View allAll Photos Tagged messier
A ball of about 330,000 stars orbiting our Milky Way galaxy.
Imaging telescopes or lenses: Meade Starfinder 8
Imaging cameras: ZWO ASI1600 cooled mono
Mounts: Losmandy GM-8
Guiding telescopes or lenses: MEADE 50mm Finder Guidescope
Guiding cameras: ZWO ASI120MM
Software: NINA Nighttime Imaging ‘N’ Astronomy · Open Guiding PHD2 Guiding · Astro Pixel Processor · Adobe Photoshop CS4 Photoshop CS4
Filters: Blue · Green · Red · Orion SkyGlow Imaging Filter
Accessory: Rigel Systems Focuser · Baader MPCC coma corrector
Dates:April 5, 2021
Frames:
Blue: 45x75" 0C bin 2x2
Green: 45x75" bin 2x2
Red: 45x75" (gain: 139.00) bin 2x2
UV/IR Cut Filter UV/IR-Cut 1.25": 117x75" (gain: 139.00) -10C bin 2x2
Integration: 5.2 hours
Darks: ~100
Bias: ~100
Avg. Moon age: 23.25 days
Avg. Moon phase: 38.36%
Basic astrometry details
Astrometry.net job: None
Resolution: 3621x2751
Data source: Backyard
I'm having a clear out/re-organise of old files on my computer today, this is a drawing I made for Mel Stringers Borrowed Suitcase zine a while ago. I was having a strange day that day.
Super sexy blond model with amazing curves. She wanted to do something a little sexier and naughtier than in past shoots. One of her kinky fantasies was to tease with and pour milk on herself. I like the results...do you? Was a hard shoot to concentrate and she admitted a few times during the shoot that she was getting very turned on!!
Super sexy blond model with amazing curves. She wanted to do something a little sexier and naughtier than in past shoots. One of her kinky fantasies was to tease with and pour milk on herself. I like the results...do you? Was a hard shoot to concentrate and she admitted a few times during the shoot that she was getting very turned on!!
Explanation: Close to the Great Bear (Ursa Major) and surrounded by the stars of the Hunting Dogs (Canes Venatici), this celestial wonder was discovered in 1781 by the metric French astronomer Pierre Mechain. Later, it was added to the catalog of his friend and colleague Charles Messier as M106. Modern deep telescopic views reveal it to be an island universe -- a spiral galaxy around 30 thousand light-years across located only about 21 million light-years beyond the stars of the Milky Way. Along with a bright central core, this colorful composite image highlights youthful blue star clusters and reddish stellar nurseries tracing the galaxy's spiral arms. It also shows remarkable reddish jets of glowing hydrogen gas. In addition to small companion galaxy NGC 4248 near the picture's right edge, background galaxies can be found scattered throughout the frame. M106 (aka NGC 4258) is a nearby example of the Seyfert class of active galaxies, seen across the spectrum from radio to x-rays. Active galaxies are believed to be powered by matter falling into a massive central black hole. (text from apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap090529.html)
This photo was taken march-april 2011 in village Khlepcha near Kiev, Ukraine.
Equipment: Telescope SW 25012P 1200 mm f/5, Mount WhiteSwan-180, camera QSI-583wsg, Baader MPCC. Off-axis guidecamera Orion SSAG.
RGB filter set Astronomik.
RGB: 25 frames *10 min. in each filter, bin.1x1.
Shooting conditions were not very good: Strong haze in the sky
Size 60%, crop 16:9. North at left.
Processed Pixinsight and Photoshop CS5
9 imatges de 30 segons. Capturades per Laia Sanjuan i Roger Ricart, alumnes de 2n d'ESO.
Processat a càrrec de mi mateix.
10 darks.
Telescopi LX200 GPS..
CCD Sbig ST9.
blocs.xtec.cat/oaia/2019/06/26/visita-fills-i-filles-del-...
M94 is about 16 million light years away, and is called the "Cat's Eye" galaxy thanks to the double ringed structure.
Tech Stuff: Borg 71 FL with 1.08X Borg flattener/IDAS LPS-D2/ZWO ASI 1600MC. 84 minutes of unguided 4 second exposures, collected in SharpCap LiveStacks, processed with PixInsight and Topaz DeNoise AI. From my yard in Westchester County, NY
Credit: Giuseppe Donatiello
RA 14h 03m 12.6s Dec +54° 20′ 57″
Messier 101 (NGC 5457) is a face-on spiral galaxy distanced 21 million light-years (6 Mpc) in the constellation Ursa Major and it was discovered by Pierre Méchain on March 27, 1781.
