance to that wardrobe item! It is located within the constellation of Vulpecula – The Fox – within a larger asterism called The Summer Triangle. The Coathanger is a chance, line-of-sight effect and the stars that form the appearance of the coathanger are not physically associated with each other at all and range from 350 to 2300 light years in distance. The stars are backdropped against the vast clouds of glowing hydrogen that dominate the spiral arms of The Milky Way galaxy. The Coathanger in Vulpecula Image Technical Data Image captured in my backyard in Nottingham, UK on Sunday 20th September 2020. I used a Samyang (Rokinon) 135mm DSLR lens with a Moravian Instruments G2-8300 cooled CCD camera. This was mounted on my NEQ6 mount and guided with a Skywatcher Evoguider and ASI120MM guidecam. All exposures binned…

Kemble’s Cascade in Widefield Setting Kemble’s Cascade (Kemble 1) is a chance straight-line alignment of 17 or so stars between the 5th and 10th magnitudes in the far northern constellation of Camelopardalis. The stars are of different colours and look lovely in a widefield telescope or binoculars. At the end of line of stars is the open star cluster NGC 1502. This asterism is named after the Franciscan monk and amateur astronomer Lucian Kemble. The cascade itself is about three angular degrees in length. Image Technical Data Imaged from my backyard in Nottingham, UK on 14 September 2020. Part of an automated capture sequence and the exposures were taken between 02:00 > 04:00 in the morning. Needless to say I was in bed asleep at the time 🙂 I processed the images afterwards. I used Samyang 135mm DSLR lens connected to my Moravian Instruments G2-8300 CCD camera with Astrodon RGB…