Category: Astrophotography

Here is an image of the center of the Milky Way taken Wednesday night while I was trying to see Perseids. I used my Canon 800D with an 85mm prime lens at f/2.5 and a light pollution filter. The image was made from 26 two minute images, stacked then processed in Photoshop. In the upper right, the brightest object is the Lagoon Nebula and to the right and above that is the Trifid Nebula. Below the center, inside the Milky Way, the bright star is Alnasl and it is the tip of the spout of the Teapot. Well above and to the left of Alnasl is Klaus Media. Well to the left but almost even vertically of Alnasl is Klaus Australis. These are the three brightest stars in the image and form the three stars of the spout of the Teapot.

If I say so myself, this is probably the best image of M31 (the Andromeda Galaxy) that I ever took. It’s made up from about 2 1/2 hours of one minute images using my 11″ SCT at f/1.9 with my ZWO ASI294MC Pro camera at a gain setting of 120. Full disclosure: I nuked two satellite galaxies in the processing of this image as they were not looking good. That’s okay since this is art not science.

M31 is possibly the farthest object visible to the unaided eye at 2.5 million light years away. I say possibly because another galaxy, M33 is slightly further away and can be glimpsed in very dark skies. But that is a story for another time, this is about M31.

M31 was first described in 964AD by a Persian astronomer who recognized its “fuzziness”. Until about 100 years ago, this was called the Andromeda Nebula. Then, in 1925, Edwin Hubble (of space telescope fame) used the then largest telescope in the world to identify and measure specific stars in the nebula and realized just how far away the object is. Until recently, M31 was thought to be as much as 50% larger than our own Milky Way galaxy. Recent measurements though have shown that the Milky Way is actually somewhat larger.

I took almost three and a half hours of one minute exposures starting at 10 PM or so Wednesday evening and let the camera run until it ran out. I caught a few Perseids but hoped for more. I guess meteor photography is more than just point the camera up. There are a few planes , those take more than one frame. The streaks that show up for a half second and then gone in the next frame are presumably meteors.

The camera was oriented such that south is at the bottom and the little arc of stars in the upper right is the handle of the Big Dipper.