mosqueeto

AKA M27.  Some pictures may look like a dumbbell, but this one doesn’t.  It looks so small and alone, but it is 1.4 light years in diameter, and nearly 1300 light years away from us.

It doesn’t know about us…

I tried a fairly major software change on my imaging setup, but it was a failure. — I couldn’t make it work.  Even worse, the tracking software  several times ran the telescope into the tripod and ground the gears in the mount in a very frightening way.  So I went back to the previous setup.  Fortunately, the Andromeda Galaxy  is now visible, and I was able to get a nice image, to prove that things were still working.  Everyone has seen this a million times, but it never gets old:

The Iris Nebula, NGC 7023

Constructed from about 15 images.  The Iris Nebula appears to be an enormous cloud of dark dust, partially illuminated by the bright star in the center.  A messy, dirty explosion of some kind… The “artifact” is the star in the lower left — I don’t know why it alone is surrounded by a perfectly circular halo.  I think it is T Cephei.

(The Wikipedia article on T Cephei, incidentally, has an absolutely stunning huge image of the region around NGC 7023 — well worth staring at for a while.)

Here’s a second image, with more data and further processing.  The artifact was still there, but I cropped it out to expand the nebula:

This image is a stack of 34 frames — several hours total exposure time.   A little robotic telescope mindlessly doing its thing…

Wildfires are raging a couple hundred miles to the Northeast.  That thought keeps intruding.  COVID-19 is sneaking around, touching people, and killing some of them.  I think about that too.  1300 light years away, six light years across.  About half the diameter of the moon…

There’s a barely discernible distant spiral galaxy, NGC 6207, a little to the left and down.

A stack of 15 three minute exposures.  Astrophotography is a good hobby for reclusive techy  introverts, I think.

This is not the Rosette Nebula, as I first stated.  Instead, it is the Lagoon and Triffid Nebulae — got my wires crossed.  This image is a 300 second single exposure. The color is somewhat arbitrary…

I also took several  1 second shots trying to frame things; for grins I stacked them and you can see the result below.  It’s interesting because to me it looks more like a painting than a photograph.  But 1 second exposures…

NGC 7635 is actually a rather small object, less than a quarter degree across.  My imaging setup has a field of view of 4×2.72 degrees, and the object is a little above the center.  The open cluster in the upper right quadrant is M52.

Below is a closer crop of the above image, showing the perfectly circular “bubble” in the center.

As counterpoint, here’s an exquisite image from the Hubble.

This image is a stack of about 30 10 minute exposures, taken over two nights.

This is the same data (27 exposures, 3 minutes each) as in the previous post.  Four different ways of combining the exposures, and two different methods of removing background coloration (an overwhelming green from the light pollution filter I was using) from the resulting image.

I think the second one (“integration-ABE1-“) is best, but I was a bit slapdash in preparing the images for posting, so that may be an issue…

This is the North American Nebula, with a bit of the Pelican Nebula at the bottom.  A stack of 27 3-minute exposures.  I’m not sure why there isn’t more color; color still remains a bit of a mystery to me…