Month: March 2022

I imagine this was a particularly dirty explosion, throwing dark dust clouds and obscuring large patches of a dense starfield. If you look closely, there is a gritty quality to the image.

 

My telescope isn’t ideal for taking a picture of the moon, but I gave it a shot anyway. Not much processing, though I did try to sharpen it a bit. Kind of a bleak, burned-out cinder look here.

I managed to frame it better this time.  Here’s an annotated version:

IC342 is a large, bright, nearby galaxy that would be “naked to the invisible eye” if it weren’t for the dust in the way.

Here’s a five-minute exposure, with a gratuitous satellite:

Do you see a galaxy? Maybe if you squint and sacrifice a pint of Haagen-Dazs?

But curiosity — perhaps more exposures could tease out something?

Here are 41 images like the above, stacked up and combined:

It looks like a galaxy! I should note that these images were taken on a night with excess moonshine, in hazy suburban skies.

Three of the 41 exposures had satellite trails, but they disappeared in the average.

There is an overall red tint to the photo. It’s probably not natural, but rather an artifact of the anti-pollution filter I am using.

The cluster extends widely past this field of view.  Poor framing — if I had tilted the camera I could have included more of it, and the “chain” moniker would have been more obvious.

Here’s an annotation of a less-processed version:

The dust in NGC3628 is more evident in this version; in fact, details are better throughout. I haven’t quite figured out why.

I collected all of the sub-images during bright moonlight. Maybe in a week or two, I will post a better rendition. This picture has just a hint of whispy spiral arms at the edges, which I might be able to capture.