Charles Stross on Snowden

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The Whale and the Crowbar (or Hockey Stick) 2022-05-27
Another try. Slightly better processing and a dozen more five-minute exposures added. The tiny fuzzy ball above the whale is a companion dwarf elliptical galaxy, NGC4627. All three galaxies are about the same distance from us, and they interact. Hence the odd shapes.
Iris Nebula, NGC7023 2022-05-23
Reprocessed with yet more data. I don’t know that this is significantly better than my previous results ( here and here and here ). But NGC7023 is a fascinating object, and I will probably return to it for the rest of my life. As always, the images available from Wikipedia are worth a pause.
IC2574 2022-05-21
IC2574 is the faint smudge in the center, 13 million light-years away. A dim dwarf spiral galaxy. According to Wikipedia, approximately 90% of its mass is dark matter. Taken with a 110mm F/7 refractor. Total exposure time is about 13 hours.
M63 2022-05-21
Sometimes referred to as “the Sunflower Galaxy”. This image has about 7 hours total exposure time. It is quite a pretty galaxy — if you zoom in (ie, click on the picture), it looks like a swirl of altocumulus clouds on a spring day.