Starlight

The Milky Way  from Cassiopeia to Perseus with the Double Cluster NGC 869  and NGC 844  taking centre stage. The Andromeda Galaxy M31 can be seen top left.

I took the above image of the Milky Way with my Canon 400D DSLR mounted on a very shakey travel fixed tripod. I must say the bog standard Canon EOS 18-55 mm lens working at f=18mm can provide an exceptional amount of detail, especially if you take 20 or more 30 second shots at ISO 1600 and the stack them using freeware such as Deep Sky Stacker.

I hope my regular readers have noticed the over time general improvement in my image processing skills.  I put this down to ; lots of practice, a masterclass from Olly Penrice and Professor Ian Morison's articles in the Astro-press.

I'm feeling quite pleased with this image as it clearly show cases the differences in the intensity and colour of stars. It also shows the star clouds of the Milky Way without them appearing overly defined and 'crunchy'

The colour of stars is directly related to their temperature and age.  Generally, the bluer the star the hotter and younger the star is.  When you look up into the night sky and see stars that appear orange or red to the naked eye, these are old stars that have left or are about to leave the main sequence of hydrogen fusing stars. Generally they have commenced fusing helium and are cooling and increasing in diameter. You can see a number of such stars in the above image. One day in the far future this will be the fate of our local star, the Sun. When this happens "the Earth will literally be toast".

The Milky Way stretches across the night sky and is particularly visible from Europe in the autumn months. Sadly light pollution can seriously diminish the visual grandeur of the Milky Way. The above image was taken from a remote site blessed with wonderfully transparent skies. 

From Earth's position in an outer arm of our galaxy we see  the Milky Way band of light as an amalgam of the milliuons of stars that are located in the flattened disc of the Milky Way spiral galaxy. The darker parts are not areas where there are less or no stars but instead identify volumes of space where gas and dust dims or extinguishes starlight.

Double Cluster NGC 869  and NGC 844 also known as Caldwell 14 taken from our backyard.