Some recent deep sky images from home

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I haven’t blogged for a while, and I have some catching up to do! So, here are 3 images I took over the period April to June.

From June until early August in the South of England, the nights are very short and I don’t tend to be very productive in terms of deep-sky imaging, that’s one reason for using remote telescopes in other parts of the world. (but more about that in another blog).

All of these were taken using my trusty old Celestron C11 Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope with an AstroPhysics 0.67x reducer, giving an f-ratio of f/6.7. The CCD camera was an ATIK-383L mono with Baader 2″ filters. Guiding was achieved using a Starlight Xpress Off-Axis Guider unit (OAG). The whole lot rides on my AstroPhysics AP900 mount (which is currently out of action due to a dodgy Dec-axis encoder!).

The first one is Galaxy M63 (also known as NGC 5055, or the Sunflower Galaxy). This is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Canes Venatici consisting of a central disc surrounded by many short spiral arm segments. M63 is part of the M51 Group, a group of galaxies that also includes the more well-known M51 (the ‘Whirlpool Galaxy’).

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Next we have the biggest and best Globular Cluster in the Northern Hemisphere. M13 is also known as the Great Globular Cluster in Hercules, and contains about 300,000 stars.

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Finally, I’m very pleased with this image of the lovely face-on spiral galaxy M101. This galaxy, in Ursa Major is some 21 million light-years away, and is also known as the Pinwheel Galaxy.

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The Eta Carina Nebula from down-under

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I’ve posted before about my exploits in using remote telescopes on the Light Buckets system from France, but I have recently been using the iTelescope network of telescopes which have observatories in New Mexico USA, Spain and also down-under in Siding Spring, Australia. The Australian setup, which is in New South Wales, is located at a latitude of about 31 degrees South, and allows access to those magnificent objects in the Southern sky that I have dreamed of imaging for a long time.

The Eta Carina Nebula is a huge, bright nebula that is roughly 4 times the angular size of the Orion nebula, but is imaged much less due to its southerly latitude (also, the Orion Nebula is perhaps the most imaged object in the night sky). The nebula is some 7500 light-years from Earth and hosts some of the most massive and luminous stars in our Galaxy, including the double-star system Eta Carinae, which weighs in at over 100 times the mass of our Sun.

The particular telescope I used has a very wide field of view and the full Moon would fit across this image nearly 8 times. To see the full-sized 3960 x 2612 image click here:  Full Size Image

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So, what about the odd colours? Well, this is a narrowband image, meaning that I used 3 narrowband filters; In this case Ha, OIII and SII and combined them to make a false colour RGB image. Here’s a cropped version showing the central region at higher resolution (or see the full size image and pan around the whole thing)  Full Size Image

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Meet The Spodies!

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Astronomers like to blame ‘Spode’ when skies are cloudy, or when things go wrong. I’d like to introduce characters called ‘The Spodies’ who are the brainchild of Roger Prout. Roger was one of the founding members of the South Down Astronomical Society (SDAS), based in the Chichester area of West Sussex. (The South of England).

Many years ago, as a teenager in the 1970’s I was assistant editor to John Mason, producing a magazine called ‘Supernova’. This was the magazine of the SDAS, and it was widely regarded as the best astro society magazine in the UK at that time (well we certainly thought so). Here’s what a typical cover of Supernova looked like (we even had photos on later editions which was very rare at the time!)

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Here’s one of the cartoons. This one showing the Spodies craftily directing clouds. This shows the Selsey peninsula and the telescope in question will certainly have been one belonging to Patrick Moore! (Patrick being a good friend of the SDAS).

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Two more are shown below (click on them to see full-size). One refers to the state of British astronomy and the discovery of  a nova in Cygnus by Japanese observer Minoru Honda (V1500 Cyg – Nova Cygni 1975). The other was topical at the time when Jupiter’s Great Red Spot all but disappeared.

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Finally, meet the lovely Andromeda. Another of Roger’s creations, she graced the pages of Supernova from time to time. I always remember this particular cartoon, and I still chortle when I see it.

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Comet PANSTARRS meets M31

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Taking advantage of a beautifully clear night, some of my astro-chums and I spent the evening observing and photographing Comet PANSTARRS. This time from near the top of St. Roche’s hill (known locally as The Trundle) near Goodwood, West Sussex. Apart from myself, the group consisted of Pete Lawrence (from The Sky at Night), Damian Peach (the world’s greatest planetary imager), Ninian Boyle (author of The Lion’s Paw) and Mark Parrish (regular contributor to the Sky at Night magazine).