M101 is a large galaxy comparable in size to the Milky Way. With a diameter of 170,000 light-years it is roughly equal the size of the Milky Way. It has a disk mass on the order of 100 billion solar masses, along with a small central bulge of about 3 billion solar masses.
We give Bonkers a small snack before our dinner (to help him contain his urge to attack us and our food at dinner time) and sometimes he gets a little too enthusiastic when he eats, and splashes and drools and has a great time.
I should be shot for ignoring my blythes lately. I think I haven't put a comb on Posy's hair in two months...so bad.
No matter how hard I tried to be clean and neat, it just didn't happen with encaustic, however the mess created some interesting photographic subjects!
View the entire Encaustic Set
View my - Most Interesting according to Flickr
For a high res version and image details, please visit my blog: www.astroanarchy.blogspot.fi/2015/09/half-million-stars-a...
This is a second image produced as a collaboration with me and Eric Recurt. The data is shot from his observatory at Tenerife. The Observatory locates at 2400 m altitude and at 28 degrees North. The site has excellent seeing conditions, 0.8 " on average and can be below 0.3 "
Cúmul globlular d'Hercules (Messier 13)
Cúmulo globular de Hércules (Messier 13)
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Sony A7s, Schmidt Cassegrain 40 cm, 30 seg, ISO 32000. Observatori Astronòmic de Castelltallat
ODC2 - Breakfast
20/09/12
Yay finally this challenge gave me a reason to use some of these soon 2-year old fruit loops.hahaha I bought them as a prop thinking maybe I'll just let the kids eat the leftovers as a treat ( I don't let them eat stuff like this normally) But they didn't like them, which I'm very happy about. But that also meant they have been sitting in my pantry for almost 2 years I think. I kept them thinking maybe I'll get some photo use out of them, and today was the day!! lol
I'm not sure about the processing of this, I wanted to do something a little bit different for me, but not sure I like it. I might have to leave it for a bit, come back and maybe I've changed my mind about it.
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The galaxies of the Virgo cluster in Messier's catalogue are among the outstanding Messier objects on my Messier imaging marathon. I have found these galaxies to be challenging objects to observe. The spring weather is usually contrary and the rapidly brightening evening skies give little time for imaging. I was very pleased, therefore, to image both M59 and M60 in the field of view of my 8-inch RC. I have found this image to be fascinating to examine as it contains many faint galaxies including the compact dwarf galaxies associated with M59 and M60.
Capturing the image data proved to be quite challenging as there are few bright stars in this part of the sky and my off-axis guide camera had to use a mag 12 star as a guide star, needing constant monitoring of the image capture process.
Messiers 59 and 60 in Virgo were discovered by Johann Kohler on 11th April 1799 whilst observing a comet. Messier himself discovered them, independently, days later and noted them in his list. Messier 60 (lower left) is interacting with NGC 4647, discovered by William Herschel and was given the designation of Arp 116 by Harlton Arp.
The image comprises 20 x five-minutes luminance and 10 x 5-minutes each of RGB, binned 2 x 2.
Equipment:
Telescope: 8-inch Ritchey-Chretien
Camera: QSI 683
Mount: Skywatcher EQ8
Location: Cambridge, UK
This new image of the reflection nebula Messier 78 was captured using the Wide Field Imager camera on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at the La Silla Observatory, Chile. This colour picture was created from many monochrome exposures taken through blue, yellow/green and red filters, supplemented by exposures through a filter that isolates light from glowing hydrogen gas. The total exposure times were 9, 9, 17.5 and 15.5 minutes per filter, respectively. #L
The Messier Catalog is a collection of 110 star clusters, nebulae, and galaxies that Charles Messier found while he was looking for comets in the 1700's. Because of the small telescopes at the time, these objects are some of the biggest/brightest ones visible in the sky, and are popular targets for amateur astronomers to observe and photograph. Though it is possible to observe them all in one night (Messier Marathon), I opted to sink anywhere from 30 mins to 19 hours into each one in order to produce the best images possible with my equipment. I technically started on this catalog the first night I did astrophotography (I did M101), but it wasn't until last spring that I started photographing star clusters and really pushing to photograph all 110 objects. The majority of these were shot from the roof of my light polluted apartment in downtown Athens, GA (bortle 7), but I also traveled to dark sites for some of them.
