This Is The Crescent Nebula It Is Located In The Constellation Cygnus. This Nebula Is The Result Of The

Perseus double cluster, had still some time left at the end of the night after the main sequence of photos and before dawn so I took the opportunity to capture about 25 minutes of photos of the double cluster. This is a pair of open clusters of stars (NGC 884 left and NGC 869 right), both are composed mostly of young blue giants and a few red giants in NGC 884. Both clusters have most likely formed from a single gas cloud and are only separated by a few hundred light years. This pair of cluster is relatively bright and can be viewed with the naked eye or a pair of binoculars in dark locations, in those cases, the clusters appear as nebulous region, with a couple of stars resolved with binoculars.

This is a photo of the Andromeda galaxy I took nearly 5 years ago. The dark parts of the galaxy are gigantic clouds of dust and gas in which no stars and planets are born. This galaxy is one the closest one to our own, and yet it's 2.55 million light years from us, It's composed of about 1000 billion stars, in a few billion years it will collide with our own galaxy.

The two lighter blotches around Andromeda are two satellite Galaxys that orbit around Andromeda and are also composed of millions of stars.

Those numbers are so big they start to get inconceivable, and that's only a small fraction of what exists out-there. We are not much in the grand scheme of the universe, but when you look at the night sky and the wonders of the universe you can feel at least for a little while that you're part of it.

Picture of IC59 and IC63. This is a pair of nebula located near the star γ Cassiopeia, the big star at the bottom, which is responsible for making the nebula glow. Both nebula are composed of ionise hydrogen responsible for the red colour (especially on IC63) and colder dust/gas responsible for the blue colour (most visible on IC59). γ Cassiopeia can make taking photos of those nebula difficult due to the halos it produces, I did my best to limit its impact during processing, but there is still a faint blue halo around it. IC63 is also known as the Ghost of Cassiopeia due to its shape, it was discovered in 1893 by the German astronomer Max Wolf.

Image taken using a CarbonStar 150/600 newtonian telescope with a 0.95 coma corrector, ZWO ASI294 monochrome camera. 12x300s image for each filter (LRGBHa), total imaging time 5h, stacking and processing done in PixInsight. Details of both objects: IC63

IC59

I've worked in a chemistry lab, they had a room with all the analysis and purification equipment. There was a constant noise due to the various pumps (vacuum, solvent, ...) and valves. After just a few days working there I could telle exactly with machin was doing what task and at what point it was in that process just based upon the noise they made.

For those not in the US wanting to search for dark skies near you, this website is quite useful.

The black areas represent the remaining natural dark skies in the United States

I was able to see and take pictures of the comet C2023/A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) ! This comet will be visible in the night sky probably for the next week or two, it's currently visible both with a pair of binoculars and with the naked eye. Since it's visible very early after sunset, it's a bit difficult to spot for now, but in the coming days it's will gradually be visible later in the night and thus easier to observe.

This comet is one of the brightest in the last few years so it should be quite easy to observe.

I hope you all get a chance to see it, it's magnificent

This is M51, also known as the Whirlpool Galaxy it is a pair a galaxy currently interacting together. If you look at the two arms of the spiral, you will see that the one on the left is somewhat deformed (near the other galaxy) this is due to the gravitational interaction between the two galaxies. Those interaction are also the reason why the left galaxy (NGC 5195) is this irregular. Some of the models have proposed that both galaxies have passed through each other at some point in the past. In the future both galaxie will slowly fuse together, but this will take at least a few hundred million years. Multiple other interacting galaxies also exist, such as the butterfly galaxies or the antenna galaxies.

This photo was supposed to be a test of my new equatorial mount but the result was WAY BETTER than expected so here you go (the post-treatment of the photos is not the best ever but I had to work with a limited amount a data). I will probably post more photos this summer since I now have access to better skys and a better mount than in Munich (If the weather complies).

Photo of NGC 7000 / the North American nebula (southern part), the bright star on the top left corner is ξ Cygni. Might rework it later since this one still has a bit too much gradient/haze due to the full moon when I took the photos. In most cases, emission nebula are the result of gas clouds being ionised by the high energy UV radiation coming from very Hot (and often massive) stars/star cluster. In the case of NGC 7000 the star(s) responsible for most of the ionisation was an unknown for quite a long time, it is only in 2004 that the star responsible for the ionisation was located. This star (actually a binary system according to later publication) known as J205551.3+435225 is located behind the dark region of the nebula (bottom right corner of the photo) which explains why it was only recently identified.

(My best guess of the position of J205551.3+435225 in my picture according to what I can find in the original publication and in the SIMBAD database)

One last thing, that star was later nicknamed Bajamar Star, which comes from the original Spanish name for the Bahamas island.

Photo of the Iris nebula / Caldwell 4 / NGC 7023, I'm very pleased with this one since I finally managed to capture the surrounding dust (barely visible in the 2 previous attempts). This is a reflection nebula, this means that it's a dust cloud reflecting the light from a nearby star. Being one of the brightest reflection nebula visible in the northern hemisphere it's visible in relatively small telescopes (4-6 inch / 100-150mm diameter), unfortunately the outer dust clouds can only be seen on photos. Reflection nebula generally tend to be blue due to a more efficient scattering of blue light compared to red by the dust particles (M45 in my previous post is another good example).

Skip Google for Research

As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse.  It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms 

As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable.  As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.

Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.

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Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free