Triangulum Galaxy Revisited

Here's my recent shot of the Triangulum Galaxy which has been reporeccesed by Bob Stuart to bring out a lot more detail.  He's a real astromagician!

The Triangulum Galaxy is a spiral galaxy 2.73 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Triangulum. It is catalogued as Messier 33 or NGC 598. The Triangulum Galaxy is the third-largest member of the Local Group of galaxies, behind the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy. It is one of the most distant permanent objects that can be viewed with the naked eye.

The galaxy is the smallest spiral galaxy in the Local Group and is believed to be a satellite of the Andromeda Galaxy or on its rebound into the latter due to their interactions, velocities, and proximity to one another in the night sky. It also has an H II nucleus.

The Triangulum Galaxy

This is a spiral galaxy some 2.73 million light-years from Earth in the constellation of Triangulum from which it gets its name. It is catalogued as Messier 33, M33 or NGC 598 and it's the third-largest member of the Local Group of galaxies, behind the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy. It's one of the most distant permanent objects that can be viewed with the naked eye.

This is probably the best Deep Sky object I have taken and processed myself from my back garden in Tyldesley. I decided to use my camera's built-in long exposure noise reduction feature instead of taking separate dark frames. Here are the acquisition details:

• Unmodded Nikon D500 with handheld intervalometer
• SkyWatcher 80 ED refractor telescope
• HEQ5 Pro tracking mount
• 25 light (image) frames of 90 seconds @ ISO 800
• 25 flat and 25 bias calibration frames
• Stacked in Deep Sky Stacker and processed in Adobe PhotoShop CC

The Pleiades or Seven Sisters Asterism

The Pleiades or Messier 45 are an example of an open star cluster, a group of stars that were all born around the same time from a gigantic cloud of gas and dust. They are one of the most easily recognisable star patterns (sometimes known as an asterism) in the night sky, although whoever gave them their popular name of the 'Seven Sisters' clearly couldn't count! When you look at a photograph it's hard to discern which seven stars were originally the ones from which the name derives.

There are more than 800 middle-aged, hot B-type stars in the group which lies in the north-west of the constellation Taurus. Te hey are located about 440 light-years from Earth and are approximately 17.5 light years wide. The brightest stars in the cluster glow a hot blue and formed within the last 100 million years. They are extremely luminous and will burn out quickly, with life spans of only a few hundred million years, much shorter than the billions of years our own sun.

The name 'Seven Sisters' is derived from Greek legend. The Pleiades are the seven daughters of the Titan god Atlas and the ocean nymph Pleione. During an ancient war, Atlas rebelled against Zeus, the king of the gods, who sentenced his foe to forever hold up the heavens on his shoulders. The sisters were so sad that Zeus allowed them a place in the sky in order to be close to their father.

Milky Way Revisited

Just revisiting some of my Milky Way shots from a recent trip to Islay in the Inner Hebrides. I was amazed by the light pollution from Northern Ireland which filled the bottom of many of my shots, so I decided to crop much of it out. This has made my Milky Way shots a lot shorter than I would like.

Here's a shot of the Cygnus region which includes my first visible image of the North American Nebula:

Here's a hand-labelled version of the same shot:

I used Astrometry.net to identify some of the stars and then the Stellarium desktop software to help me fill in some more details. Here's the output from Astronomy.net:

Here's the Stellarium view that I used:

This is a list of the main objects in my photograph as found by Astrometry.net:

And this diagram shows the area of sky at which I was looking:

Can You See What It Is Yet?

This is my first ever shot of Uranus - that's pronounced 'Your-an-us' to avoid any lewd jokes. 

Can you even see it?

Uranus is an Ice Giant planet and nearly four times larger than Earth. It has 27 known moons, most of which are named after literary characters. Like Saturn, Jupiter and Neptune, Uranus is a ringed planet.

It really is beyond the limits of my current equipment to get a shot any better than this, but it's still pleasing to be able to photograph it as it brings my total of planets photographed to six: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus. And all within a single year.

The Orion Nebula Reprocessed

I have a new found friend and astro-mentor called Bob Stuart, who I met this year via Facebook in one of the astronomy groups.  Bob very kindly agreed to process one of my shots early shots and since then we've often chatted online, taken part in Leigh Astro Society Zoom meetings and I even bought my MGEN-II standalone guider off him. 

Whenever I moan about the difficulties I'm having in processing shots Bob always wants to have a go at processing it for me - lovely chap! So here's his version of my recent Orion Nebula shot.  It took about three processed versions to het to this but I think you'll agree it's better than anything I've produced by myself.

One day I hope to be able to process all my own shots, but for now it's good to see that my equipment is capable of getting some decent results.

The Orion Trapezium Revisited

To produce my recent Orion image I took some shots at only 1 and 5 seconds so that I might preserve some detail in the Trapezium stars of the core. I was pleased to see that I managed to capture the four largest core stars with some separation.

But Bob Stuart processed these stars even further to bring out more nebulosity and dust clouds and spotted that the A and C stars in the core (see diagram) had slight bulges on them. My DSLR and lenses couldn't resolve any better detail than this, but Bob believes them to be the much smaller E and F stars in the cluster (see diagram below), but I'm not sure.

Bob also suggests that the black spots close to the Trapezium may be proto-planetary discs, which are rotating discs of dense gas and dust surrounding a young newly formed star.

My photos need to be rotated to be compared with the diagram below - a rotated version is included at the bottom of this page.

A Second Try at the Moon and Mars

A day later I thought I'd have another go at the (almost full) Moon and Mars conjunction, particularly as they were closer together.  There was still a fair amount of cloud about, but this gave some of my shots a bit of atmosphere.   Mars is that tiny orange dot you can see in the top left corner of each shot!

And finally, here's a bit of video of the same scene.  Watch as Mars and the Moon drift eerily from east to west across the cloudy sky.

The Moon and Mars in Conjunction - October 2020

October 2020 will have two full moons this year, the first being the Harvest Moon at the start of the month on 1 October and the second on Halloween, 31 October.  When this occurs, the second full moon is known as a  'Blue Moon' (nothing to do with its colour) and also 'Blood Mood', 'Sanguine Moon' or a 'Hunters Moon' - but more on than later, when it actually occurs.  For now, these names are all down to local folklore from various countries.

Along with the first Full Moon, Mars will be close to it as it gradually reaches opposition and so the aim here was to try and get the conjunction of Mars and the Moon in a single shot.  The weather was generally poor with a lot of cloud, but this actually helped in achieving an exposure which balanced out the Moon's brightness with Mars in the same frame.

I also tried a few shots of just the moon, but the cloud cover really didn't help the detail here.

I tried processing my shots in various ways, but none of them are really that successful.