Andrew’s Astronomy Blog

Boxing day was clear and bright which continued into evening so a visit to the observatory was in order to take some more footage of Venus (pictures to follow, hopefully).

Once Venus had set then I switched to the Canon 350D  as the sky was beautifully transparent (a truely rare occurance this year!). I had some problems with the EQ-5 mount as it wouldn’t align, seemingly unable to locate Vega during a single star align. Giving up on this I manually aligned it on Orion for some pictures of the nebula. 15 30-second exposures at ISO 800 are combined for this image.

At a distance of 1600 light years, the Orion nebula lies in the adjacent spiral arm of the Milky Way and is an area of star creation about 30 light years across. It shines brightly, illuminated from within by the newly formed stars.

 NGC104 (47 Tucanae) is the second brightest globular cluster in the sky after Omega Centauri. Globular clusters are massive concentrations of ancient stars that are some 12 billion years old. This cluster contains over a million stars within a diameter of 120 light years with a very compact core and is 13,400 light years distant.

Also captured within the image is NGC121 although it’s a little difficult to see in this compressed web image. It’s at the bottom of the frame, just to the right of centre, (click for the larger image and it looks like a slightly larger star). It’s a lot further away as it’s not associated with our galaxy but the Small Magellanic Cloud. Subsequently it’s very faint at magnitude 10.6.

The telescope used is GRAS-10; a Tec 140 f/7 refractor with an SBIG STL-11000M-ABG, 11 mega-pixel camera and is a single 5 minute exposure.

A half size TIFF copy of the original is available here: http://www.littlebeck.org.uk/Images/NGC104.tif

After a pretty fruitless evening trying to image Venus with the webcam on the club Celestron 9.25″ I fitted the Canon 350D instead and took this picture of the Ring Nebula in Lyra.

Not a good image as it’s out of focus and the stars have trailed slightly, but it’s still an amazing sight. This is the result of a single 60 second exposure.

M57 has a white dwarf star at the centre which has shed it’s outer layers towards the end of it’s life, forming a Planetary Nebula. Despite the name, these have nothing to do with planets, the term was coined by William Herschel in 1785 as in his telescopes they looked like small faint disks of light.