Welcome to my February photos of objects I found in the sky this month. Astronomers call this EAA or Electronically Assisted Astronomy. It is a little like looking through a telescope lens, but rather than putting my eye to the eyepiece, I put a special video camera, and display the camera’s image on a monitor, through a computer, so that I can capture longer exposures. With more light, I see more details, and snap a photo after about 10 minutes of fooling around.
My word for the month is Pareidolia. Pare-ah-dol-ee-ya. It’s the word for seeing familiar objects in random images. Like Jesus in your toast, faces in clouds, or a dog in M 42, the Orion Nebula.
In the lower left hand corner I see a puppy. Actually, two puppies in one. One puppy is looking at me, with a white blaze on its nose and droopy eyes. The other way I see this dog is that it is looking up the red shoulder of the Orion Nebula. It’s one of the fun things in looking at these images. When I did a little research on this word, of course early psychologists saw pareidolia as a sign of dementia or psychosis. I’m hoping that the current thinking that it is a sign of creativity is more accurate.
I’ve posted the Rosette Nebula in the past, but this last time I was looking closely at the center and there seemed to be some veins and wispy clouds I had not spotted before. The first photo shows the whole nebula, and the 2nd I took using a filter that blocks out just about everything but some narrow hydrogen and oxygen emissions. Usually when I try to photograph nebula when the moon is close to being full, I don’t get much of anything worth keeping. But with the filter, it blocks the moon shine!
HD 84406 is a 6.9 magnatude star in Ursa Major. 6.9 means that you need a telescope to see it. In the photo below it is the star in the center. I photographed it because it is the star that the James Webb Telescope is using to calibrate all 16 of its individual mirrors on. The calibration process is taking several months. https://inf.news/en/science/d5378d21ca2f890f79a522d53baa261a.html
C 14 (Caldwell 14) is a double star cluster in the constellation Perseus.
I’ve shown M 81 in the past, Bode’s Galaxy, but I realized that M 82 (Cigar Galaxy) and NGC 3077 (Garland Galaxy) are also in the same neighborhood, so I used my Hyperstar lens to get them all in one photo.
The M 82. Cigar Galaxy often shows a red (hydrogen) spot on it, so I used my trusty L-Extreme filter to bring out that emission here.
Two more galaxies for you. First is M 106, a spiral galaxy where you can see one of it’s arms sticking out. The 2nd photo is NGC 5195, the Whirlpool Galaxy. This is actually two galaxies that are coming together—where you can see the exchange of stellar material between them. I took the photo with my wide angle Hyperstar lens, and enlarged it to study it more closely. The stars you can see are not part of the Whirlpool Galaxy—they are in our own Milky Way. NGC 5195 is too far away to see individual stars…just their glow. It is about 25 million light years away.
I’ve been taking photos of the Moon again, and as the moon was near being full, I spotted some interesting craters. My Moon Atlas not only lists the names of the Moon’s features, but where those names came from. As you might guess from the names, the Italians, French and Germans are well represented. All from the 1500s-1700s. Interesting group, though. Bailly was a scientist who was the author of several histories on astronomy. Schooner was the first to use a filter to see solar spots. And Kircher was a scientist/priest who created the first museum and wrote a French-Chinese dictionary. Busy fellows. Come to find out, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) is in charge of naming astronomical objects and features.
Finally, there are a few objects, that whenever I’m out and the skies are in the spectacular to wonderful category, I take photos of them. I’m looking for the right conditions to get a great shot of a great object. B 33, the Horse Head Nebula, is one of them. There are some spectacular images taken of B 33. Most of them are done not with EAA, but with long exposure astrophotography. They have hours and hours invested over months and months, and use a variety of software magic to pull out the faintest details. In mid-February there was about an hour window when the atmosphere was just right, so I gave it a go. There are things about B 33 that I’d like to do better with, but this showed me that it may be within my reach….on just the right night. I’d never seen the blue streaks before! The reds were just spectacular. Enjoy!
Clear Skies!
Hank
