Strongly Celestial

Looking outward; looking backward in time...

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New! Pictures Gallery

Here I will put a half dozen or so of my most recent pictures taken. Some will not be of the highest quality; I just want to show what I've been looking at. The better ones will make their way into the appropriate gallery for longer term. 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.

Date Taken: 5/13/2013

Equipment:
Coronado SolarMax II 60mm
Imaging Source DBK 41AU02.AS w/ 2x Barlows
Stacked AVI video with RegiStax 6

Comments
On a day filled with lots of white fluffy clouds, I managed to grab this image of a rather large solar prominence during a lucky few minutes of pure sunshine. The blue dot is an image of the Earth drawn to scale, indicating the amazing magnitude of this solar event!

Date Taken: 8/8/2012

Equipment:
Coronado SolarMax II 60mm
Imaging Source DBK 21AU618.AS w/ 2x Barlows
Stacked AVI video with RegiStax 6

Comments
There was quite a lot of prominence activity all around the sun today. This particular one made an interesting target to capture.

Subject: M57 - Ring Nebula
Date Taken: 6/2/2012

Equipment/Exposure
iTelescope - T4 New Mexico - Takahashi Epsilon 250
SBIG ST-10XME
18 minutes exposure (2 x 3 min each red, green, blue stacked)

Comments
This is M57, known as the Ring Nebula. It was fist discovered in 1779 by Antoine Darquier de Pellepoix and was catalogued that same year by Charles Messier. Similar to M27 below, this is a planetary nebula with a white dwarf star at the center which has thrown off its outer layers near the end of its life and now illuminates the expanding "ring of gas". The exact distance from Earth is difficult to determine, but it is estimated to be ~2,300 light years away.

Subject: M81 - Bode's Galaxy
Date Taken: 5/16/2012

Equipment
iTelescope - T4 New Mexico - Takahashi Epsilon 250
SBIG ST-10XME

Comments
This is M81, known as Bode's Galaxy. It was fist discovered in 1774 by Johann Bode...thus it's name. It was catalogued by Charles Messier in 1779 as M81. It is approximately 11.7 million light years from Earth and located in the constellation Ursa Major (i.e. near the Big Dipper). Similar to our own Milky Way galaxy, Bode's contains on the order of 250 billion stars. If you look closely at this image (click to enlarge it), you can clearly see the bright galactic center and the "dust lanes" along the spirals, where new stars are born.

Subject: M92 - Globular Cluster
Date Taken: 5/23/2012

Equipment
iTelescope - T4 New Mexico - Takahashi Epsilon 250
SBIG ST-10XME

Comments
This is M92, a globular cluster first discovered in 1777 and catalogued by Charles Messier in 1781. As the name suggests, this is a (very large) cluster of stars, located in the Milky Way approximately 26,000 light years from Earth. It is a very old cluster, estimated to be 12-14 billion years in age, or about the age of the universe itself. The literature is unclear on how many stars are in the cluster, but the combined mass is estimated to be 330,000x the mass of our own sun.

Subject: M39 - Open Cluster
Date Taken: 5/16/2012

Equipment
iTelescope - T3 New Mexico - Takahashi TOA-150
SBIG ST2000XMC

Comments
This is M39, a large, open star cluster first catalogued by Charles Messier in 1764. Messier is generally given credit for its discovery, although there is some discussion that Aristotle noted it as a comet-like object in 325 BC.

This cluster is approximately 800 light years from earth and is 200-300 million years old. There are at least 30 proven stars in the cluster; note that the defraction spikes in this image were added on purpose to highlight some members. The bright central star in this image has 3.7x more mass than our sun.

Subject: M27 - Dumbbell Nebula
Date Taken: 5/6/2012

Equipment
iTelescope - T20 New Mexico - Takahashi FSQ-ED
SBIG ST-8300C One Shot Color CCD

Comments
This is the Dumbbell Nebula, and it was the first example of a planetary nebula discovered by Charles Messier in 1764. A planetary nebula occurs near the end of a star's life when it throws off its outer layers and itself collapses into a white dwarf. Stellar winds create remarkably beautiful shapes out of the expanding gas, and radation from the dwarf ionizes it to make the colors visible to us. The Dumbbell Nebula is approximately 1,300 light years away and is estimated to have begun its expansion about 10,000 years ago.

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.