Gallery XXXIV - Deep Space - 9/18-19/04

            Hurricane Ivan had passed through leaving clear sky in its wake. "Galaxy" Rob Adkins, Dave Tolley and Don Kemper joined me at the DCMO for a night of video observing and imaging. I attached the Stellacam II to a 2" f 3 reducer and sent the output to a 800x600 video moniter. The signal then ran from the monitor's video out to the laptop's frame grabber PCI card (on old ImperX card purchased from AVA). I have read on the Astrovideo web site that objects were better displayed in real time video on a good high resolution B&W monitor then on a laptop screen. Admitting that I don't know how to adjust the contrast on the laptop, i would have to say that unequivocally the view on the B&W monitor was better! (to quote Madeline Kahn in the movie Young Frankenstein "Its true. Its true." ("its twu its twu")) The video was better then the images I captured for some objects.

            The telescope is a C14. We used 256 integrations, gain of 50-60% (20% on the globular and open clusters), and lo gamma. Images are stacks of 30 frames (about 256 seconds of imaging).

            The Stellacam II likes bright objects so we started with globular clusters.

           

M2 - a globular cluster in Aquarius, 37500 light years distant, 175 ly across, contains 150000 stars, visual magnitude 6.5

M15 - A globular cluster in Pegasus, 33600 ly distant, 175 ly across, magnitude 6.3, a very dense core

NGC 7789 an open cluster in Cassiopeia, mag 6.7,  8000 ly distant

M 52 an open cluster in Cassiopeia, 5000 ly distant, 19 ly across, mag 7.3

M 71 is a rather open globular in Sagitta, 13000 ly distant, mag 8.2

M 57 is a planetary nebula in Lyra, 2300 ly distant, mag 8.8 - the ring nebula, 15 th magnitude central star

 NGC 7331 - mag 9.6 spiral galaxy in Pegasus, 49 million ly distant, 30000 ly across

The small galaxy above and to the right is 7335, to its right is 7336, 7337 is to the left near a star - a nice grouping

 

NCG 7332 and 7339 form a nice pair in Pegasus

7332 - right - m 11

7339 - left - m 12.2

 

 

NGC 7184 - a magnitude 12 spiral galaxy in Aquarius

NGC 7606 - a magnitude 11.5 Spiral galaxy in Aquarius - 90 million ly distant

NGC 7009 - the Saturn nebula - at f3 to the left and at prime focus to the right.

This is a magnitude 8 planetary nebula in Aquarius - 2400 ly distant

NGC 2392 - the Eskimo nebula - a magnitude 10 planetary nebula in Gemini, 3000 ly distant

NGC 2371 - the Gemini nebula - a magnitude 13 planetary nebula in Gemini, 4400 ly distant

 The Flame nebula in Orion - NGC 2024 - near Alnitak at the edge of Orion's belt a Low surface brightness object, a little big for the FOV of our set up.

NGC 1977 - a large reflection nebula in Orion about 0.5 degree from M24. A little big for our FOV

 

NGC 1973 - a reflection nebula in Orion - North on M42, again big for our FOV

M42 - the great Orion Nebula - here the central region is seen - the brightest reflection nebula seen from the northern hemisphere - 1600 ly distant - 4 times the apparent size of the full moon!

M 78 - a reflection nebula about 2 degrees from Orion's belt - magnitude 8.3, 1600 ly distant - a bright diffuse nebula

M 1 - the Crab nebula - Supernova remnant in Tarus - mag 8.3, 6300 ly distant, Super Nova was seen by Chinese in 1054AD - Messier's first noncomet object

NGC 891 - a large edge on spiral galaxy in Andromeda - magnitude 10, 10 million ly distant, discovered by Caroline Herschel in 1783

NGC 792 - a magnitude 14 spiral galaxy in Aries.

About this time we tired out and the fog was creeping up the valley. We had the equipment taken down and the dome closed up by 4:15AM.

All in all, 21 objects (not including galaxy pairs and galaxy clusters) including 8  Messiers and 13 NGCs were viewed and imaged. M27 was viewed but it did not image well which is amazing given how well it was seen on the screen. I need to learn how to manipulate image brightness and contrast in Astrovideo - I wonder about the default settings of black=10% and white = 99.9%. I need to play with these settings. 

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