Picture Of The Helix Nebula / Caldwell 63, This One Was A Bit Of A Pain To Take As This Nebula Stays

Image of IC 405 aka the Flaming Star Nebula This is an emission (the red part) and reflection (the blue part) nebula. It's relatively bright for a nebula with visual magnitude of +6.

The bright star at the center of the blue reflection nebula is AE Aurigae, it's the star responsible for the ionisation of the gas in this nebula. AE Aurigae is what's known as a runaway star, those are star that moves at high speed compared to their surrounding environment. They are the result of gravitational interaction between stars or stars being ejected by nearby supernovae. In the case of AE Aurigae, it was probably ejected due to gravitational interaction, its path has been traced back to the Orion Nebula from which it was ejected about 2 million years ago.

The moon was nearly full and somewhat close by when I took the photos, so it was a bit tricky to process them. As a result, the reflection part of the nebula was not as visible as I would have liked but I think the overall result is not too bad.

Image taken using a CarbonStar 150/600 newtonian telescope with a 0.95 coma corrector, ZWO ASI294 monochrome camera. 6x300s image for each colour filter (LRGB) and 12x300s for the Ha filter, total imaging time 3h, stacking and processing done in PixInsight.

Tried applying the Ortonglow script in PixInsight to give the nebula a bit more depth, but I don't like the halos it gave around the bright stars on the left.

Those do not look like much, but they are, to the best of my knowledge, Herbig-Haro object (to left: HH 94, top right: HH 249 and bottom: HH 95) Herbig-Haro object are ionised gas clouds formed when the jet of hot plasma ejected at the poles of newly born stars interacts with Interstellar gas, they are thus more common in star forming regions. I first noticed one of them (HH 94) after I shared the image with a friend. The What's in my image PixInsight scrip from SetiAstro was very useful in finding out what that was. I couldn't find a lot of information on those objects specifically (and very few pictures), but a few publications did have images to compare with (orientation differs):

(original publication ref for HH 94 & HH 95; additional publication ref for HH294 aka NGC 2023 HH 3) (better images of other Herbig-Haro object taken by Hubble : 1, 2 & 3) Position of the three objects in the original image (another might be present but I wasn't confident they were visible):

This is the heart nebula (or at least as much of it as I can take with my setup without doing a mosaic) also known as IC 1805 or NGC 896. It is around 7 000 light years from us, in the constellation Cassiopeia. Despite its distance to us it still appears about twice as big as the moon in the sky, which speaks volumes when it comes to its actual size (about 200 light years in diameter).

This being an emission nebula its light mostly comes from gasses ionised by nearby stars.

This nebula also has an open cluster at it's center (a bit closer to us than the rest of the nebula), Melotte 15:

This cluster is bout 1,5 million years old which is very young for such a stellar object. It is composed a a few very heavy and bright stars and many fainter lighter stars.

The starless version :

(Image taken using a CarbonStar 150/600 newtonian telescope with a 0.95 coma corrector, ZWO ASI294 monochrome camera and Baader 6.5nm narrowband filter. 25x300s for the Ha filter, 26x300s for the SII filter and 26x300s for the OIII filter, total imaging time 6h 25min, stacking and processing done in PixInsight. Photo taken mid-January) Other versions with a different colour combinations (a bit less pleased of how they turned out).

If you want to see the nebula in its entirety, you can check out this NASA Astronomy picture of the day made by Adam Jensen.

“the arts and sciences are completely separate fields that should be pitted against each other” the overlap of the arts and sciences make up our entire perceivable reality they r fucking on the couch

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 the NGC 2237, the Rosette nebula and the star cluster inside it, NGC 2244.

The star cluster, which is estimated to be about 5 million years old, is responsible for the ionisation of the surrounding gas. The mass of the nebula is estimated to be about 10 000 times the mass of our sun, which is relatively massive for a diffuse nebula.

This image uses a SHO palette, I quite like the colours I manage to get, both as the normal and starless images.

I also tried using the Foraxx palette, I think it's a bit less interesting visually, but the dark dust structures seam a bit more visible.

(Image taken using a CarbonStar 150/600 newtonian telescope with a 0.95 coma corrector, ZWO ASI294 monochrome camera ZWO LRGB filters and Baader 6.5nm SHO filter. 5x120s image for each colour filter (RGB), 15x300s for the Ha filter 20x300s for the SII filter and 18x300s for the OIII filter, total imaging time 4h 25min, stacking and processing done in PixInsight.)

Finale got around to processing the photos of M33 I had taken at the end of august. M33 is a spiral galaxy about half the size of our own galaxy and located about 2.7 million light years from earth. This galaxy has a rather high rate of star formation resulting in numerous ionised hydrogen regions (the red irregular blotches inside the galaxy), some of those being notable enough to have been included in the NGC catalogue or the IC catalogue.

NGC 588 NGC 604 (Example of some of the notable nebula in M33)

On of the first recorded observation of this galaxy was possibly done by Giovanni B. Hodierna before 1654, it was independently rediscovered by Charles Messier in 1764 who added it to his catalog (hence the name Messie 33).

information on the photo - total exposure time : 1h48 min using RGB and Ha filters - camera : ASI294 mm - telescope : Newtonian 150/600 with 0.95x coma corrector - photo edited with pixinsight

For those using PixInsight for treatment/edition, I recently discovered the scrips created by Seti Astro (https://www.setiastro.com/pjsr-scripts), Blemish-Blaster was quite useful to remove the halos from my Ha filter and What's In My Image helped with the identification of nebulas. If you had not heard those scrips, you should check them out.

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.

Friendly reminder that CRT TVs were basically a particule accelerator you had in your living room. They used power supple capable of delivering tens if not hundreds of thousands of volts, to accelerate the electron that were quite literally being boiled of a glowing piece of metal.

They sometime used a lead infused glass as the front plate to limite if not eliminate the small amount of X-ray they emitted towards you.

They had to be heavy because of the thickness of the glass needed to resist the distance of pressure between the atmosphere and extremely low vacuum inside the vacuum tube. It's that difference of pressure that would result in them exploding in a shower of glass shrapnell if the tube was broken.