Mars

Viewing Mars at its best still involves staying awake until the early hours of the morning; not always compatible with an early start for those of us who have to work for a living!


This is my first attempt at an image of the Red Planet this year. The disk is still just under 12 arcseconds in diameter so capturing any detail is a challenge with and f5 Newtonian, involving a 4x barlow and extension tubes. All said and done I'm quite happy with this image, the north polar cap being clearly visible and just the faintest hint of surface detail.

Jupiter, Io and Europa

Jupiter is still nicely positioned in the early evening and is always a fascinating subject to view and image. The dance of the moons, their occultations,  transits and shadows and the ever changing festoons,  barges and storms on the surface are a constant fascination.

Some Narrowband Horsing Around

I obtained some additional narrowband filters to compliment the Ha filter I've been using for a while now. The new filters are OIII, which admits light around the the 501nm wavelength only and and SII which admits light around the 672mm wavelength only.


Whilst these filters do not render "photo-realistic" colours that the eye might perceive (if the human eye was sensitive enough to discern the colour of deep sky objects), it's fun to experiment with different colour combinations by assigning various colours to the Ha, OIII and SII channels.


My first attempt at this is illustrated below, though cloud and haze severely degraded both the OIII and SII sub frames.


The images below were produced by assigning  RGB channel colours to Ha, OIII and SII respectively in the first image, then SII, Ha, OIII in the second (the "hubble palette").

A Jupiter Transit

It's a great time to be observing Jupiter, the planet being high in the south west during the latter part of the evening. The planet is just past opposition but presents a large disk with a wealth of detail available both visually and for imaging. A transit of Io and some clear weather combined to inspire this image, with the shadow of the moon about to transit the Great red Spot.

  

Saturn

A storm has been raging in Saturn's northern hemisphere for about a year now. If you look closely,  this storm can just be seen as a faint, white mark on the upper left "limb" of the disk in this recent, stacked web-cam image.

The Pinwheel Galaxy

M101 is about 170,000 light years away in the constellation of Ursa Major. A bright spiral, clearly visible in binoculars from a dark site, it is nearly twice the size of our own Milky Way. This image is about 30 mins each of RGB.

The Cone Nebula

The Cone Nebula, or NGC 2264, is located about 2700 light years away in the constellation of Monocerous. The "Cone" part of the overall nebula (image centre), is part of a larger structure which includes the Fox Fur nebula (just out of shot to the top right) and Christmas Tree star cluster. The Cone itself is a pillar of star forming dust and gas, where new stars are in the process of creation. The structure has also been referred to as the "Mother and Child" nebula, giving the whole composition something of a festive feel, which is appropriate as it was taken during the Christmas holiday period over 2010/11.
The image is a combination of 10 and 15 minute subs taken through an H-alpha filter, amounting to 2 hours of imaging in total.



Sometimes, completely fortuitously, the process of imaging an object captures something unintended. Such was the case here, when an unexpected artifact apparantly "spoiled" the image by moving across the field of view at a rate that is difficult to spot on individual sub frames and only becomes apparant in the final stack. The video below shows the object moving across the frame. (look closely at the bottom right hand side). It transpires that the object moving across the field is an asteroid named  640 Brambilla, which was apparantly discovered in 1907 by August Kopff. Neat!

The Pac-man

This star forming region of the sky lies 9500 light years away in the constellation of Cassiopoeia. The hot, young stars at the centre of the gas and dust lanes that make up the nebula cause it to shine by emission, particularly at the wavelength of ionized hydrogen in which this image was taken. The nebula also features "Bok globules", columns of gas being eroded by the intense ultraviolet radiation from the massive blue stars in the nebula. If they survive this onslaught, they might well go on to form stars, and eventually even other solar systems.

M27

The autumn observing season is now well underway, heralded by the ever darkening evenings and chillier air.

This is Messier object 27, a planetary nebula some 1,360 light years from earth in the constellation of vulpecula; the first planetary nebula to be discovered. The colourful shells of gas that form the nebula are created by ultra-violet emissions from the white dwarf remains of the progenitor star that created it, causing the gases to glow according to their chemical composition.

A New Season Begins

Late August marks the start of the 2010/2011 observing season, and some spedtacular clear skies around the time of the Perseid meteor shower brought the opportunity to brush the dust off the equipment and head for dark skies. This image of globular cluster M13 in Hercules is a luminance only (B&W) image of about an hours duration.

Here is the same image with some RGB frames added