The Winter Milky Way

 

The view from our Backyard last night. No Moon to dilute the starlight but hazy cloud moving in from the west was a problem when combined with a little light pollution. Image taken with an astro-modded 200d Canon DSLR and a Sigma EX zoom lens at f=11mm. 10x30sec exposures at ISO1600 were stacked and processed.

What a beautiful night, only marred by light intermittent cloud. Mars and Uranus are visible in this image. Other astronomical delights on show include:

• The constellations; Orion, Taurus, Canis Minor, Monoceros, Lepus, Aries and Gemini.
• The show piece stars; Betelgeuse, Rigel, Bellatrix, Saiph, Alnitak, Mintaka, Alnilam, Procyon, Castor, Pollux, Sirius and Aldebaran.
• The open star clusters; the Hyades and the Pleiades.
• Orion's Dagger and the Great Orion Molecular Cloud..

Apart from all that scientific stuff, it makes for a very pretty picture.

Oh those Summer Nights!

 

The Summer Miky Way from summers past and remixed and cropped by Kurt Thrust using Starnet GUI and Affinity Photo. The original data was captured using a tripod mounted 400d Canon DSLR with a standard EFS 18-55mm zoom lens at f=18mm.

"The weather continues 'exceptionally inclement' at the Jodrell Plank Observatory and so, along with polishing our equipment, observatory staff members have been keeping on their 'astro-imaging toes' by reprocessing data captured under past and better conditions. I clearly remember the warm summer night when we collected light from the Milky Way running through the constellation Cygnus. The bright star centre right in the above image is the white super giant Deneb and the bright star top right is the nearby (25 light years distant) Vega. Vega has at least two large planets and a debris disk orbiting it. Vega is spinning so fast that it has a central bulge created by centrifugal force (or as my old physics master Mr. Rawlinson used to say " a lack of centripetal acceleration").- Joel Cairo CEO Jodrell Plank Observatory.

The sky aglow with ionised hydrogen gas.

 

The night sky between the Constellations Cassiopeia, Andromeda, Triangulum and Camelopardalis. A wide sky image taken with the Canon 600d DSLR camera on the Star Adventurer equatorial mount at the Jodrell Plank Observatory. Image credit Pip Stakkert.

"Whenever I see images on which the 'spinning wheel' of our nearest neighbour galaxy Messier 31 features, I cannot help but wonder whether intelligent life forms inhabit planets orbiting any of its trillion stars" - Joel Cairo CEO of the Jodrell Plank Observatory. 

Conjunction

The waxing gibbous Moon and Jupiter in conjunction. Canon 600d DSLR and zoom lens at f=200mm. If you look closely you can see Jupiter's moons Callisto and Ganymede.

Beautiful night with the terminator on the Moon catching the Bay of Rainbows.

The Bay of Rainbows - image credit: George Roberts