NGC 520 from Hubble

Update 9/7/2021: This image has been chosen as and APOD by NASA! You can view their write-up here: https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap210907.html. This galaxy is just so bizarre that I had to process it! NGC 520 is the product of a collision between two disc galaxies that started 300 million years ago. It exemplifies the middle stages of the merging process: the discs of the parent galaxies have merged together, but the nuclei have not yet coalesced. It features an odd-looking tail of stars and a prominent dust lane that […]

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Interesting Astronomy & Astrophysics news from the week of 8/15/2021

Next week’s night sky: From Saturday onward, the night is prime milky-way viewing. Go out at around 2 hours after sunset to look at the beautiful band of bright stars snaking across the sky! Martian Images Images of knobbly rocks and rounded hills are delighting scientists as NASA’s Curiosity rover climbs Mount Sharp, a 5-mile-tall mountain within the 96-mile-wide basin of Mars’ Gale Crater. The rover’s Mast Camera, or Mastcam, highlights those features in a panorama captured on the 3,167th Martian day,. This location is particularly exciting: […]

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ARP 273 from Hubble

This is one of my absolute favorite galaxies, so I had to take a shot at processing it! The whirling spirals, the dark dust lanes, the beautiful colors – Hubble really picked a great target! From APOD’s description (4/21/2011): “The spiky stars in the foreground of this sharp cosmic portrait are well within our own Milky Way Galaxy. The two eye-catching galaxies lie far beyond the Milky Way, at a distance of over 300 million light-years. Their distorted appearance is due to gravitational tides as the pair […]

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A Sagittarius triplet – M8, M20, and NGC 6559

Edit 9/10/2021: This image was selected for Italy’s APOD GRAG: https://apod.grag.org/2021/09/10/a-sagittarius-triplet-m8-m20-and-ngc-6559/ This so far is my favorite image! Nearly 21 hours of data (taken across 4! nights) and 3 hours of processing went into this huge project. I love the color range so much – golden milky way stars, pink lagoon nebula, and light blue trifid reflection. Image: Equipment: Nikon D90 Sigma 300mm prime lens Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer Star Adventurer Tripod Bahintov Mask Intervalometer DIY diffraction spikes using a violin strings Stellarium All Sky Plate Solver Sharpcap […]

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Interesting Astronomy & Astrophysics news from the week of 8/8/2021

Next week’s night sky: When the moon completes the first quarter of its journey around Earth on Sunday, Aug. 15 at 11:19 a.m. EDT (1519 GMT), its 90-degree angle away from the sun will cause us to see the moon half-illuminated — on its eastern side. In the first quarter, the moon always rises around midday and sets around midnight, so it is also visible in the afternoon daytime sky. The evenings surrounding the first quarter are the best ones for seeing the lunar terrain when it […]

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A two-panel mosaic of the Sadr Region

Image: Equipment: Nikon D90 Sigma 300mm prime lens Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer Star Adventurer Tripod Bahintov Mask Intervalometer DIY diffraction spikes Stellarium All Sky Plate Solver Sharpcap Laptop Acquisition: Bortle 2-4 Iso 800 F4 8/04/2021 – North Panel 122 x 2′ light frames 100 bias 34 dark 43 usable flats 0/06/2021 – South Panel 106 x 2′ light frames no bias 29 dark 50 flats Processing: Calibrate with WBPP Blink to discard bad frames Generate normalization data with NormalizeScaleGradient Image integrate CFA drizzle scale 1 Crop DBE each […]

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Messier 22

Messier 22 or M22, also known as NGC 6656, is an elliptical globular cluster of stars in the constellation Sagittarius, near the Galactic bulge region. It is one of the brightest globular clusters visible in the night sky. The brightest stars are around magnitude 11. Image (click for full size): Equipment Nikon D90 (Astro-Mod) Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer Sky-Watcher Tripod AF-S NIKKOR 500mm f/5.6 Bahintov Mask Intervalometer Laptop All Sky Plate Solver Sharpcap Stellarium Acquisition: ISO 800 f/5.6 Bortle 2-4 Taken on 7/22/2021 183 light frames x 1 […]

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M16 – The Eagle Nebula

The Eagle Nebula is perhaps the most famous nebula in the night sky. Made famous by Hubble’s stunning image of the pillars of creation, the Eagle nebula is one of the most interesting nebulae for astronomers to study. Image: Equipment: Nikon D90 (Astro-Mod) Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer Sky-Watcher Tripod AF-S NIKKOR 500mm f/5.6 Bahintov Mask Intervalometer Laptop All Sky Plate Solver Sharpcap Stellarium Acquisition: ISO 800 f/5.6 Bortle 2-4 Taken on 7/11, 12, 13 in 2021 732 light frames x 1 minute (taken across three nights) 500 bias […]

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The Strawberry supermoon – 2021

Image: Equipment: Nikon D90 (Astro-Mod) Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer Sky-Watcher Tripod Rokinon 135mm f2 AF-S NIKKOR 500mm f/5.6E Acquisition: Taken 6/24/2021 from Sharon CT Taken from a bortle class 2 zone ISO 100, F2.8, 1/320 second 1505 total frames, stacked the best 35% 100 dark frames Processing: Pre-processed to tif in PIPP Stacked with 1.5x drizzle in Autostakkert Linearfit RGB to get better color in pixinisight SNCR green Sharpened in registax Blended sharpened and unsharpened version to get nice halo in pixinisight invert+sncr to get rid of purple […]

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Corona Australis molecular cloud

Image: Equipment: Nikon D90 (Astro-Mod) Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer Sky-Watcher Tripod Rokinon 135mm f2 Bahintov Mask Intervalometer Laptop All Sky Plate Solver Sharpcap Stellarium Acquisition: Taken 6/20/2021 from Sharon CT Taken from a bortle class 2 zone Iso 800, F4.0 82x 3″ light frames – total 4.1 hours 15 dark frames 83 flat frames 128 bias frames Processing: Manually stacked in pixinsight Crop to remove stacking artifacts Image solver DBE Photometric Color Calibration Noise Reduction (TGV + MMT) HSV reparation Masked stretch Masked histogram stretch curves Star reduction […]

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