Category: Deep Sky

I captured this image of the Trifid Nebula early Saturday morning with my 11″ SCT and Hyperstar. The original image was significantly larger but the nebula is a little small for that scale and so I cropped it. This was made from 30 64 second images.

According to Wikepedia, “The Trifid Nebula (catalogued as Messier 20 or M20 and as NGC 6514) is an H II region located in Sagittarius. It was discovered by Charles Messier on June 5, 1764. Its name means ‘divided into three lobes’. The object is an unusual combination of an open cluster of stars; an emission nebula (the lower, red portion), a reflection nebula (the upper, blue portion) and a dark nebula (the apparent ‘gaps’ within the emission nebula that cause the trifurcated appearance; these are also designated Barnard 85). Viewed through a small telescope, the Trifid Nebula is a bright and peculiar object, and is thus a perennial favorite of amateur astronomers. The Trifid Nebula is a star-forming region in the Scutum spiral arm of the Milky Way. The most massive star that has formed in this region is HD 164492A, an OIII star with a mass more than 20 times the mass of the Sun. This star is surrounded by a cluster of approximately 3100 young stars.”

Below is another view of the nebula. Unintentionally, this was recorded in monochrome. I’ve only cropped the rough edges to give you a better idea of the scale that the Hyperstar and this camera can achieve.

It took me nearly a week to process this image but I finally did. I’ve seen many better images of the galaxy but this is without a doubt the best I’ve ever done of it even with my poor Photoshop skills. This was taken with my Hyperstar adapter on the C11 (Elf) with my ZWO ASI 294MC Pro. Approximately 60 images of 60 seconds each went into it. It’s not a mosaic, the galaxy fit into the field of view. Stacked in Deep Sky Stacker then post processing in Photoshop.

Friday night was my second night out with my 11″ SCT (Elf) and the new Hyperstar adapter. Clouds, heat and humidity made things a challenge but I managed to get this before packing it up. First, I spent a while collimating the Hyperstar. This was not too hard and I hope it will stay but we’ll see. A few months ago, I learned that my CGEM mount has as polar alignment routine, not just the common star alignment, and using this gave me very little drift over the evening.

Anyway, I queued up 120 30 second images with what is essentially a 532mm f/1.9 telephoto lens. Unfortunately after about 40 minutes it clouded over and I had to cut it short. Also I found airplanes or satellites in a few of the images so I wound up with 69 images to combine. The largest galaxy is M81 or Bode’s Nebula. Above it is M82, the Cigar Galaxy. In the lower right and not very impressive in comparison is NGC 3077, the Garland Galaxy. The Hyperstar is used for wide angle small scale imaging so we don’t see a lot of detail here. Horizontally this image is about 4 times the width of the Moon.