I Took Another Photo Of The Crescent Nebula (C27) This Time Using My Monochrome Camera And Processed

Picture of the bubble nebula and surrounding objects : Top left (the vague group of stars): M52 an open cluster

Center right: NGC 7538 an emission nebula (also known as the northern lagoon nebula)

Bottom center: NGC 7635/the bubble nebula and the surrounding hydrogen cloud

The ''bubble'' part of this nebula is created by the stellar wind (flow of gas, plasma and particle) emitted by the central star at nearly 650 million km/h hitting and compressing the surrounding interstellar gas. The central star (BD +602522) is currently estimated to be about 45 times heavier than our sun and about 4 million years old. Being so massive and thus very hot (it's a type O star) its lifespan is very limited for a star and it should go supernova in about 10 to 20 million years.

BD +602522 is slightly off center from the bubble, this is due to the interstellar gas being a bit more dense on one side and thus slowing the stellar wind more efficiently.

Single exposure to make the central star more visible.

Image taken using a CarbonStar 150/600 newtonian telescope with a 0.95 coma corrector, ZWO ASI294 monochrome camera. 12x300s image for each colour filter (LRGB) and 12x300s for the Ha filter, total imaging time 5h, stacking and processing done in PixInsight.

Starless version of the same image:

Older image where the bubble is more distinct from the background hydrogen clouds :

Photos of the two major components of the veil nebula, the first one is the eastern veil aka C33 and the second one (the one with the star in the middle) the western veil aka C34. Those are part of a supernova remnant (left over gas and dust from a supernova), their colour are due mainly to two gases present inside. The blue/green colour comes mostly from oxygen (as OIII emission around 500nm by doubly ionised oxygen) and a little bit from hydrogen (as H beta emission at 486nm) where as the red comes nearly completely from hydrogen (as H alpha emission at 656nm).

The first photo is about 2.5 hours of exposure (30x3 min for RGB + 10x5 min for H alpha) and the second one about 3 hours (36x3 min for RGB + 16x5 min for H alpha).

The additional photos taken in hydrogen alpha are added to the normal RGB photos to intensify the colour and visibility of the hydrogen gas (it doesn't show well enough with standard RGB in part due to the lower amount of light it emits an in part due to the sensor's response itself) Here is a version of C33 (eastern veil) with the stars removed as my friends were very impressed by it, hope you like it too.

sometimes astronomy camera companies will post about their horrible attempts to fix hardware problems with software. normally these are unremarkable.

and then sometimes they contain a beautiful single sentence that will live in your brain forever

In my new scale, °X, 0 is Earths' record lowest surface temperature, 50 is the global average, and 100 is the record highest, with a linear scale between each point and adjustment every year as needed.

Temperature Scales [Explained]

Transcript Under the Cut

Temperature Scales

[A table with five columns, labelled: Unit, water freezing point, water boiling point, notes, cursedness. There are eleven rows below the labels.]

[Row 1:] Celsius, 0, 100, Used in most of the world, 2/10 [Row 2:] Kelvin, 273.15, 373.15, 0K is absolute zero, 2/10 [Row 3:] Fahrenheit, 32, 212, Outdoors in most places is between 0–100, 3/10 [Row 4:] Réaumur, 0, 80, Like Celsius, but with 80 instead of 100, 3/8 [Row 5:] Rømer, 7.5, 60, Fahrenheit precursor with similarly random design, 4/10, [Row 6:] Rankine, 491.7, 671.7, Fahrenheit, but with 0°F set to absolute zero, 6/10 [Row 7:] Newton, 0, 33-ish, Poorly defined, with reference points like "the hottest water you can hold your hand in", 7-ish/10 [Row 8:] Wedgewood, –8, –6.7, Intended for comparing the melting points of metals, all of which it was very wrong about, 9/10 [Row 9:] Galen, –4?, 4??, Runs from –4 (cold) to 4 (hot). 0 is "normal"(?), 4/–4 [Row 10:] ''Real'' Celsius, 100, 0, In Anders Celsius's original specification, bigger numbers are ''colder''; others later flipped it, 10/0 [Row 11:] Dalton, 0, 100, A nonlinear scale; 0°C and 100°C are 0 and 100 Dalton, but 50°C is 53.9 Dalton, 53.9/50

A quick and (very) dirty mosaic of the H alpha photos I had already taken for the three major components of the Cygnus loop.