I took my AstroTrac unit mounted on a sturdy tripod, and my Canon 350D with a 200mm F2.8 lens which I used at F4. I decided this would be the best kit to be able to fit the comet and the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) in the same frame. Here’s the first result.

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And here’s a cropped version where I have stretched the image as much as I dare to bring out the galaxy and the fainter parts of PANSTARRS:

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Comet PANSTARRS with its anti-tail

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Finally! A clear night to see and capture an image of Comet PANSTARRS. There has been a terrible spell of weather here in the UK recently, but last night I had a decent clear spell just after sunset.

This time I used my ATIK-383L CCD camera through my 130mm APO refractor which gives me a field of view of 69′ x 51′ – just right for this comet. The image below was the first one in a fairly dark sky because the comet has moved away from the Sun considerably since I last imaged it. So, although the comet has faded (I couldn’t see it with the naked eye), it is better placed for CCD imaging through telescopes.

This image is an averaged stack of 28 separate images. 18 of these were 60 second exposures, the remainder being 90 seconds (I increased the exposure as the sky darkened). This is why the stars appear as trails, because I registered each image on the bright nucleus of the comet before stacking them. It gives an idea of the relative movement of the comet against the background stars over the 30 minutes or so from beginning to end.

There is a notable ‘anti-tail’ visible in this image. It is the spike stretching out at about 8 o’clock from the head of the comet. This is caused because there can be a considerable amount of dust contained in the flat plane of the comet’s orbit, and this is concentrated near the head of the comet. If the geometry of the orbit, and the angle from which we view it are right, an anti-tail can sometimes be seen. Occasionally it can stretch away in the opposite direction to the regular dust tail being driven back by the Sun.

Link to full image here: http://www.astro-sharp.com/images/comets/C2011L4/2011l4_20130329_all_ids.jpg

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Comet PANSTARRS at last!

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At last some better weather here in the UK, and I’m pleased to have been able to see and photograph Comet C/2011 L4 PANSTARRS at last.

I did manage to grab a rushed image yesterday in between the clouds, and this is shown at the end of this entry, but this evening I had better luck and caught the Comet with both a 130mm F/7 APO refractor and a 200mm telephoto lens. (Both using a Canon 350D DSLR camera). Details are on each image.

This one is with the telephoto, the lights in the distance are on the Isle of Wight about 5 miles away.

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On this one, a scale of 30′ (minutes of arc) is marked which is roughly the apparent diameter of the Moon.

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Here is my first image from 12th March.

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Galaxy M106 and Companions

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M106 is an interesting galaxy! Situated near the handle of ‘the plough’, in the constellation of Canes Venatici, it is roughly 22 million light-years away, and is known as a Seyfert  galaxy which means it has a very active nucleus. In fact, at the centre of M106 is a super-massive black hole. Now, our Milky Way galaxy has one of those too, as do most galaxies  but not as big as the one in M106. It is the material falling into the black hole that causes x-rays and other unusual emission lines to pour forth from this galaxy.

Besides M106, there are many other galaxies visible in this image. The lovely edge-on spiral  near the bright star at upper left is NGC 4217 and is thought to be a companion of M106. I have annotated a few of the brighter ones on the image, but there are many more if you look closely at the bigger sized image which is available here:

Click here for bigger image

As for the details of how this image was obtained. It was taken over some clear spells during 3 nights in late February and early March. A total of 27, 10-minute exposures were collected over this time through a white (luminance) filter, which is why this is a mono image. I will try and collect the R, G and B colours soon.  The telescope was my TS 130mm APO refractor at f/7 and the CCD camera used was my ATIK 383L.

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Moon Mosaic finished at last!

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Phew! I’ve finally finished working on a large lunar mosaic from last month (Feb 19th) when the Moon was 9.5 days old with a phase of just under 69%.

I previously posted another mosaic from the same evening here which was taken with the same 130mm APO telescope and QHY5L-II camera, but at prime focus. This bigger image was taken with a 2x Barlow and, with the extra projection, gives a scale over twice the previous result. In this image, I had to stitch together over 50 images to create a full lunar mosaic. The result is about 35 mega-pixels (5700×6300), and the jpg is about 3.5 Mbytes. Please click on the following link to see the full-sized result. Please make sure to expand the image to its full size when it has finished downloading into your browser. Then you can pan around the moon.

