The inner portion of the Orion Nebula taken January 24, 2022.
Skies were rather mucky but it was a good effort with my Meade LX200GPS 8" with a focal reducer, modded Canon T3i.
I used a variety of exposures and stacked them to create a more high dynamic range image.
NGC 2174 aka The Monkey Head Nebula, is located in the region east of the Orion constellation.
It is thought to be located about 6,400 light-years away from Earth.
This image was taken on this January 21, 2022. The skies were rather mucky which caused the stars to bloat.
The image is a stack of 23 four minute images at ISO 3200 with a modded Canon T3i body on an 8" LX200GPS Meade telescope with a .63 focal reducer.
While the Moon hinders deep sky astrophotography it presents its own great beauty.
I used a method called by some "lucky imaging" to get the greatest detail the night would offer. Instead of taking a single shot or even multiple shots of different parts of the Moon, "lucky" imaging uses the camera in the video mode to take hundreds of frames. Why? Because the Earth's atmosphere "shimmers", much like the illusion created by heat waves on straight highway asphalt on a hot day. There are very brief moments when the image of the Moon is clear. So I use a computer program that seeks out the best frames and stacks them to result in the sharpest image possible (under the circumstances). Since the video captures only a small part of the Moon, I had to take a number of videos, sweeping the telescope back and forth across the face of the Moon.
In this case, I combined all the final images into one, which, is FAR more detailed than any single shot by any normal camera. I was unable to do the entire Moon tonight because high, thin clouds came in and made finishing this project impossible.
However, I was pleased with what I did capture and am looking forward to trying again!
Once a month on a clear night when the Moon is visible there is an illusion of an "X" on the terminator of the Moon. The moon's terminator is the dividing line marking the edge between day and night on the moon. It's sometimes called the twilight zone, because it marks where the sun is either rising or setting on the moon and so – along the terminator line – the moon's landscape is in a twilight state.
On one small area of the terminator several craters meet each other in such a way that the light along the terminator creates the illusion of an "X".
Here are a few pics of my roll-off observatory and control room... (click pics for a bigger image)
Since my move to south-eastern Arizona I have been longing to image some of the galaxies that hang lower in the night sky than I could image from central Oregon. Tonight I focused my attention on the Sculptor Galaxy:
High overhead in the evening during the winter is the beautiful bright open star cluster known as the Pleiades.
The name of the Pleiades comes from Ancient Greek. It probably derives from plein ("to sail") because of the cluster's importance in delimiting the sailing season in the Mediterranean Sea: "the season of navigation began with their heliacal rising". However, in mythology the name was used for the Pleiades, seven divine sisters, the name supposedly deriving from that of their mother Pleione and effectively meaning "daughters of Pleione".
So why are the Pleiades called the Seven Sisters, when only six stars can be seen with the eye? In fact, the number of stars you can see within the Pleiades cluster, using just your eye, varies depending on your own eyesight, local atmospheric transparency and light pollution levels. Some people simply see fainter stars than others. It’s possible that early skywatchers, whose skies were darker and clearer than our modern skies, more often saw more than six stars here. Even today, people with exceptional vision see seven, eight or more stars in the Pleiades with the unaided eye. With binoculars you can easily see far more!
The Bible mentions this star cluster (that is easily visible to the unaided human eye) in Job 9:9 and Job 38:31 as well as in Amos 5:8. It has been known since antiquity to cultures all around the world, including the Celts, Irish, Hawaiians, Aboriginal Australians, the Persians, the Arabs, the Chinese, the Japanese (who call them Subaru), the Maya, the Aztec, the Sioux, the Kiowa and the Cherokee... any many more!
With small telescopes or average binoculars, but especially when long-exposure photographs are taken some hint of nebulosity around the cluster is seen. The "veil" around the bright blue stars is called a reflection nebula, caused by dust reflecting the blue light of the hot, young stars.
Studies show that the dust responsible for the nebulosity is not uniformly distributed, but is concentrated mainly in two layers along the line of sight to the cluster. These layers may have been formed by deceleration due to radiation pressure as the dust has moved towards the stars. - Wikipedia
In the northern sky in the area near the Andromeda Galaxy is a delicate galaxy: the Triangulum Galaxy.
It is far fainter than Andromeda but is very beautiful.
Given the clear skies and the fact that my observatory is completed enough to begin some serious imaging I thought I would give it a go!
The little pink spots are regions of star formation in this galaxy far, far away.
The Triangulum Galaxy is a spiral galaxy 2.73 million light-years (ly) from Earth in the constellation Triangulum. It is catalogued as Messier 33 or NGC 598
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Taken with a monochrome 5 megapixel camera on an 8" SCT Meade LX200GPS with a Baader solar filter and a 2X Barlow len.s Of these two ...
