Space is the Best!
The Little Dumbell Nebula
This is the Little Dumbell Nebula (Messier 76). First classified as a planetary nebula (now classified as a bipolar planetary nebula) in the northern constellation of Perseus. It is 2,544 light years away from earth, has a magnitude of 10.1 and is 2.7×1.8 arc minutes in size. The UV-light from the nucleus is growing a luminous nebula as it’s envelope & has a surface temperature of about 88,400 k. These were captured with an Orion 8″ f/3.9 Newtonian Astrograph reflector telescope, an Orion Sirius EQ-G equatorial mount, and a ZWO ASI120MC Super Speed Color CMOS Telescope Camera & NINA software for capture. We stacked 200 photos of 15-second exposures to get this image. We are working on our post-processing skills & will def revisit this set of images as we improve to re-process it. Plenty of data here we are not experts at bringing out yet. But how freaking cool is that?
Space Rocks!
The M51 Galaxy
Messier 51 is an interacting grand-design spiral galaxy with a Seyfert 2 active galactic nucleus. It lies in the constellation Canes Venatici and is 31 million light-years away from Earth. It has a radius of 30,000 light years & is 400.3 million years old. It contains about 100 billion stars. These were captured with an Orion 8″ f/3.9 Newtonian Astrograph reflector telescope, an Orion Sirius EQ-G equatorial mount, and a ZWO ASI120MC Super Speed Color CMOS Telescope Camera. He stacked 30 pics of 30-second exposure shots to get these. So cool!
Space is so cool!
The Messier M101 Galaxy
This is the M101 galaxy, which is a face-on spiral galaxy 21 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation Ursa Major. It has a radius of 85,000 light years & contains about 1 trillion stars. These were captured with an Orion 8″ f/3.9 Newtonian Astrograph reflector telescope, an Orion Sirius EQ-G equatorial mount, and a ZWO ASI120MC Super Speed Color CMOS Telescope Camera. He stacked 30 pics of 30-second exposure shots to get these.
