Here are the astronomy photos from January. This month marks the end of my first year of sending out photos. Thanks for hanging in there with me. It’s been an interesting journey! So here we go….
IC 405. Flaming Star Nebula. The blue star, AE Aurigae, is thought to be so hot that it knocks electrons away from the gas that surrounds it, giving it the blue glow. As the electrons move away and cool they are absorbed by the surrounding gas which turns it red. It is about 1500 light years away and spans 5 light years. I love those blue lines!
IC 410. The Tadpole Nebula is close to the Flaming Star Nebula in the constellation of Auriga. A star cluster, NGC 1893, lies in the center of the nebula, lighting it up. This is an area of active star formation. The “tadpoles” are suppose to be in the dark areas in the center, but to be honest, they have not revealed themselves to me yet.
NGC 2264. Some nebula are just too big, but I hate to miss the details that a narrow field of view gives. Here are two photos. The first shows a dark “cone” near the bottom. The Fox Fur Nebula, is shown in the 2nd photo. When some clear skies show up again I’ll give it another try to pull a few more features out of NGC 2264, and maybe give my wide field of view Hyperstar lens a shot at it…. It would help too, to get a clearer night and a telescope with more poop to it to see these features, but I’m not complaining, honest, Marianne! Just saying, if I got a big telescope I could take a better photo of it.
NGC 1999. Key Hole Nebula. This Nebula is my favorite object of the month (another one of Orion’s wonders!) and the smallest image. I read about it in Sky and Telescope magazine and decided to go out and find it, and it was worth the trip. What’s amazing about it is that the dark patch on the right side is not a cloud of gas and dust, but a void that can be seen through.
In 1781 Charles Messier, a French astronomer, published a list of objects in the sky which were NOT comets, to avoid wasting time sorting them out from the comets he was searching for. The “Messier Catalogue” has many of the brightest nebula, star clusters, galaxies we can see with low power telescopes, and they are popular with amateur astronomers and astrophotographers. Of the 110 objects, with this month’s additions, I am now within about 15 to having photos of them all. The first, M 70, is a Globular Cluster. Globular Clusters are old clusters of stars that are tightly bound by gravity, and can have tens of thousands to millions of stars in them. The other 8 are Open Star Clusters. Open Star Clusters are stars that are loosely bound by gravity and were born about the same time. I love the shapes that the stars can line up to make in Open Star Clusters. All of these clusters are within our Milky Way Galaxy.
M 42. This time of year, whenever I go out and the sky looks clear, I take a quick photo of M 42, the Orion Nebula, to see if I can notice something else there. This photo was taken with a filter that lets only specific hydrogen and oxygen emissions through, so it highlights some areas and dims others.
This month also saw the James Webb Telescope finally get to it’s new home at L2 and it appears it is in one piece and everything is working! This is a huge deal for us all in helping us come to understand where it is we find ourselves in the Universe, and what that means. This summer expect to start seeing lots of news coming out of NASA about what it is finding. Exciting.
In the not so good news category, we are launching more and more low orbit satellites. Starlink hopes to launch 42,000 satellites, and that’s just one company. The skies are getting crowded, and the streaks going across my photographs are going to be increasing….Plus, if you see how the night sky is getting brighter and brighter as a result of our light pollution….The night sky is changing!
But for February, I’d settle for a few more clear nights than I saw in January!
Clear Skies
Hank
