Imagery of M51 taken during the last two nights by myself (luminance) with a TEC-140 and imagery in RGB from beginning this month by Michael Van Doorn (www.dutchastrocolors.com) using his Hyperstar C11. Telescopes: TEC-140 / C11 hyperstar Camera’s: QSI583ws / SXVR-H18 Exposure time: 14h (70×10 min L, 120 min total RGB) The inverted image shows …
NGC 4631 is a big beautiful spiral galaxy seen edge-on (bottom left) only 25 million light-years away towards the small northern constellation Canes Venatici. This galaxy’s slightly distorted wedge shape suggests to some a cosmic herring and to others the popular moniker of The Whale Galaxy. Either way, it is similar in size to our …
Recently I have been working on image data from M81/M82. The image was a combination of my own data together with the data of Michael van Doorn. I had the feeling there should be more possible with this dataset and I found a great image of this region of Neil Fleming. After being in contact …
Recently there was a supernova in M82, the Cigar galaxy. Last 2 nights I could image this supernova together with the ‘sister’ galaxy of M82, which is M81, aka Bode’s galaxy. Michael van Doorn also made images of the same area with his Hyperstar including a lot of H-alpha data. Michael shared his data and I combined …
This image is a combination of my own H-alpha imagery together with color information from the Digitized Sky Survey made by the Palomar telescope. The Poss-2 red and blue data is used for the color generation. This shows what result is possible if you combine professional and amateur data in one image. Version 2:
Recently I have been working on images of M78. I thought it was nice to show the process that is involved to show what I started with and how it ended. This way you can see how the first raw images look like. You would never expect something like this coming out of this… My …
IC 405 (also known as the Flaming Star Nebula, SH 2-229, or Caldwell 31) is an emission/reflection nebula in the constellation Auriga, surrounding the bluish star AE Aurigae. It shines at magnitude +6.0. Its celestial coordinates are RA 05h 16.2m dec +34° 28′. It surrounds the irregular variable star AE Aurigae and is located near the emission …
Barnard 344 is a dark nebula in the constellation of Cygnus. It’s located close to the star Sadr in the Gamma Cygni Nebula (RA: 20h18m57.4s DEC: +40º 40′ 01″). Barnard 344 is located on the bottom of the image. This region is very rich of dark and emission nebulae. On the image also VanDenBergh 130, …
Recently an image of M33 was posted on this site made by Michael van Doorn and myself. By searching for some papers on the internet I was able to find databases giving the coordinates of red and yellow hypergiants, post-red hypergiants (supernova progenitors), variable stars and globular clusters in M33. With pixinsight I overlaid these …
Recently I have teamed up with Michael van Doorn to make some imagery of M33. Michael uses a Celestron C11 with Hyperstar at f/2. This setup has a focal length of about 560mm and so does give a wide field with a high sensitivity. We decided to combine the RGB and Ha from the Hyperstar …