Tagged: messier - Adam Lundie - Eatons Hill Observatory

The Butterfly Cluster, Messier 6, is an open cluster of hot blue stars with the brightest member being an orange giant star. Behind the cluster is the orange light of the Milky Way, and a beautiful cloud of excited Hydrogen alpha gas.

The Sombrero Galaxy (also known as Messier Object 104, M104 or NGC 4594) is a lenticular galaxy in the constellation Virgo found 31 million light-years from Earth.

The Orion Nebula is one of the brightest nebulae in the sky, visible to the naked eye. It is seen as the fuzzy middle star in the sword of Orion. The nebula is 1344 light years away and is one of the closest star forming regions to Earth.

Almost everyone has a go at imaging the Trifid nebula, which is composed of 3 different type of nebulae; emission, reflection, and absorption. When I noticed some faint red glow in the background, I decided to try integrating some long hydrogen emission line frames to see if I could get any structure out of it. I'm quite happy with the resulting background structures!

I was lucky enough to snag a second hand 900mm refractor at a good price. I needed a bright target to test it with. The Lagoon Nebula is a giant interstellar cloud around 4077 light years away, classified as an emission nebula and as an H II region.

The Southern Pinwheel Galaxy is a barred spiral galaxy approximately 15 million light-years away. It is one of the closest and brightest barred spiral galaxies in the sky.

The Sombrero Galaxy is an unbarred spiral galaxy 28 million light-years from Earth. The galaxy has a diameter of approximately 50,000 light-years, 30% the size of the Milky Way.

My original target was the Helix Nebula, but after spending most of Saturday night trying to work out how to use off axis guiding, I gave up and noticed Orion was rising. A nice bright target to use the drift aligned mount on.

A DSLR image of the swan nebula when I was first learning how to do astrophotography

M68 is a globular cluster at a distance of about 33,000 light-years away from Earth.

Messier 15 is a very old and tightly packed home to over 100,000 stars. It is 33,600 light years from Earth, and is visible to the naked eye in areas with little light pollution.

10600 light years away, Messier 22 is one of the closest and brightest globular clusters visible from Earth.

The dark molecular clouds of Barnard 92 (center) and 93 (left) are superimposed over the Messier 24 Sagittarius Star Cloud.

The Lagoon Nebula is an active stellar nursery spanning 60 light years across. This false color photograph shows the interplay of three gasses: hydrogen-alpha in green, sulfur-II in red, and oxygen-III in blue.

One of the few Messier objects difficult to observe in the northern hemisphere, M55 is a globular cluster 17,600 light years away, comprising of around 100,000 very old stars.