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.

Anglo-French Fusion

Les Granges Farm House en Provence 2015. Glass fusion project by Anita Roberts

Toot is enjoying her American made glass kiln and undertaking some interesting fusion projects. This free standing back-lit glass plaque captures the house in which we stayed on holiday last autumn.

After an electrical storm, we went for a walk on a muddy track collecting Jurassic fossils along the way.  Looking back we could see Les Granges on a rocky outcrop set between the folds of the Hautes Alpes and a clearing blue sky. Toot's art work captures the moment!  I like the use of  vibrant landscape colours and the way the tree appears to flex in the mountain breeze.  Nice one Toot, you're really smart!

Things I've seen in the Great Bear in January 2016

Comet Catalina on the 19th of January. Image taken with my Canon 600D DSLR  with  a 66mm Altair Astro Lightwave refractor and field flattener on a Star Adventurer equatorial mount.

Messier 101 spiral galaxy. Image taken with the Bradford Robotic Telescope.

The comet was in the same part of the sky as Messier 101 but very much closer to Earth  than the galaxy far far away. Unfortunately, I could not get both objects in the same field of view. Hence the two separate images.

Messier 101 (NGC 5457), also known as the Pinwheel Galaxy, is nearly 21 million light years away from us
The Pinwheel Galaxy is about 170,000 light years in diameter, roughly comparable with the Milky Way . The galaxy’s disk has 100 billion solar masses, while the bulge has about 3 billion solar masses. The galaxy disc is slightly assymetric the likely result of tidal interaction with companion galaxies.

By contrast, the nucleus of the comet is quite small, of the order of a few kilometres and  relatively close to Earth.  On the 19th of January when the above image was taken the comet was some 70 million miles distant.

Credits: Bradford Robotic Telescope and Wikipedia.

Comet Catalina C/2013 US10 Jan 16 2016

Comet Catalina moving infront of the Constellation Ursa Major. Image taken from our Backyard using my Altair Lightwave 66/400 ED refractor on a Star Adventurer mount and a Canon 600D DSLR

The bright star top centre left is the multiple star system Mizar and Alcor in the tail of the Great Bear or handle of the Plough or Big Dipper. 

The two tails, ion and dust, can be seen emanating from the cometary nucleus at roughly 10 and 2 o'clock.
When this photograph was taken the comet was at more or less its closest to the Earth. The comet is from the Oort Cloud a remote place at the extremity of the Solar System. Since perehelion it is on an ejection trajectory and will leave our Solar System for ever.

Enjoy this visitor while you can!  For the next few weeks, it can be seen through binoculars, moving from the Great Bear's tail towards Polaris the pole star.

Successive enlargements from the widefield photograph

Messier 33 or NGC 598 Spiral Galaxy

Image data obtained in October 2015 at Les Granges,  Haute Provence. Thanks to Olly Penrice for the excellent data from his tandem mounted refractors and data processing tuition.

I'm told that under a dark sky you can see M33 with your naked eye. All I can say is, I've never seen it!  Indeed it takes some finding with 10x50 binoculars although it is readily visible in my big 11x80 bins.  M33 is a member of the local group of galaxies, which includes the Andromeda (M31) and Milky Way galaxies. Although estimates of distance from the Earth vary, M33 is thought to be slightly further from us than M31 at some 2.7million Light Years.  M33 is a spiral galaxy and is smaller than either the Andromeda or Milky Way galaxies.  It is however 60,000 light years across and contains some 40 billion stars.

The recently discovered bones of Homo naledi, a very early hominid ancestor of ours found in a south african cave system, are approximately contemporary with the age of the light captured in my photograph. Makes you consider the vastness of the Universe, the finite velocity of light and the transcendental nature of time, doesn't it?  Although my previous statement does provide some illustration to the time and distances involved, strictly speaking the light doesn't share an age with the bones.   In the strange quantum world of electromagnetic radiation, the photons of light did not come into existence until the wave function collapsed when Olly's refractors caught them.  The physics of the very small is all very confusing!

It was a wonderful clear and transparent night when the above image was aquired. Whilst Olly maintained a vigil ensuring the scopes were tracking accurately, I went about the night taking widefield photographs of the stars with my Canon 400D DSLR.  I also heard a wild boar grunting in a hedge behind my tripod. Not something you hear everyday!

Back in our East Anglian home and with Christmas behind us, I finally plucked up the courage to complete processing the data and the above image is the result. I'm pretty sure this is my best effort to date at imaging a deep space subject.

Enlargement annotated to show the H11 emission Nebula NGC 604

NGC604 is larger and much brighter than the visible part of the Orion Nebula.  If NGC 604 was as near as the Orion Nebula, it would appear to outshine Venus as viewed from Earth.  A veritable stellar nursery on an unimagineable scale.

The following images, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, show NGC 604 with increasing detail and a decreasing field of view.

Credits: Olly Penrice, NASA-ESA, HST and Wikipedia