She's Got It ... Venus!

Not the best photo in the world but hey, it's Venus in a waxing gibbous phase.  I've been watching it slowly rise higher in the western sky since just after Christmas and I've seen it in close proximity to Jupiter and the Moon.  Hopefully I'll manage a better shot when it's higher still.

Waxing Crescent Moon

Unfortunately the weather has been very poor in recent weeks and this is the first time I've seen the moon in ages. The cloud cover meant that I couldn't see the thin sliver of moon which appears after a new moon and so I'll just have to be content with this crescent which is a few days old now.

Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here - Dante's Inferno!

Well, may be not quite, but when I process an Ha-rich image of the Orion Nebula like the one above, it always makes me think of it.  This is a starless version, which some people prefer to images which are covered in stars, often overpowering the delicate features of the nebula. Personally, I like some stars in an image as without them I think it seems a little artificial.  So I'll often do a bit of star reduction to make them as little less dominant and distracting. Here's a version with some stars and :

And here's a much wider version showing the Running Man Nebula a little better:

Howling at The Wolf Moon

As I have said many times here in my blog and in several other online places, the full moon is my least favourite time to take moon shots.  Because the sun is pointing straight at it (and thus lighting up the whole nearside of the moon) the light is very fast with no shadows and little detail.  It takes a bit of work to bring out some of the detail and it doesn't always work. Having said that, it doesn't stop me from trying!

I personally think that the full moon is best when used as part of a composition, something like this shot on the previous day.  The trouble then is finding a good location for some foreground interest or scenes value.  I'm still looking for that.

Venus and Jupiter Meet

Venus and Jupiter were close in the western sky tonight.  Well they looked close by eye, but when a photograph is taken with a long telephoto lens they appear to be quite a long way apart.  The whole thing is an illusion anyway and in reality they are millions of miles apart and Jupiter is 10x bigger that Venus.  This is also true of many the stars we see in our constellations - they seem to form a 2D pattern in the sky, when in 3D reality they are nowhere near each other.

Daytime Waxing Gibbous Moon

This shot was taken whilst it was still light in the 'Blue Hour'. There is some good detail in the lower right quadrant but not much along the terminator line as this is mainly over two large Maria.

Review of 2022

Some of my better images from 2022. I didn't think I done that much this year, having focused mainly on planetary imaging, but in the early part of the year I did do some work on nebulae. 

From left to right and top to bottom we have:

• The California Nebula, which supposedly resembles the shape of the state
• Mars showing its north polar ice cap of frozen carbon dioxide
• The Flaming Star anthem Tadpole Nebulae with the smaller small spider Nebula
• Saturn when it was close to opposition
• The famous Horsehead Nebula and with the Flame Nebula below it
• Jupiter showing cloud bands
• The Jellyfish Nebula
• A so-called 'mineral' moon
• The Christmas Tree Nebula with the Cone Nebula st the top
• The sun showing at least seven active regions or sunspots
• The Soul Nebula
• The Rosette Nebula in the false Hubble Palette colour

And here's a 2023 calendar with all these images for you to print out if desired:

To Do List (20/12/22)

 I'll start my updates by creating a to do list of my images since March 2022 in reverse chronological order.

December 2022

• Rosette Nebula
• Orion Nebula
• Sunspots
• Moon
• Jupiter (2/10/22)
• Mars (inc lunar occultation)
• Saturn

November 2022

• Andromeda Galaxy (25/11/22)
• Heart Nebula
• North America Nebula
• Moon
• Jupiter
• Saturn
• Mars
• Uranus Occultation
• First Andromeda - wide

October 2022

----------------------------------------------------------

Photos still to post:

Sept

• Astro 17/9
• Jupiter 16/9
• Moon and Planets 15/9
• Sunspots 7/9
• Llanddwyn 7/9

Aug

• Moon 24/8
• Moon 25/8
• Moon 27/8
• Moon and Planets 26/8
• Moffat 10/8
• Jupiter, Saturn &DSO's 12/8
• DSO and Planets 2/8
• Dunstan Hill 9/8 and 13/8
• Sunspots 29/8
• Jupiter and Saturn 27/9

July

• Pacman and Veil nebula 18/7
• ISS and Moon 19/7
• Elephant's Trunk 17/7
• ISS, Jupiter and Saturn 17/7
• ISS and Moon 16/7
• Moon 15/7
• Dumbell 15/7
• Crescent 16/7
• Andromeda 8/7
• Eagle Nebula 7/7

June

• Sunspots 29/6
• Moon, Saturn and Jupiter 26/6
• NGC 7000 26/6
• Moon 21/6
• Moon 20/6
• Moon 17/6
• Moon and Antares 15/6
• Moon 14//6
• Partial Solar Ecli[se 10/6

May

• Sun
• Moon
• Rivi
• ISS

UPDATE TIME !!!

I can't believe that I haven't updated this blog since March 2022 - how time flies.  Unfortunately it's not been a very productive year mainly due to the long stretches of poor weather and opportunities only arising at inopportune moments. 

