Strongly Celestial

Looking outward; looking backward in time...

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Deep Space Gallery

These are my pictures of the deep space objects. As with all of my galleries, click on the picture itself to bring up a larger, scaleable copy of the picture in a separate window; be sure to expand that window to see the full size of the image!

Subject: Andromeda Galaxy (M31)
Date Taken: 1/6/2012

Equipment:
Orion Short Tube 80-A refractor
Canon T2i DSLR (60 exposures, 1 min each, stacked)

Comments
Pictured here is the galaxy Andromeda. This galaxy is 2.5 million light years away and is the farthest object visible from earth with the naked eye (when in a dark location). Although not the closest galaxy to earth, it is the closest spiral galaxy and visually spans about 2x the width of the full moon in the sky. Andromeda is estimated to contain ~1 trillion stars, putting it at over 2x the star population of our own Milky Way.

Subject: Andromeda Galaxy (M31) plus M32 and M110
Date Taken: 1/6/2012

Equipment
Orion Short Tube 80-A refractor
Canon T2i DSLR (60 exposures, 1 min each, stacked)

Comments
This is the exact same picture as shown above, but it is labelled to point out that this image contains not just one galaxy, but acually three are clearly visible. Galaxy M110 is indicated just below and to the right of Andromeda. It is an elliptical galaxy which is about the same distance from us as Andromeda and in fact is a satellite of that galaxy. It contains on the order of 10 billion stars. Though not very distinct in this image, the other galaxy is M32, indicated just to the left of Andromeda's core. This galaxy is also an elliptical very close to Andromeda, though it is smaller, containing only about 3 billion stars.

Subject: Orion Nebula (M42)
Date Taken: 3/6/2012

Equipment
Orion Mak-Cassegrain 180mm
Canon T2i DSLR (20 exposures, 10 seconds each, stacked)

Comments
This is the Orion Nebula, which sits right in the middle of Orion’s sword in that constellation. It is a large star birthing area, and the very bright stars in the middle were "recently" (in cosmological terms...) born. In fact, at ~1,344 light years from the Earth, this is the nearest region of massive star formation to us. The new stars' light causes the huge hydrogen cloud (from which they were born) to light up and “glow”. The solar winds from those new stars blow on the hydrogen cloud and sculpt it into the fascinating patterns you can just make out in this image.