Tag: Galaxies

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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The Tadpole galaxy, taken by Hubble and processed by me

The Tadpole Galaxy is a disrupted barred spiral galaxy located 420 million light-years from Earth in the northern constellation Draco. Its most dramatic feature is a massive trail of stars about 280,000 light-years long; the size of the galaxy has been attributed to a merger with a smaller galaxy that is believed to have occurred about 100 million years ago. The galaxy is filled with bright blue star clusters. Image: Processing: I created this image with 3 filters taken by the Hubble ACS camera: near- infrared (814nm), […]

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M51 – The Whirlpool Galaxy

The Whirlpool Galaxy, also known as Messier 51a, M51a, and NGC 5194, is an interacting grand-design spiral galaxy with a Seyfert 2 active galactic nucleus. It lies in the constellation Canes Venatici, and was the first galaxy to be classified as a spiral galaxy. Its distance is estimated to be 31 million light-years away from Earth. This is one of my favorite objects, because of how cool it is! Image Equipment: Nikon D90 Nikon F5.6 500mm lens Bahintov mask Intervalometer Sky-Watcher Star adventurer Acquisition ISO 800, F5.6, […]

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Markarian’s chain – A cluster of galaxies

Equipment: Sony Rx10iv Sky watcher star adventurer Star adventurer tripod bahintov mask intervalometer t-shirt for flat frames Acquisition: ISO 800, F/4.0, 300mm equivalent zoom 362 1 minute exposures, 244 stacked (4 hours 20 minutes total exposure time) 50 flats 100 bias Processing: Stacked with siril Processed with pixinsight (stretched, luminance extraction and reapplication, curves transformation) Image with objects:

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The Pinwheel Galaxy

Equipment: Sony Rx10iv SWSA SW Tripod taken at 600mm with a stock lens Bahintov Mask Acquisition: 240×30″ exposures 50 darks 100 bias 100 flats ISO 1600 F/4.0 Stacking: Stacked in DSS Processing (all in pixinsight): DBE, color calibration, Green SNCR Streched image Applied Luminance image Played around with curves Annotated image with other objects:

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Interesting Astronomy & Astrophysics news from the week of 2/21/2021

Next Week’s Night Sky: With the full moon nearly completely gone from Friday’s night sky, this is a great time to get some stargazing in! Bring your favorite pair of binoculars, and feast you eyes on the many beautiful objects in the night sky. My Own Research I found eight blue E+A galaxies in a galactic filament in the Coma cluster of galaxies. An E+A galaxy is a galaxy that has just transformed from its “young” stage to its “old stage.” A galactic filament is simply a […]

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Interesting Astronomy & Astrophysics news from the week of 2/7/2021

Next Week’s Night Sky: When the moon completes the first quarter of its orbit around Earth at 1:47 p.m. EST (or 18:47 GMT) on Friday, Feb. 19, the relative positions of the Earth, sun, and moon will cause us to see it half-illuminated — on its eastern side. In the first quarter, the moon always rises around noon and sets around midnight, so it is also visible in the afternoon daytime sky. The evenings surrounding the first quarter are the best for seeing the lunar terrain when […]

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Interesting Astronomy & Astrophysics news from the week of 1/3/2021

Next week’s night sky: Wednesday marks the new moon. This is a great time for stargazing because the moon will not blot out any stars! Look out for the Pleiades high in the sky, one of the most beautiful star clusters of the night sky. Hubble’s Beautiful Galaxy collisions To celebrate a new year, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has published a montage of six beautiful galaxy mergers. Each of these merging systems was studied as part of the recent HiPEEC survey to investigate the rate of […]

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Interesting Astronomy & Astrophysics news from the week of 12/20/2020

Next week’s night sky: The December full moon, traditionally known as the Oak Moon, Cold Moon, and Long Nights Moon, always shines in or near the stars of Gemini. Since it’s opposite the sun on this day of the lunar month, the moon is fully illuminated and rises at sunset and sets at sunrise. Full moons during the winter months reach as high in the sky as the summer noonday sun, and cast similar shadows. This is a great time to get a good look at the […]

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Interesting Astronomy & Astrophysics news from the week of 12/13/2020

Next week’s night sky: Tomorrow, one of the most interesting and rare astronomy events happens! Jupiter and Saturn will be closer together than they ever have been since 1683. This event will not happen again until 2080!. Tomorrow, look towards the southwestern sky just after sunset. You should see a huge dot, brighter than any star in the sky. It should even be visible through clouds to the naked eye! With binoculars, you should be able to see the individual planets, Jupiter being the larger one.  The […]

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