Who says you cannot shoot dark nebulae from the city? This is LDN694, one of my most beloved targets. A copious star field just barely blocked by a dark nebula which resembles a void.
More than a beehive, a swarm of bees! Cannot deny the beauty of the M44 open star cluster, filled with hundreds of red dwarfs, five very luminous red giants, and quite a few very energetic blue stars.
My fascination with globular clusters is two ways: their compact form and brightness is mesmerizing; their composition is astronomically intriguing and fascinating.
We have found variable stars, neutron stars and it’s even hypothesized that medium sized black holes could be at their cores.
Globular clusters not only exist in galaxy’s halos. M71 is practically embedded in Milky Way’s disc, just halfway (apparently) in between Albireo and Altair. This globular cluster has another peculiarity: it is rich in metals which is unusual for an old object like this.
This turned out to be the last picture with my 130 mm Newtonian telescope. Unfortunately, high winds knocked it out despite my ZWO Mount had more than 11 pounds of counterweights to hold it in place. Anyway, the fact that I was able to capture 3 galaxies that are about 35 M-ly away makes me love my hobby no matter what.
Although I have been enjoying clear skies, today decided to reprocess my picture of NGC’s 1999 region. This time my processing yielded in a more natural color.
I published a few weeks ago a widefield view of the Omega Glob Cluster with my Rokinon 135 mm lens. Couldn’t resist to try a closer look with my 130 mm newt, so I shot it again! Wouldn’t you have done the same? Love this yaw dropping cluster!
I have been climbing up with my astronomy gear from a sidewalk next to the apartment I used to live in not so long ago, to a balcony, and from there high to the rooftop of my house. This has allowed me to access plenty of southern sky targets that I was not totally aware of.
GUM 15 is one of them. This nebula, located very close to the Vela SN remnant.
There are better pictures of NGC4216, a Galaxy you can find in Virgo’s Constellation. My idea, however, to capture it was two-folded: to capture it “as it appears to be” from my rooftop in Mexico City, but mostly to capture and understand the supernova explosion that happened there a few weeks ago and that you can find (WOW!) in my photograph.
If I understood well, our cosmos at the beginning was a very dense but chaotic nebula. With inflation, it started to break into smaller clouds. Gravity pulled some of this gas and started to form stars. These stars, thanks to their energy, carved and shaped these nebulae.
Lower’s nebula, depicted in my attached picture, is a small remnant of this lengthy process.