This is an update on the photos I’ve taken in the last two months with my telescope here in Custer, South Dakota.
Here is the August-September line-up:
M 2 is a globular star cluster in our galaxy, the Milky Way.
NGC 7380 is an open cluster of stars and nebula.
I really want to catch NGC 7635, the Bubble Nebula, on a really clear night, so its bubble shows up better.
This photo was taken with a special lens, called HyperStar, that gives the telescope a wide field of view—over 2 degrees!. It does not give as detailed a photo, but it is able to capture very large objects, such as M 31, the Andromeda Galaxy. This is our closest neighboring galaxy, and is only 2.5 million light years away. Also in the photo, above Andromeda is another galaxy, M 110, and below to the right is galaxy M 32. I love the dark “dust lanes” in Andromeda. Astronomers believe that our own galaxy, the Milky Way, looks much like Andromeda, but we only have about 300 billion stars compared to Andromeda’s trillion stars.
NGC 6960 is part of the Veil Nebula. It’s in Cygnus, which is right in the center of our Milky Way galaxy, and that’s where our stars are most densely packed.
Also in Cygnus’s Veil Nebula is NGC 6992. Love those colors!
IC 5146 is in Cygnus, too. I love how soft the colors are.
I couldn’t resist adding this snapshot of Jupiter and 4 of its moons. Actually I can’t make out where the 4th moon is, as I think the black spot that shows up on Jupiter is actually the shadow of the moon on the surface of the planet.
Finally, here’s a photo of the new pier for our Celestron 8” Evolution telescope. Prior to building this, I’d set the telescope up on a tripod. But with the pier I’ve added a wedge that sits between the pier and the telescope mount. It is angled at about 43 degrees (our latitude), and is able to more easily track the stars as they move along the ecliptic—the path the stars take as they arc across the sky. The wire coming off the telescope connects the camera to the aluminum box, that connects my telescope to the house through buried cables, so I can be inside in the winter to see the stars!
If you’d like to be able to look up in the sky and know what you are looking at, I’d recommend a planetarium app for your smart phone: Stellarium. The regular version is just a couple of dollars, and the “plus” version is about $10. You basically hold it up to the sky and it shows and tells you what’s up there. It’s easy to know what you are looking at, roam around, zoom in, look ahead or back in time, search…. I use mine every night I’m out. It has lots of features and for many of the objects in the sky it has lots of information. Very cool.
Until next time….Hank