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Equipment:
Telescopes/Lenses
TPO 6" F/4 Imaging Newtonian
Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8
Meade ETX125-EC
Agena 50mm Deluxe Guide Scope (autoguiding telescope)
Tracking Mount:
Orion Sirius EQ-G
Cameras:
ZWO ASI1600MM-Pro
Canon T3i (Astro-modified)
ZWO ASI120MC (Autoguiding camera)
Filters:
Astronomik LRGB+CLS Filters- 31mm
Astrodon 31mm Ha 5nm, Oiii 3nm, Sii 5nm
Starguy 2" CLS-CCD
Accessories:
ZWO EFW 8x1.25"/31mm
Moonlite Autofocuser
DeepSkyDad Autofocuser
Skywatcher Quattro Coma Corrector
Baader MPCC
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Processing:
(This is an extremely generalized processing workflow in PixInsight.)
Calibrate with dark and flat frames (bias frames also used for DSLR images)
Stack individual frames together to create a single image with high SNR. (This combines many images each with a few minutes of exposure into images which effectively have several hours of exposure, and rejects out any satellites that flew in front of the camera)
Crop (removes stacking artifacts)
Background extraction
Deconvolution sharpening and noise reduction
Color calibration (not necessary for false color images:)
Stretch to nonlinear state (this brightens the picture. The images straight off the camera are very close to black)
More noise reduction
Final tweaks of contrast, luminance, color balance, and saturation curves
Crop/resample to 1000x1000 for mosaic image, which was then assembled in Photoshop
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Some highlights/superlatives:
M16: The famous 'Pillars of Creation' are located at the center of this nebula
M31: The Andromeda Galaxy, which is naked eye visible under dark skies
M40: The sexiest Messier object.
M45: The closest Messier object (430ly). In japanese the cluster is called 'Subaru' and is the logo for the car company. The stars are naked eye visible even under moderate light pollution
M65/66: These are the oldest photos in the composite (photographed March 22nd, 2018). I had previously done some of the other objects but I reshot them at later dates. These galaxies are also part of the Leo Triplet.
M70: The newest photo in the composite (photographed June 25th, 2020)
M87: The small blue splotch in this galaxy is the relativistic jet of material shot out by the black hole that was photographed last year. Coincidentally I took this photo on the same night that the photo was released
M101: This was the first space object I ever photographed, and I ended up reshooting it twice to track my improvement. (Don't plan on reshooting it this year, though)
M109: The most distant Messier object (~83 Million ly), though some sources say that M58 is further away.
89 were photographed from my apartment roof in downtown Athens, GA
10 were photographed from dark sites (Bortle 3/4) (M6, M7, M33, M41, M44, M69, M70, M78, M79, M101
7 are false color images (M8, M16, M17 M18, M43, M52, and M76)
This is a slightly controversial object within the Messier catalogue. The Spindle Galaxy was discovered by Pierre Méchain on 27th March 1781. Méchain described the object as a “nebula between the stars Omicron Boötis & Iota Draconis,” adding that “it is very faint; near it is a star of the sixth magnitude.” Méchain probably meant Theta Boötis, not Omicron, which contributed to the subsequent confusion around the identity of M 102. Omicron Boötis is more than 40 degrees away from Iota Draconis, which makes the possibility of an error very likely. Méchain reported the discovery to Messier, who added the object to his catalogue.
The confusion about the object started two years later, in May 1783, when Méchain wrote to Bernoulli in Berlin saying that the listing of M 102 was a mistake and that the object referred to was a duplicate observation of M 101. One can imagine that M 102 could not be found due to the error in the original observation notes. It was the French astronomer Camille Flammarion who identified NGC 5866 as M 102 in his “List of the Messier Objects,” published in L’Astronomie in November 1917, arguing that the Greek letter Omicron (ο), written down by Messier, was in fact a lowercase Theta (θ). This was probably correct because the object found at this location corresponds to Messier’s description of M 102.
The Spindle Galaxy was independently discovered by William Herschel in 1788. Herschel determined the position of the object on May 5, 1788.
M 102 is a spindle-type galaxy, seen edge-on and around 41 million light years distant. It is magnitude 10.7 and 6 x 3 arc minutes in extent.
Data for this image were captured between 27th May and 17th June - yes on the shortest nights and with a waxing Moon. The data comprises 23 x five-minutes luminance and seven each of five-minutes RGB subs, all binned 1 x 1.
Telescope: 8" Ritchey-Chretien at 1660mm focal length
Camera: QSI 583 with Astrodon filters
Mount: Skywatcher EQ8
Location: Cambridge, UK
The small smattering of bright blue stars upper left of centre in this huge 615 megapixel ESO image is the perfect cosmic laboratory in which to study the life and death of stars. Known as Messier 18 this open star cluster contains stars that formed together from the same massive cloud of gas and dust. This image was captured by the OmegaCAM camera attached to the VLT Survey Telescope (VST) located at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile.
More information: www.eso.org/public/images/eso1628a/
Credit:
ESO