The main thing that happened this year was that I bought a second hand Celestron NexStar 6SE telescope, a ZWO ASI 224 planetary camera, a ZWO atmospheric dispersion corrector (ADC) and a 2.5x PowerMate (Barlow) for planetary work and so that's what I've mainly focused on for much of the year. It's been another learning curve as planetary imaging is quite unlike deep sky imaging, but I have had some successes and I've managed to produce my best ever images of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars. Still a lot of work to do there though.

In the last couple of months I've been very fortunate to have had the loan of a William Optics WhiteCat 51 widefield telescope off my friend and fellow L.A.S. member Mark Hellaby, who has very kindly let me borrow it for quite a while now as he focuses on other projects in his newly built observatory.  I was mainly hoping to put it to good use at a 'Star Party' in darkest Dumfries and Galloway in November, but very poor weather meant I only managed one night of imaging and one target, Andromeda (shown here).  However, since returning home I have had a few more sessions with it in my back garden and improved my existing images of several widefield deep sky objects.

So, without more ado, I'll set about updating this blog with images I've taken since March and I'll be putting them in chronological order according to the dates I took them.

At Time of Increasing Solar Activity

Here are today's active solar regions (A.R.'s) showing more sunspots than I'ver captured before.  Although the sun emits all wavelengths of light and these combine to make white light, people are used to seeing the sun with an orange colour (caused by the scattering of all the shorter wavelengths but the atmosphere) and so I have increased the white balance to make it appear orange rather than the normal white colour my solar filter produces.

Here are some closer versions of the main sunspot groups being seen today:

A.R. 3163, A.R. 3166 and A.R. 3162

A,R. 3167 and A.R. 3160

A.R. 3165

A.R. 3168

A.R. 3163

A.R. 3166 and 3162

The Flaming Tadpoles and Friends

In this wide field image there are three main nebulae and some partial views of other deep sky objects.  From left to right there is IC405 or the Flaming Star Nebula, IC 410 or the Tadpole Nebula and the smaller IC 417 or Spider Nebula.

In the bottom right corner there is also part of NGC 1912 or the Starfish open star cluster.

Here's an annotated inverted version of this region of the sky:

The Full Veil Nebula

Until I borrowed the WO WhiteCat telescope with a focal length of 250mm, I could only ever image one section of the Veil Nebula at a time.  To get the full Veil Nebula with my scopes I would need to do a mosaic of several images and I haven't got round to trying this technique out yet.  Indeed, this is a common problem for many astrophotographers and so it's very common to see separate images of just the Western Veil (or Witch's Broomstick) and the Eastern Veil rather than the full nebula. Therefore the full Veil Nebula was high up on the list of images I wanted to take whilst I still had access to this scope.  

The Veil Nebula is easily overwhelmed by the number of stars in the region and so I used the technique of removing the stars to process the nebula and then reducing them in size and intensity before adding them back in. Unfortunately this has resulted in the very bright star (52 Cygni) in the Western Veil area becoming quite dull and so I need to redo this image sometime to bring up it's brightness and vibrance. I'm also not terribly happy with the colours so more work is needed.

Waning Gibbous Moon

 Here are some shots of tonight's waning gibbous moon:

Two for the Price of One!

The famous Horsehead Nebula is one of my favourite deep sky targets and one I found it hard to believe I could actually image from my own back garden.  And when imaging this dark nebula in widefield, you get two for the price of one, because the Flame Nebula is also in view in the lower left corner.

The big problem with imaging this fantastic pair of nebulae is the very bright star called Alnitak to the left of the horse's head, which tends to drown everything out.  In trying to dim it's effect, there is a tendency for it to become quite dull, as it has done in my image above, so more work is needed to get the final image I so desire for my wall.

The 2022 Lunar Occultation of Mars

Occultation is where one astronomical object, such as a planet or moon, passes front of another one, obscuring it from being seen.  In this case, the Moon was due to pass in front of Mars in the early hours of 8 December 2022.  In addition, Mars also happened to be in opposition, meaning that the Earth was directly in line between Mars and the Sun. Opposition is when a planet appears at its brightest in the night sky.

I had so looked forward to this rare astronomical event and planned for it quite throughly, but in the end I was frustrated and foiled by the cloudy weather. I set up early in the afternoon and had quite a few practice shots during the early evening when the skies here were crystal clear.  

At first I thought I'd stay up all night waiting for the main event when Mars was occulted by the full 'Cold' Moon at around 4:45am, but in the end I decided to get a few hours sleep starting around11:45pm. When I got up at 3:14am, the skies were still clear and Mars was a lot nearer to the moon than when I had gone to bed.  However, when I returned from making a quick cup of tea, everything had changed!

The clouds had rolled in totally obscuring Mars and the Moon at times and time was running out.  I'd focused everything previously, so I wasn't concerned about that, but the exposure time was giving me real problems and I had to keep adjusting it manually with every passing cloud.  This really wasn't easy and was certainly very frustrating.

Consequently, I couldn't see Mars at the all important moment of occultation, so I just left the camera video running whilst I hoped for the best.  I was also trying to take some manual single shots with my DSLR and big lens in a sort of belt and braces approach.  In hindsight this wasn't such a good idea as my attention was constantly switching between the two systems.

