The Bubble (NGC7635)

The Bubble Nebula
NGC7635 and NGC7654 (M2)

NGC7635, the “Bubble Nebula”, is towards the lower left, and M2 is the open cluster along the upper right side.

The Hubble has, as usual, produced a lovely rendition of the Bubble — I guess we could call it the “Hubble Bubble“.

On a different note, the New Space Telescope has dropped its first images, and they are spectacular, as expected. Ditch astrophotographers such as myself tremble in awe. Several side-by-side comparisons of HST and NST images show wonderful improvements in clarity and detail. Stephan’s Quintet has special significance to me because it is the most difficult object I ever saw visually, back many years ago when my eyes were better and I had a 10″ Dobsonian. It was only discernable with averted vision, but definitely there.

However, the Hubble images are still as exquisite as they ever were. The universe has wonders at every scale — it is a fractal of wonder. The Hubble reveals wonders at its scale. The New Space Telescope reveals wonders at a different scale. And My Little Telescope (MLT) reveals wonders at its scale.

Better M101

M101
M101

Another heroic image 🙂 — 18 hours with a small telescope and poor conditions. Post-processing is minimal — just some brightness and contrast adjustments in gimp to minimize the distracting sky glow.

Life these days is extremely depressing.

Morbius: ‘My poor Krell. After a million years of shining sanity, they could hardly have understood what power was destroying them.’

M51 improved

This image is my deepest view so far of M51. About twelve hours total exposure time, but it represents much more telescope time because I’ve discarded many hours worth. The night before last, for example, out of five hours total time I dumped four, because after I went to sleep fog rolled in, and all the exposures were flat gray.

M51
M51

A close crop:

M51
M51

The dark red coloration is consistent with images on the web, so I presume it is a reflection of reality.

NGC6946, redux

NGC6946
NGC6946

As fate would have it, more light was available last night. Not great, but better.

Here’s the larger view:

Galaxy and Open Cluster
There may be hundreds of stars in the open cluster that don’t show in this image…

NGC6946, the Fireworks Galaxy

Fireworks Galaxy and Flying Geese Cluster
NGC6946 and NGC6939 — the Fireworks Galaxy and the Silk Fan Cluster

NGC6946 is dim. I only had about three hours total exposure; it would be better with twice that. Unfortunately, the weather is sketchy, and I probably won’t be able to collect those photons any time soon.

Stellarium has several fanciful names for NGC6939 — the “Ghost Bush Cluster”, the “Flying Geese Cluster”, and the “Silk Fan Cluster”. I prefer “Silk Fan Cluster”.

This image was cropped to balance the two objects. A closer crop of the galaxy shows lots of potential, but it would take time and good conditions to do it justice:

NGC6946

La Bomba Volcanica Gigantesca

Volanic bomb on a sea of ash
Fellow passenger observing a rock
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—”Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

 

On Island Lanzarote, the easternmost island of the Canaries. The cinder cone in the background cleared its throat, and La Bomba was born, a shattered visage on the sand.

Lanzarote is entirely composed of wind-blown flat expanses of volcanic ash and lava flows, dotted with low cinder cones. We took a four-mile hike that started over difficult ‘A’a clinkers. One person fell and rose with bloody hands, and a couple decided to turn back.

Volcanic landscape with A'a lava flows
Slightly weathered A’a lava flows

But by the time we reached La Bomba, the trail turned into a wide, level walking path over fine cinders. Effortless.

The hike’s highlight was ‘La Caldera de los Cuervos’ — ‘Cauldron of the Ravens’. It’s a small cinder cone that was home to a colony of ravens; there is a notch blown out of the side so you can walk in.

La Caldera de los Cuervos
La Caldera de los Cuervos. The notch is on the right side.
Entrance to the crater
The notch. A nice trail.
Inside the crater
Looking down into the crater
Bottom of the crater
Inside the crater
Lavascape
Outside
Walking back to the bus
Back to the bus, through the vineyards
Vinyards in the cinders
Vineyards in the cinder fields.

The vines are grown in pits; the pits are protection from the constant trade winds. There is no irrigation; the vines get enough water naturally. Lots of hand labor picking the grapes. We didn’t have time to try the wine.

M13 and M13

M13 and a distant galaxy
M13 and a distant galaxy, NGC6207. Slightly cropped.

There’s a delicate hint of pink in the middle of the cluster — it is probably necessary to expand the picture to the max to see it. The pink is undoubtedly an artifact. (However, Wikipedia states that the brightest star in the cluster is a red giant… Could it be the color comes from that star??? Nah.)

The tiny galaxy to the Northeast (by accident, the orientation is roughly correct), NGC6207,  is quite pretty when seen by the Hubble.

I process images using PixInsight, plus GIMP for the final touch-up. The most important single step in the process is called “stretching” — even with long exposures, an unprocessed image is dim to the point of being almost black. Something like:

unstretched image of M13
Unstretched image of M13

If you maximize the image and look very closely, you will see a few stars (I count 15) and, in the middle, a faint ghost of M13. (I cheated — this image has actually been stretched slightly — otherwise, there wouldn’t even be a ghost!)

Though big telescopes are fabulously expensive and finicky to set up, the computing power necessary for image processing is readily available to the common nerd like me. And a telescope is not required — for example, the enormous trove of Raw Hubble Data is available online, for free.

NGC4565, the Needle Galaxy

NGC4565
NGC4565

There are at least three other galaxies visible in this picture. IC3571 was a dim, dim smudge on the left side of NGC4565 that I tried hard to preserve as I processed the image. But alas, it did not survive the harsh contrast enhancement steps.

Here is an annotated full frame. Some of the other galaxies in the region are visible.

Annotated full-frame view
Annotated full frame

On another topic, yesterday I took possession of hearing aids for the first time. (As I type this, I hear keyboard clicks — I didn’t notice them before.)

It turns out that I have insurance coverage for hearing aids, so I got good ones — Bluetooth enabled, with extensive customization controlled via a smartphone app. They work quite well as music earbuds, at least for certain types of music. Solo guitar sounds fantastic. Noise-canceling features I haven’t explored yet. I can’t get over how loud everything is, especially the coffee grinder. Persimmon the Parrotlet is a terror now — I used to think she (it?) was a quiet bird, but now I know the volume was in the high frequencies.

Here’s Persimmon chewing on a chicken bone:

Persimmon eating a chicken leg
Persimmon gnawing on a chicken bone

We thought she would be interested in the watermelon scraps.

The Whale and the Crowbar (or Hockey Stick)

NGC4631 and NGC4656 — The Whale and the Crowbar (or Hockey Stick) Galaxies

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.