I wanted to have an idea of what a future mosaic of this target could look like (probably won't be able to do better than that before the end of the year or next summer unfortunately)

Thought I could post it here while I finish processing newer photos.

Finale got around to processing the photos of M33 I had taken at the end of august. M33 is a spiral galaxy about half the size of our own galaxy and located about 2.7 million light years from earth. This galaxy has a rather high rate of star formation resulting in numerous ionised hydrogen regions (the red irregular blotches inside the galaxy), some of those being notable enough to have been included in the NGC catalogue or the IC catalogue.

NGC 588 NGC 604 (Example of some of the notable nebula in M33)

On of the first recorded observation of this galaxy was possibly done by Giovanni B. Hodierna before 1654, it was independently rediscovered by Charles Messier in 1764 who added it to his catalog (hence the name Messie 33).

information on the photo - total exposure time : 1h48 min using RGB and Ha filters - camera : ASI294 mm - telescope : Newtonian 150/600 with 0.95x coma corrector - photo edited with pixinsight

For those using PixInsight for treatment/edition, I recently discovered the scrips created by Seti Astro (https://www.setiastro.com/pjsr-scripts), Blemish-Blaster was quite useful to remove the halos from my Ha filter and What's In My Image helped with the identification of nebulas. If you had not heard those scrips, you should check them out.

Friendly reminder that CRT TVs were basically a particule accelerator you had in your living room. They used power supple capable of delivering tens if not hundreds of thousands of volts, to accelerate the electron that were quite literally being boiled of a glowing piece of metal.

They sometime used a lead infused glass as the front plate to limite if not eliminate the small amount of X-ray they emitted towards you.

They had to be heavy because of the thickness of the glass needed to resist the distance of pressure between the atmosphere and extremely low vacuum inside the vacuum tube. It's that difference of pressure that would result in them exploding in a shower of glass shrapnell if the tube was broken.

This is the heart nebula (or at least as much of it as I can take with my setup without doing a mosaic) also known as IC 1805 or NGC 896. It is around 7 000 light years from us, in the constellation Cassiopeia. Despite its distance to us it still appears about twice as big as the moon in the sky, which speaks volumes when it comes to its actual size (about 200 light years in diameter).

This being an emission nebula its light mostly comes from gasses ionised by nearby stars.

This nebula also has an open cluster at it's center (a bit closer to us than the rest of the nebula), Melotte 15:

This cluster is bout 1,5 million years old which is very young for such a stellar object. It is composed a a few very heavy and bright stars and many fainter lighter stars.

The starless version :

(Image taken using a CarbonStar 150/600 newtonian telescope with a 0.95 coma corrector, ZWO ASI294 monochrome camera and Baader 6.5nm narrowband filter. 25x300s for the Ha filter, 26x300s for the SII filter and 26x300s for the OIII filter, total imaging time 6h 25min, stacking and processing done in PixInsight. Photo taken mid-January) Other versions with a different colour combinations (a bit less pleased of how they turned out).

If you want to see the nebula in its entirety, you can check out this NASA Astronomy picture of the day made by Adam Jensen.

oh yeah speaking of grass.

i can't think of any epiphytic grasses and I can't understand why they wouldn't exist. it seems like the perfect niche for a grass.

Photo of NGC 7000 / the North American nebula (southern part), the bright star on the top left corner is ξ Cygni. Might rework it later since this one still has a bit too much gradient/haze due to the full moon when I took the photos. In most cases, emission nebula are the result of gas clouds being ionised by the high energy UV radiation coming from very Hot (and often massive) stars/star cluster. In the case of NGC 7000 the star(s) responsible for most of the ionisation was an unknown for quite a long time, it is only in 2004 that the star responsible for the ionisation was located. This star (actually a binary system according to later publication) known as J205551.3+435225 is located behind the dark region of the nebula (bottom right corner of the photo) which explains why it was only recently identified.

(My best guess of the position of J205551.3+435225 in my picture according to what I can find in the original publication and in the SIMBAD database)

One last thing, that star was later nicknamed Bajamar Star, which comes from the original Spanish name for the Bahamas island.