Click here for full-size image

Below is one of the 50 or so images that were stitched together in Photoshop to create the full mosaic.

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How to see Comet PANSTARRS

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I’m very excited about the Comet PANSTARRS (full name Comet C/2011 L4 PANSTARRS). It is due to be at its best for us in the Northern hemisphere in mid-March 2013, and since it is March 1st today, I thought it was time to get ready for it.

Firstly the name: Pan-STARRS stands for “Panoramic Survey Telescope And Rapid Response System” which is a wide-field imaging facility developed at the University of Hawaii’s Institute for Astronomy. Details about the facility, which is not fully completed, are here http://pan-starrs.ifa.hawaii.edu/public/home.html. The comet was discovered on June 6th 2011 and because it is classified as a long-period comet, it takes the ‘C’ prefix (as opposed to ‘P’ used for short-period comets).

Comet PANSTARRS is the first naked-eye comet of 2013, and it is currently putting on a good show for our colleagues in the Southern hemisphere; Yesterday it was reported at magnitude 2.6 with a 2 degree tail, and it is still brightening.

So, the comet is currently heading towards its perihelion, which is the closest to the Sun it will get, and it will reach there on March 10th. The perihelion distance will be about 0.3 AU (1 AU, or Astronomical Unit, is the distance of the Earth from the Sun). Then, after it has rounded the Sun, and gets away from it a bit more, it will start to appear to observers in the Northern hemisphere. I’ve put together a couple of finder maps below.

The first shows where the comet will be at sunset on March 12th. The map is based on the latitude of the South of England, roughly 50 degs N, and sunset will be about 18:00 UT give or take a few minutes depending on where you are. You need to looking West just after sunset, and the Moon will be a very thin crescent, just over 1 day old. You may find you miss it completely before it gets too low, following the Sun. Mars will be below the Moon, possibly even harder to spot. The comet itself will be slightly up and left of the Moon. On this map, the head of the comet is about 12 degrees above the horizon, and will get lower as the minutes tick by. The tail should be stretching away from the direction of the Sun. You should have some binoculars at the ready and it should be a lovely sight in them, depending on how bright PANSTARRS has become! Interestingly, the planet Uranus is very close to the head of PANSTARRS on this day and, at magnitude +6, may be visible in a decent pair of ‘bins’.

Those with a DSLR camera should use a tripod and try taking exposures of several seconds. Set your camera to manual focus, and focus on the Moon, or Mars or any stars you may see in the darkening sky (your autofocus won’t work!). With the camera in fully manual mode, set the aperture as fast as it will go (the smallest number – f/4 for example), and the ISO setting to 800 or 1600. Try exposures of 30 seconds or so. Mess about with the exposure time – the camera should reveal more of the comet than you can see with your eyes.

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The following map shows the comet on the evening of the 15th March, also at sunset. You can see that, although it has moved a few degrees from the 12th, there are plenty of evenings to try and spot it. Now the Moon is much higher in the sky, and will be showing a phase of about 16%.

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Good luck! Let’s hope it puts on a good show.

 

A Starburst Cigar

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I have been using my trusty old C11 that I normally use for the Moon and planets to take some deep sky objects. The C11 gets used more this time of the year because it is ‘Galaxy Season’. This means that the Milky Way is not dominating the sky to us here at this time of the year as it is during the Summer months when it stretches across the sky, and that means that we can more easily see out of our galaxy to other distant galaxies without the plane of the Milky Way getting in the way.

This galaxy is often referred to a the Cigar Galaxy. It is Messier 82 and it is often shown together with M81, Bode’s Galaxy, but the field of view with the C11 and my ATIK 383L CCD will not fit them both in the FOV at the same time. This means we can zoom in on M82 which is only about 11 arc minutes across.

M82 is a bit of a strange galaxy to look at. It is a ‘starburst’ galaxy, seen edge-on and is also the closest starburst galaxy to the Milky Way. As a starburst galaxy M82 has a rate of star formation 10 times greater than our galaxy. Conditions for the starburst activity were believed triggered by a past close encounter with M81 between 300 and 600 million years ago which must caused gas and dust to be compressed into conditions favourable for star formation.

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