Christchurch Astro Tours's blog

A welcome run of clear nights recently allowed me to lose yet more sleep and get some imaging done. This is the result of one of those runs. IC 4605 is a beautiful reflection nebula that is lit up by the bright (magnitude 4.8) blue, main sequence star, 22 Scorpii, which lies about 413 light years away from us. Although the star is visible from a reasonably dark sky site, long exposures with a camera are needed before the tenuous dust clouds that envelope it can be seen.

As I was making my way through my past images, I came across one from 2017 that  - rather oddly - I had not yet fully processed. This is a wide field photo of the Trifid Nebula (Messier 20). It is a perennial favourite of astro photographers, and a relatively easy target for beginners to learn data gathering and post-processing. M20 is a stellar nursery located about five degrees west from Lambda  Sagittarii and two degrees northwest of Messier 8 (Lagoon Nebula).

This one was unplanned. The sky cleared, I stepped out into the backyard, and there was Jupiter about 3 degrees from a just-past-full moon. I grabbed a few shots and created this composite. The composite was necessary to show all the objects, of course, because exposing for the moon completely dims Jupiter and loses its Galilean moons, while exposing for Jupiter makes the moon look like the lens is staring at the sun. In the end, I processed three separate frames (Moon, Jupiter, and the Galilean moons) as they appeared through the viewfinder.

This is another of those "challenging" objects I unwisely decide to tackle occasionally. This one is worth it, though, I think. Herschel's Ray, also known as the Pencil Nebula, is a beautiful swipe of blue and pink shock waves in the constellation Vela. At 3/4 of a light year in size, it is a reasonably sized object in its own right. However, it is just a tiny portion of the truly gigantic Vela Supernova. That "remnant" is what was left after a very large star cataclysmically exploded as a Type II supernova about 11,000 years ago.

I know, I know - not the prettiest name for a such an interesting galaxy, but I didn't come up with it. NGC 2442 is an example of a peculiar, barred spiral galaxy. In this case, its peculiarity is most likely due to gravitational tides when it interacted with another galaxy at some point in its history; possibly the smaller one (PGC 21456) visible to its right. Besides leaving it with an odd shape, the interaction would have started a burst of star formation evident in its arms.

A while back, I had picked up a "new" (to me) Tamron 24 mm lens. I decided to do some wide-field, night-sky photography to try it out and, eventually, came up with this image. The Moa (in NZ) or the Emu (in Australia), seen in profile, is a series of visually connected dark regions in this portion of the Milky Way. Look for the two bright stars in the middle of the image. These mark the neck and shoulder. Just above and to the right is the head and beak, which, to astronomers, goes by the unlovely name of Caldwell 99 ("The Coal Sack Nebula").

NGC346, which resides in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), is an open star cluster with surrounding nebulosity. At magnitude 10.3 and having a smallish size (~14 x 11 arcseconds), it is relatively easy to spot with a small telescope. This photograph was taken through H-alpha, H-beta, and OIII narrowband filters, which reveal the different densities of ionised hydrogen and oxygen gases in NGC 346 and the surrounding N66 gaseous region.

Among astrophotographers, I suspect that our moon is a seen as a bit too common to spend much time on. After all, we can observe it with the naked eye - why waste precious minutes on it when we can be chasing down some truly weird objects out there in the universe?  And yet, I find that I come back to it quite often, either for a photograph or, more often, just to consider it's many features through a decent telescope or set of binoculars. There is still something beguiling about getting up close and personal with all those craters.

This one is well-named. The Little Gem Nebula subtends a tiny visual angle; just 22 by 15 arcseconds. For those visitors unfamiliar with astronomical measurements, look at the back of your hand while it is at arm's length covering part of the sky. Point your little finger upward. It's width is about one degree. Take that width and divide it by 3600. That is one arcsecond - as I said, tiny. It's no wonder we need good telescopes and clear, still skies to view some of these objects. 

These are a collection of gas nebulae in the Small Magellanic Cloud. Chadwick and Cooper, in their excellent book "Imaging the Southern Sky", have named the collection The Magnificent Seven (tilt your head to the right to see why). The photograph is an example of narrow-band imaging. The term narrow-band refers to the fact that the filters used during the data collection process allow light only from very specific regions of the visual spectrum in which electrons are jumping between energy levels.