Category: Deep Sky

Above is a picture of the edge on spiral galaxy known as NGC 891 in Andromeda, discovered by William Herschel perhaps the greatest astronomer ever. I took this Sunday evening at the River Ridge Observatory with my 11″ SCT on a CGEM DX mount and my Canon EOS T5. This is a composite of six 60 second images and my paltry Photoshop skills. I framed the shot to get the other little edge on spiral on the left. I don’t know it’s designation yet. There is also a a fuzzy above it about a third the way from the top.

Below my friend Don Walters imported the picture into PixInsight and ran a script to identify several galaxies. I had spotted three counting the big one, he found eight more. Looks like a star chart with those lines and designations.

On what might be the final clear night of the year, I set up my C11 (Elf) and used my Canon EOS t5 to take this picture. I used BackyardEOS to control the camera. This is 21 30 second images combined. I haven’t done deepsky other than with the stock lens of my camera in a long time and I’ve forgotten the techniques I once knew. The seeing Friday was not as bad as predicted but not great and focus was hard to come by. Once I worked through the details of acquisition, I got my images. After acquisition I remembered my focal reducer/corrector which would have helped, this is prime focus at f/10. Saturday morning I auto aligned in Photoshop and switched back to Lightroom for processing. Click image for a larger view.

Here is a short (2 frame) video of a nearby star called “Barnard’s Star” in the constellation of Ophiuchus. After the famous Alpha Centauri triple star system, this is the closest star to the Solar System at 6 light years away. By a weird coincidence, just over one hundred years ago an astronomer named E.E. Barnard discovered that this star is moving across the sky faster than any other object in the sky beyond the Solar System. This “proper motion” is measured at 10 arcseconds per year. By comparison, the planet Jupiter appears to be about 40 arcseconds across from Earth. Not a lot but easily measurable with a telescope and camera. In these two images, take 26 months apart, we can see one star move to the left just a little.