Category: Nebula

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Nebula Open Cluster

M52 and the Bubble nebula

Last night yielded a couple of clear spells without a moon in the sky, (the first for a while) and with the nights drawing in rather earlier as we approach autumn I made the most of the opportunity for a final run through of equipment and techniques before the Kelling Heath star party.

It was just as well that I did because I discovered that my T adapter for the Canon had worked loose and needed a tweak with a screwdriver. The weather has been so bad this summer that I’ve barely had the telescope out since the La Palma trip.

M52 is an easy target to find and with the Zenithstar, if you’ve got it in the middle of the frame then you’ll also capture the Bubble nebula as well. After a short interlude waiting for cloud to clear, I took 5 3 minute exposures at ISO 800 with the unmodified Canon 350D.

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Nebula

M17

Looking back on our time in La Palma it seems that the time passed all too quickly. Certainly, I would have liked to have spent more time doing LRGB imaging on the 40cm. However, this type of photography consumes time at an impressive rate and there were a lot of other things that we wanted to do. This image of M17 is comprised of single 10 minute exposures with red, green, blue and luminance filters, the colours being binned 2×2.

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Deep Sky Nebula

The Lagoon and Trifid

Once I’d got the Astrotrac rather more accurately drift aligned on the final evening, we set about imaging some rather closer views of objects using longer focal lengths. This image of M8 and M20 consists of five 3 minute exposures with a Canon 75-300 zoom lens set at 180mm (f/5) and ISO 400.

Both nebulae are probably part of the same complex, some 5200 light years away and are pictured against the star clouds of Sagittarius towards the Galactic centre.

Categories
Deep Sky Nebula

NGC 6888 – The Crescent nebula

With the days getting longer, and the nights corresponding shorter, opportunities for imaging get fewer. Friday night at the observatory looked promising though and once it started to get dark Dan and I had a crack at M57 using his modified Canon 1000D. More on that later. By this time, Cygnus was getting higher in the eastern sky so we moved onto NGC 6888, an emission nebula.

With viable guide stars on top of the nebula, and with it ideally placed for the Alt-Az 20″ (low in the east) we settled on 1 minute exposures at ISO 1600. A few were rejected due to bad tracking but overall the results were very good. The tracking excursions were limited to the Alt axis which we’ve seen before. The usual fix if it’s problematic is to add or remove nose weight but on this occasion it only affected a few frames.

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Deep Sky Galaxy Nebula

Near & Far

One of the advantages of using a small telescope for photography is that you can get wide fields of view that help put objects within their true context. The two main objects in this picture are M97, the Owl nebula and M108. Originally I planned to use a cropped version of this picture but after some consideration I decided that the wider field was the better presentation.

M97 is the intra-galactic object at only 4140 light years distance. Despite it’s diminutive size (only 170″), it is still about 3 light years across. First observed by Mechain in 1781 Messier added it to his catalogue in march of that year.

M108 is rather further away at 46 million light years and is a member of the Ursa Major group of galaxies. The bright object near the centre is not the galaxy core but a foreground star in our own galaxy. While this galaxy was observed by Messier at the same time as M97 it was not added to his catalogue at the time and is a 20th century addition.

19 3 minute sub frames, ISO 800
Canon 350D
Zenithstar 70
Skywatcher field flattener

Categories
Deep Sky Nebula

Rosette Nebula

The Rosette nebula is a large cloud of ionised hydrogen gas in the direction of the constellation Monoceros. Distance estimates vary but it’s probably 5000 light years distant with an overall diameter of 130 light years. The nebula has the Caldwell number 49 and the cluster of stars at the centre is separately listed as Caldwell 50 (also NGC 2044).

While the central cluster is visible under dark skies with binoculars the nebula is very difficult to see visually as it’s about 1 degree in diameter with a very low surface brightness. The red colour is also not visible. Relatively short CCD images however, show what a spectacular object this is.

Telescope: GRAS-14 – Takahashi FSQ-106ED
Camera: SBIG STL-11000M-ABG

Categories
Deep Sky Nebula

Seagull Nebula

Staying with the Ha filter due to the full moon, I took 4 15 minute exposures of the Seagull Nebula in a 2 frame mosaic. This picture covers almost 4 degrees by 4 degrees in an area close to the borders of Canis Major, Monoceros and Puppis.

GRAS-12 – Takahashi FSQ-106ED
SBIG STL-11000M-ABG

Categories
Deep Sky Nebula

B33 – The Horsehead Nebula

This is one that’s featured in previous images of mine but this time it’s in close up courtesy of GRAS-6, an RCOS 16? Ritchey-Chrétien Cassegrain with a focal length of over 3.5 metres. With a full moon in the sky I used an Ha filter on the camera and binned the pixels 2×2 to reduce the sub-frame exposure length to a manageable 5 minutes. This image is a stack of 6 exposures.

Set against the bright emission nebula IC434, the Horsehead is a cloud of cold, dark gas in the constellation of Orion.

Categories
Deep Sky Nebula

Flaming Star Nebula – IC 405

As regular readers of both mine and Dan’s blogs will know, using the 20″ has been a constant struggle to produce untrailed images. The approach taken has been to keep exposures as short as possible and be prepared to throw away a high percentage that show bad tracking.

With the new servos and controller we decided to press the club’s old SBIG STV into service again as a guider using the supplied 100mm focal length e-finder scope. Despite the disparity in focal lengths between this and the main instrument the results from initial testing are impressive.

This being an Alt-Az mount we chose IC 405 as a suitable subject as it was below 40 degrees in the East, with a bright star in the nebula that could be used for guiding. After an initial test exposure we increased  the time to 300 seconds and reduced the ISO to 800 and took 6 frames. The first was unusable due to instability in altitude but the remaining 5 frames showed remarkably little trailing. Dan’s result is here.

IC 405 is a combination of an emission and reflection nebula in the constellation of Auriga.

Categories
Deep Sky Nebula

IC 5146 & The Cocoon Nebula

This picture is actually comprised of many objects. The red emission nebula is catalogued Sharpless Sh2-125 and this nebula is giving birth to a new star cluster, IC 5146. Associated with this we also have reflection nebula illuminated by the new stars of the cluster. Adding impact, we have a dark nebula, Barnard B168 obscuring the light from the background stars of the Milky Way.

At a distance of 3500 light years the nebula spans 15 light years.

This wide field image was produced with an SBIG STL-11000M ABG on a  Takahashi FSQ-106ED (GRAS-14)

 

  • Luminance: 50 min (bin 1×1)
  • Red: 30 min (bin 2×2)
  • Green: 15 min (bin 2×2)
  • Blue: 15 min (bin 2×2)