At first I thought I'd totally fluffed it, but with a considerable amount of processing I managed to resurrect these two shots from the stacked video.  They're quite disappointing really but they are all I've got and at least I witness the event.  

My best shot probably came after the occultation had finished and Mars was on its way to set in the western sky. You can see how cloudy it was from the colours in the sky and the lack of clarity in the Cold Moon's surface features.

If You've Got Heart, You Gotta Have Soul!

The Soul Nebula is partner to the Heart Nebula in the constellation of Cassiopeia.  The Heart Nebula was my first go at using Mark Hellaby's WhiteCat 51 telescope last month. Unfortunately, not even the WhiteCat is wide enough to capture both in one image and so I had to image them separately. Tonight's target was the Soul Nebula - well, if you've got Heart, you gotta have Soul!

I also managed a bit of time on the Elephant's Trunk Nebula on the same night. It's nice to see it in a widefield setting as my previous images wit a narrower field of view concentrate just on the Elephant's Trunk itself.

The North America and Pelican Nebulae in Cygnus

This is another pair of widefield targets that I can't achieve in a single image with my own telescopes. The so-called North America Nebula on the left of this image has an uncanny resemblance to North America and the Gulf of Mexico in particular, but I do find the smaller Pelican Nebula on the right much harder to resolve.

The brighter section of the North America nebula, which I guess represents California and Mexico, is known as the Cygnus Wall and it's something I want to image with my own scopes which have more focal length and a narrower field of view.

You're All Heart

My previous attempts at the Heart Nebula have never managed to capture the whole nebula due to my own scopes having to narrow a field of view (FOV).  However, Mark Hellaby has kindly loaned me his William Optics WhiteCat 51 telescope which, at 250mm, has a much wider FOV and so I am able to image some of the larger nebulae in their entirety.  My first go at using this excellent scope was to image the Heart Nebula.

And it really does look like a science textbook cross section of the human heart!

Catching up with Messier 109 - A Spiral Galaxy

It's been quite a while since I updated my blog, nearly a year in fact. The latter half of last year and particularly the winter period wasn't very good for astrophotography because of the weather - we seemed to have weeks and weeks of cloudy skies with very few breaks. The winter constellations like Orion will have to wait for another year! 

It was very similar at the start of this year too, but things got a little better in February and March and I managed to make some progress in my images and image processing techniques. I've managed to keep posting a few things to my Flickr account throughout this time, and now I'm turning to my blog. I'm going to work from today backwards to post all the images I've taken since last May.

So here's an image of Messier 106 (also known as NGC 4258) whcih is an intermediate spiral galaxy in the constellation of Canes Venatici. It was discovered by Pierre Méchain in 1781. M106 is about 22 to 25 million light-years away from Earth and contains an active nucleus classified as a Type 2 Seyfert. The presence of a central supermassive black hole has been demonstrated from radio-wavelength observations of the rotation of a disk of molecular gas orbiting within the inner light-year around the black hole. A Type II supernova was observed in M106 in May 2014. Here's a closeup view of M106 cropped from the above image. It clearly shows the galaxy's spiral arms.

And finally this widefield view of my image has been annotated in www.astrometry.net and shows how rich the region is in deep sky objects including NGC 4217, a possible companion galaxy of M106.

Messier 51a - The Whirlpool Galaxy

Messier 51a, also known as the Whirlpool Galaxy or NGC 5194, is an interacting grand-design spiral galaxy with a Seyfert 2 active galactic nucleus. It lies in the constellation of Canes Venatici at a distance of 31 million light-years from Earth. It was the first galaxy to be classified as a spiral galaxy. 

It was discovered in 1773, by Charles Messier while hunting for objects that could confuse comet hunters, and was designated in Messier's catalogue as M51. Its smaller companion galaxy, NGC 5195, was discovered in 1781 by Pierre Méchain, although it was not known whether it was interacting or merely another galaxy passing at a distance. In 1845, William Parsons using a 72-inch (1.8 m) reflecting telescope in Ireland, found that the Whirlpool possessed a spiral structure, the first "nebula" to be known to have one. These "spiral nebulae" were not recognized as galaxies until Edwin Hubble was able to observe Cepheid variables in some of these spiral nebulae, which provided evidence that they were so far away that they must be entirely separate galaxies.

The advent of radio astronomy and subsequent radio images of M51 unequivocally demonstrated that the Whirlpool and its companion galaxy are indeed interacting. Sometimes the designation M51 is used to refer to the pair of galaxies, in which case the individual galaxies may be referred to as M51a and M51b.

The galaxy and its companion, NGC 5195, are easily observed by amateur astronomers, and the two galaxies may be seen from dark sky sites with binoculars. The Whirlpool Galaxy has been extensively observed by professional astronomers, who study it to understand galaxy structure (particularly that associated with the spiral arms) and galaxy interactions. This second version of my image is one that has been calibrated photometrically in Siril to give the true star colours.

Here's a widefield shot of the region which has been annotated in www.astrometry.net.