Galaxies and Stuff

I’ve been experimenting with a relatively cheap dedicated astrophotography camera, the Svbony SC311. It’s a self contained camera with wifi and a dedicated phone app, making it very easy to take pictures through a telescope and store them on a removable flash drive. For reasons I won’t go into, I probably won’t be keeping it. However, before sending it back, I did manage to snap a couple of images of the sun and the moon. These are among the most detailed pictures that I’ve taken to date. Here are a couple of samples.

https://mega.nz/file/M1AlTZqR#4ew3LQNWOBuV38Qpnag2o8WDCB7R3YWxlFWqweeEhsU

https://mega.nz/file/xwxEmAAI#ME0g9G-HPXL5yCiY7a0sUkpiMXGlihazm9GIM4Kw3Aw

The trouble with this camera is that, while it takes great photos of the sun and the moon, it takes absolutely terrible photos of everything else. Don’t ask me why. I haven’t got a clue.

For deep sky images I’m now almost totally reliant on my new “smart” telescope, the Seestar S50. It’s just so easy to set it up and them come back inside and do something else, or even just go to bed. This is M51, the “Whirlpool” galaxy. It’s the result of about two hours of stacked images.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whirlpool_Galaxy

You can find this near the handle of the Plough,

For comparison, my previous efforts, that involved a lot of manual picture taking and shivering in the cold, resulted in some much poorer images.

The Whirlpool galaxy is a very popular target for amateur astrophotographers. A much less popular target is the nearby M106. Despite being closer to us than the Whirlpool galaxy, it’s a good bit dimmer and appears to show a lot less structure. I’ve made several attempts to image this over the last month. The picture below is a combination of three nights worth of pictures, totalling about four hours’ exposure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messier_106

M106 is principally of interest to astronomers because of it’s contribution to setting the distance scale to nearby galaxies. The wikipedia article has some details. If I’ve understood this correctly, it goes something like this. Water MASERs emit radiation at a specific frequency. MASER clouds in M106 are bright enough that their doppler shift can be monitored. This allows their acceleration to be determined. This in turn determines their exact distance from the central galactic black hole. This absolute distance can be compared to their angular separation. From there it’s simple geometry to determine distance. Once this is known, other “standard candles”, such as Cepheid Variable stars, can be more accurately calibrated.

If you look just above M106 in the picture you’ll see a short, elongated, fuzzy blob. This is another galaxy, NGC 4248. The following Hubble image is quite beautiful.

Hubble’s Cosmic Atlas

And near the top of my picture, are yet another pair of galaxies, NGC 4231 and 4232. Here are some close up pictures.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:NGC_4231

One of the things I’ve mentioned before is that the Seestar isn’t very good at long exposures because it can’t fully compensate for the apparent rotation of the sky (it uses an alt-azimuth mount rather than an equatorial mount, for anyone who’s interested). As M106 is just such a long exposure I thought I’d do a short movie that shows the camera as it struggles to keep the galaxy in view. (You might need to enable insecure links in your browser to see this.) This is about 100x normal speed.

http://www.platitudes.org.uk/m106_edit.mkv

As you can see. I’ve been quite busy over the last few weeks.

Oh, and T Cor Bor still hasn’t exploded.