Friday, 16 October 2020

NGC 281 The Pacman Nebula in Cassiopeia

 This has taken a lot for time (for me), in total around 2hours 30 minutes per channel ,so around 10 hours total . I haven't tried to control the size of the stars,  will leave that, to another day maybe. The image has much less noise than most of the ones I do, because of the long integration time. The nebula is bigger than the field of view, I have missed the edges.



Wikipedia: NGC 281, IC 11 or Sh2-184 is a bright emission nebula and part of an H II region in the northern constellation of Cassiopeia and is part of the Milky Way's Perseus Spiral Arm. This 20×30 arcmin sized nebulosity is also associated with open cluster IC 1590, several Bok globules and the multiple star, B 1. It collectively forms Sh2-184, spanning over a larger area of 40 arcmin. A recent distance from radio parallaxes of water masers at 22 GHz made during 2014 is estimated it lies 2.82±0.20 kpc. (9200 ly.) from us. Colloquially, NGC 281 is also known as the Pacman Nebula for its resemblance to the video game character.

Wednesday, 14 October 2020

Mars and first colour image of Jupiter

 Mars was at its closest to Earth on 6th October, three days ago. It was quite high in the sky, so this is the best image I have to date.




The image of Jupiter was taken at the end of September, when it was low on the southern horizon, so in disturbed air.