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"
I finally had a run of clear skies on a new Moon! I took advantage by imaging NGC 5566 at the beginning of each of the six mostly clear nights. This galaxy is the prominent one in the middle of the image, and it lies about 65 million light years… Continue Reading... "NGC 5566 and friends"
I recently learned about this rarely imaged target just a few weeks ago. In addition to the Magellanic Clouds, two dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way visible only from the southern hemisphere, there are many other satellite galaxies of the Milky Way. One of these is an elliptical dwarf that… Continue Reading... "Ursa Minor Dwarf Galaxy"
With the beautiful clear weather this week, I have been able to leave my telescope at the ready for several days in a row. I decided to plop on my aperture mask that has a 50mm offset aperture with Baader solar film taped to it. I’d really like to get… Continue Reading... "Sunspots"
