Andrew’s Astronomy Blog

After a cloudy start to Tuesday evening the sky cleared so I took some pictures of M81 in Ursa Major. M81 was discovered by Johann Bode in 1774 and is named Bode’s Nebula. At about 12 million light years distance it’s one of the closest galaxies outside the local group.

Telescope was the Celestron 9.25″ with f/6.3 reducer. 13 exposures of 2 minutes each were taken with the Canon 350D plus 5 dark frames.

The slightly mis-shapen star at 2 o’clock from the galaxy is actually a double star, HP38635A & B.

Making the news this week; M31, the Andromeda galaxy is due to collide with our own Milky Way in some 3 billion years. While this isn’t anything to lose sleep over, there are plenty of galaxies out there already experiencing this. Whilst individual stars are unlikely to collide in this process (there’s too much space between them, even in the relatively crowded space of a galaxy), the galaxy structures are massively disrupted due to gravitational forces. In this picture, we can see NGC 3226 (small elliptical) and NGC 3227 (spiral) interacting. Collectively, this pairing has the catalog id ARP 94 and is about 55 million light years away.

This picture is taken with GRAS-005, a Takahashi Epsilon 250 (Hyperbolic Flat-Field Astrograph) with an SBIG-10XME camera, 4x 5 minute exposures.

With Venus a brilliant object in the early evening sky on Boxing day I put the webcam on the back of the Celestron 9.25. The ultimate goal is to image the cloud detail on Venus and to this end I’ve aquired a violet filter (Wratten 47) but as this doesn’t block IR I need to piggy-back an IR block filter. Until I obtain one; this is in visible light with an IR-UV block to limit atmospheric dispertion.