Hello,
I share with you 2 photos of the new SWAN comet. They were made on Sunday morning on Reunion Island before sunrise.
The first photo shows the comet but also a shooting star from the Eta Aquarids meteor shower.
The second photo shows the comet near the zodiacal light. The lights below come from a small village in the Cirque of Mafate, La Nouvelle.
Best,
Huge and ancient crater of the Moon, in a rugged and mountainous region, riddled with ancient impact craters. Its internal walls are irregular, presenting deformations and a great slope.
Detailed view of the central part of The Great Nebula in Orion one of the most imaged celestial object. The Orion Nebula is located about 1500 light years away in the same spiral arm of our Galaxy as the Sun.
The Orion Nebula contains a very young open cluster The Trapezium. In normal observing conditions can be resolved four stars but two of these stars are binary systems giving a total of six stars to the asterism. The stars of the Trapezium, along with many other stars, are still in their early years. The Trapezium is a component of the much larger Orion Nebula Cluster, an association of about 2800 stars within a diameter of 20 light years.
Different exposures time was used to produce HDR combination and to be able to resolve the bright and dark regions.
Frames were taken with RC 12” astrograph, f/5 in HaLRGB, Bin 1:
Ha: 45 x 5 sec;
Ha: 50 x 30 sec;
Ha: 17 x 300 sec;
Ha: 6 x 600 sec;
LRGB: 10:10:10:10 x 1 sec
LRGB: 3:3:3:3 x 300 sec
Total exp. time 210 min (3.5 hrs)
Last edited by bystander on Tue May 05, 2020 3:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Reason:Please, no hot links to images > 500Kb. Uploaded image as attachment.
M82 (Pure, Deep and Final). KG Observatory, Julian, CA.
My 5th attempt at M82 this year...
PURE because I use a Lighten blend of Ha over RGB. I believe this preserves the RGB much more than a screen blend.
DEEP because I use 20 hours of Ha in a 21.3 SQM sky.
FINAL because I promise this is the last version – at least for 2020. (-:
The layering technique used here is...
If we observe the Sun the from day to day the same time (e.g.: 8 AM. or at noon or 4 PM.) we may spot it nearly the same direction. However its position in Winter is lower in the sky, in Summer it's higher and there are some periodic movements towards West and East because the Earth is orbiting around the Sun in elliptical orbit. If we capture the phenomena and overlay these photos, our Sun slowly draws the famous Celestial Number Eight in a year. The recent years analemma photo projects have become very popular amongst amateur astronomers and photographers, there are completed photos published almost every months including analemma-curves behind wonderful foregrounds.
Our Moon needs 1.035028 days (24 hours 50 minutes 29 seconds) in average to reach the same point in the sky to consecutive times. We might say this is the length of the "Moon-day". In case the weather and the clouds allow and we photograph the Moon 50 minutes and 29 seconds later on successive days, we may capture an analemma-like curve in 27 days. But (unlike the Sun's analemma) this is an open curve that looks different from month to month.
Capturing Lunar analemmas is still in its infancy: only three photos have been published so far (the third one was taken by myself in 2014). Due to the quarantine of the actual COVID-19 epidemic and to the promising weather forecasts let me try to take a new Lunar analemma photo. The small meadow 400 meters away from my home near Mogyoród, Hungary have an excellent outlook towards Southwestern direction with the lights of Mogyoród and the M3 highway in the foreground and with the lights of Budapest in the distance. From 26th of March to 18th of April I walked here daily and captured the Moon (except one rainy and cloudy morning) and overlaid these Lunar crescents and disks to the background photo taken on 27th of March.
I also made a short Youtube video -- the first "real" YT video of my life.. It may be quite lame but I think it's very informative and may inspire others to photograph this beautiful celestial phenomena. Just remember: all Solar analemmas look like the same but all Lunar analemmas would be different and unique..
Click to play embedded YouTube video.
Photo details:
2020.03.26. - 2020.04.18. Mogyoród, Hungary
Canon EOS 5D Mark II + Samyang 24/1.4 + Tamron EF 150/600 @ 600mm
My goal was to combine the very bright and very dim parts of the nebula, while maintaining visibility of the evenly spaced, concentric rings around the central bright structure. While the HST image of NGC 6543 clearly shows these rings, I was only able to find a couple amateur images that show them as well. The data was acquired during April 2020 from my Bortle 7 backyard in Herent, Belgium. The base layer consists of short and long LRGB exposures, while the faint outer halo was enhanced with H-alpha and OIII data.
The rose of space: I present the rosette nebula in HOO
The petals of this cosmic rose are actually a nursery of stars.
What characterizes this image is the sculpture drawn by the globules of dark dust.
The stars emit ultraviolet radiation that ionizes the surrounding hydrogen cloud, which gives the image a red color.
Crescent Nebula and Soap Bubble, imaged over several days from my backyard in San Diego.
Within our Milky Way in the constellation Cygnus lies clouds of gas and dust drifting through rich star fields. Within the image view are the Soap Bubble (lower right) and the Crescent Nebula (upper left). Both were formed during the final phase in the life of a star. NGC 6888, also known as the Crescent was shaped as its bright, central massive Wolf-Rayet star, WR 136, shed its outer envelope in a strong stellar wind. Burning through fuel at an accelerated rate, WR 136 is near the end of a short life that should finish in a spectacular supernova explosion. The recent discovered (2007) Soap Bubble Nebula is likely a planetary nebula, the final shroud of a lower mass, long-lived, sun-like star destined to become a slowly cooling white dwarf. While both are some 5,000 light-years or so distant, the larger Crescent Nebula is around 25 light-years across.
Full Res: Copyright: Charles Bonafilia
Imaged in HOO Palette
Ha 80 x 300"
OII 160 x 300"
Esprit 120ED
Last edited by CBonafilia on Sat May 09, 2020 3:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.
The Wide Field Coverage for Juno (WFCJ) program is synchronized with perijove passes of the NASA Juno mission. "Perijove" is the close-approach atmospheric overflight of Juno during its highly eccentric 53-day orbit. The Juno spacecraft orbit is very eccentric, allowing microwave and infrared scans of the atmosphere from a vantage point inside the planet's intense radiation belts. Although Juno is equipped with a visible wavelength public-outreach camera (JunoCam), the proximity to Jupiter during the perijove passes means that Juno itself cannot obtain regional-scale or global-scale imaging data to provide context for its own observations. The WFCJ program fills this gap with WFC3/UVIS imaging data.
Access Data: MAST-NASA-JUNO-HUBBLE (Firts Observation Date by Juno on 2019-09-12) Perijove Number: 22 Primary Investigator: Michael H. Wong
I have spent a few hours enjoying the processing of this magnificent image obtained by the Hubble Space Telescope, I am fascinated by the appearance of the clouds of gas and dust that are seen in the image, since I began to process it I cannot remove from my head the impression that I am observing the surface of Mars.
Credits and Copyrights: Hubble Legacy Archive, NASA, STScI; Processing by Alberto Pisabarro 2020.
It may be quite lame but I think it's very informative and may inspire others to photograph this beautiful celestial phenomena. Just remember: all Solar analemmas look like the same but all Lunar analemmas would be different and unique.. 
