Tycho Crater, taken yesterday evening with my 8” reflector telescope is situated on the moons southern lunar highlands and was formed over a hundred million years ago when an asteroid impacted on the moons surface.
The material ejected during the impact event, are still visible as bright streaks forming beautiful rays emanating from the crater.
A Christmas Eve clear sky and i couldn’t resist another attempt at the planet Jupiter and this time, the transit of Jupiter’s moon Io is clearly visible along with its shadow hitting the upper atmosphere of the giant planet. I certainly wasn’t expecting that!
The Andromeda Galaxy (M31) taken with my RASA 8″ Telescope. I took images in the Oxygen and Sulphur wavelengths of light in addition to the Hydrogen alpha images i took a couple of weeks ago and have now created an RGB colour image representing 8 hours of exposure. This barred spiral galaxy is 2.5 million light years away in the constellation Andromeda and is home to over a Trillion stars. The brown bands of nebulosity on the outer edge represent new star forming regions and the object below the main galaxy is M32, is a smaller satellite galaxy of Andromeda and only discovered in 1742
I was pleasantly surprised with the amount close up detail visible in my image of the Heart nebula i had taken a few days earlier. As a result, I’ve created a very short video to showcase the beautiful pillars of gas and dust that make up the nebula. Hard to believe it is 7500 light years away from us. Make sure you have the volume on. Enjoy.
The Heart Nebula (IC 1805), an Emission Nebula, 7500 light years away, in the constellation Cassiopeia which shows glowing ionized hydrogen and Oxygen gases and darker dust lanes. Imaged on Tuesday and Wednesday nights as icicles were forming on my nose . I used my wide 8″ RASA telescope with hydrogen alpha filter, Oxygen III and Sulphur II narrowband filters attached to my camera, and a total exposure time of four hours to bring out the detail within the nebula. I added the three light waves to the RGB channels and the result is this gorgeous Hubble palette image.
The heart shape is clearly recognisable and indeed the shape and strong visible hydrogen gas and dust is driven by the radiation, which is emanating from a small group of stars near the nebula’s centre. This open cluster of stars contains a few bright stars nearly 50 times the mass of our own sun.
The Bubble Nebula (NGC 7635) is an Emission Nebula in the constellation Cassiopeia, imaged last week (My third attempt) using my 8″ RASA Telescope and an ZWO CCD deep space imaging camera. This is one of my favourite deep space objects and at 11000 light years away it is a very distant and faint object, hence I used over 3 hours of exposure to bring out the Nebulosity. Indeed, the Nebulosity consists of Hydrogen Alpha, Oxygen III and Sulphur II gases, which is why I used special narrowband filters to extract only those crucial wavelengths of light.
The Bubble shape is caused by a star forty times as massive and several hundred thousand times more luminous than our sun (visible in the seven o’clock position inside the Bubble). Its enormous energy output and powerful stellar winds have blown a titanic Bubble of ionised gas measuring thirty six Trillion miles in diameter, and it is this Bubble that can be seen in the middle of the picture.
