I came back to my image of the Deer Lick Group and Stephan’s Quintet from last year due to the JWST reveal. While my original take on the image was not terrible for the tools and knowledge I had available at the time, I wanted to give the original integration… Continue Reading... "Reprocessing the Deer Lick and Stephan’s Quintet"
On my spectral analysis of a quasar project, I had cheated by already knowing the redshift of the quasar from professional research, and was able to reverse-discover what elements should be in my spectrum. It led me to wonder how I might discover the elements in my spectra naturally. The… Continue Reading... "Galactic Redshift Script"
A low full moon made the other night a great night to do some EAA. I used SharpCap live stacking and 25 second calibrated exposures to create these images. They were post-processed in PixInsight using photometric color calibration, downsampling, arcsinh and histogram stretches, NoiseXTerminator, and some multiscale median transform for… Continue Reading... "A plethora of short stacks"
The Cat’s Eye Nebula, formally known as Caldwell 6 and NGC 6543, is a planetary nebula in Draco. Planetary nebula is a confusing term that has nothing to do with planets and everything to do with the life cycle of intermediate mass stars. These are stars that are not massive… Continue Reading... "Cat’s Eye Nebula"
The Summer Beehive Cluster, IC 4665, is a coarse open star cluster in the constellation Ophiuchus that was discovered in 1745. It only started forming around 40 million years ago. It lies about 1,400 light years from us and is approaching us at about 12 km/s. This is only about… Continue Reading... "Summer Beehive Cluster"
I was finally able to figure out how to take some semi-decent flats when doing solar. All I needed was a trash bag! I used Sharpcap to do calibration on the fly with darks and flats, then processed as normal in Autostakkert and PixInsight. The seeing was pretty terrible, so… Continue Reading... "Sunspots"
It’s time to get serious with my spectroscopy. 🙂 Introduction With the moon full but very low in the sky, this is the perfect time to challenge myself by capturing and analysing a quasar. A quasar, short for quasi-stellar, is basically an extremely bright galaxy that is powered by the… Continue Reading... "Spectral Analysis of a Quasar"
The second target of my last imaging sequence is the Cygnus Wall, a prominent feature of NGC 7000, the North America Nebula. This is a very bright nebula at magnitude 4. It’s around 2,600 light years away in Cygnus. The “wall” of gas is about 20 light years long. I… Continue Reading... "Cygnus Wall"
