Monthly Archives: May 2019

A Home Galaxy

 in Blog  tagged M51 / NGC5194 / NGC5195 / Whirpool Galaxy

It’s fun to imagine that distant worlds might be home to other sentient beings, who stare up at their night sky to see the Milky Way Galaxy (although, even translated to their language, that would be a very odd name for it).  Perhaps there is some such world or worlds in the Whirlpool Galaxy, also known as M51 or NGC5194.  But in this case, “home galaxy” means that I captured this image of M51 from my home observatory, which is unusual because 99% of the images I capture from here are narrowband images of emission nebulae.  And I was surprised […]

Another Image from Last Week

 in Blog  tagged m106 / NGC4217 / NGC4248 / NGC4258

You might notice that both this and my previous post have images of galaxies rather than my usual nebulae (and more specifically, emission nebulae captured with narrowband filters).  That’s partly because I wanted to take advantage of the dark sky at the star party to photograph things I can’t shoot from home.  But it’s also true that at this time of year, the Milky Way doesn’t come up until 3AM or so, and all of the nebulae we photograph are in the Milky Way, so it’s now “galaxy season”. The largest galaxy in this image is M106, also known as […]

First Star Party of 2019

 in Blog  tagged Hamburger Galaxy / Leo Trio / Leo Triplet / M65 / M66 / NGC3628

Last weekend was the first star party I attended this year – in this area anyway.  The past Winter was long and cruel for astronomers, and May is a rather late start.  We went to my favorite place, SkyView Acres, in Goldendale, WA. The above photo is the “Leo Triplet” or “Leo Trio” – 3 galaxies in the Leo constellation.  The one on the left is NGC3628, commonly known as the Hamburger Galaxy.  In the upper right is M65, and lower right is M66.  This is an LRGB image made up of 24 L (luminance) exposures and 12 each of […]