Starship Asterisk*

Venus and the Seven Sisters

Frank A. Rodriguez Ramirez
astroeduca(a)gmail.com
www.instagram.com/astroeduca

From Tejeda. Gran Canaria Island. Canary Islands. Spain
13.04.2023

Spectacular conjunction between Venus and Pleyades from the Tejeda basin and the Sacred Mountains of Gran Canaria, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The ancient inhabitants of the islands looked at the sky and thousands of years later we continue to enjoy the sky as if time had not passed. Roque Nublo stands out in the foreground in the heart of the island of Gran Canaria, a spectacular monolith and aboriginal sanctuary.

Venus-Pleiades-Conjunction above the black desert

shining Venus above the black mountains of the black desert, Egypt, between the Pleiades and Hyades

Apr 14 2023

Venus-pleiades-Conjunction by osama Fathi, on Flickr

Venus-pleiades-Conjunctionannotated- by osama Fathi, on Flickr

also you can easily find mercury and the California nebula in the frame


Gears:
Nikon Z6 Mod, Skywacher star adventurer tracker , Sigma 28-70 mm

Settings :

-Stacke 11 photos ( 1, 2, 3 min , ISO 800 and 32000, f4 @35mm
-Foreground : 2 photos , 1/10 sec Iso 800 at 35 mm

Softwares: Deep Sky Stacker , Pixinsight ,Adobe Photoshop 2022, Astrotools

Credit :
Osama Fathi / https://www.instagram.com/osama.fathi.nswatcher85/
Social:
https://www.instagram.com/osama.fathi.nswatcher85/
https://www.facebook.com/NSWatcher/

Black Desert, Egypt

After years of visiting the place, it is the first time I see the Temple’s lights off, so I had the chance to capture the Temple and moonrise without the light pollution.
More info:
https://spacetinkerer.com/tinkering-sto ... ent-light/

Venus and the Seven Sisters

Frank A. Rodriguez Ramirez
astroeduca(a)gmail.com
www.instagram.com/astroeduca

From Tejeda. Gran Canaria Island. Canary Islands. Spain
13.04.2023

Spectacular conjunction between Venus and Pleyades from the Tejeda basin and the Sacred Mountains of Gran Canaria, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The ancient inhabitants of the islands looked at the sky and thousands of years later we continue to enjoy the sky as if time had not passed. Roque Nublo stands out in the foreground in the heart of the island of Gran Canaria, a spectacular monolith and aboriginal sanctuary.

Venus and the Seven Sisters

Frank A. Rodriguez Ramirez
astroeduca(a)gmail.com
www.instagram.com/astroeduca

From Tejeda. Gran Canaria Island. Canary Islands. Spain
13.04.2023

Spectacular conjunction between Venus and Pleyades from the Tejeda basin and the Sacred Mountains of Gran Canaria, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The ancient inhabitants of the islands looked at the sky and thousands of years later we continue to enjoy the sky as if time had not passed. Roque Nublo stands out in the foreground in the heart of the island of Gran Canaria, a spectacular monolith and aboriginal sanctuary.

Zodiacal Light

I created this image with a stack of five sixty second exposures, tracking the stars to eliminate star trails, and one two minute exposure of the foreground and blended the two shots together.

Canon T3i @ ISO 3200
Sigma 17-35mm lens @ f/2.8
Skywatcher Star Adventurer
Stacked in Pixinsight
Processed in Pixinsight and Photoshop

Andromeda Galaxy , also known as Messier 31, M31, or NGC 224 and originally the Andromeda Nebula, is a barred spiral galaxy with the diameter of about 46.56 kiloparsecs (152,000 light-years) approximately 765 kpc (2.5 million light-years) from Earth and the nearest large galaxy.
This shot is a mosaic made up of 3 panels.

https://www.astrobin.com/b7wljm/final/r ... /qhd/?sync Equipment:
Skywatcher 200/800 - Asi 294 Color

Image processing:
Pixinsight/Photoshop

Location:
Rome Italy

NGC 7635, also known as the Bubble Nebula, Sharpless 162, or Caldwell 11, is an H II region emission nebula in the constellation Cassiopeia.



Equipment:
Skywatcher 200/800 - Asi 294 Color

Image processing:
Pixinsight/Photoshop

Location:
Rome Italy

NGC6188 in SHO palette with RGB Stars. I've imaged NGC6188 previously at 360mm but really wanted to see what additional detail I could see at 800mm. Very cool to be able to see more of the structure in the central dust bands and some of the other detail that was hinted at when at 360mm. Details are:

Imaging Telescope - Bintel BT200 f/4
Imaging Camera - ZWO ASI1600MM Pro
Mount - Sky-Watcher EQ6-R Pro
Filters - ZWO Blue 36 mm · ZWO Green 36 mm · ZWO H-alpha 7nm 36mm · ZWO O-III 7nm 36mm · ZWO Red 36 mm · ZWO S-II 7nm 36 mm
Accessories - Sharpstar 2" 1x coma corrector (MPCC) · ZWO EAF · ZWO EFW 7 x 36mm

Dates:13 Apr 2023 · 14 Apr 2023

Frames:
ZWO S-II 7nm 36 mm: 58×180″(2h 54′)
ZWO H-alpha 7nm 36mm: 56×180″(2h 48′)
ZWO O-III 7nm 36mm: 47×180″(2h 21′)
ZWO Red 36 mm: 58×15″(14′ 30″)
ZWO Green 36 mm: 59×15″(14′ 45″)
ZWO Blue 36 mm: 60×15″(15′)

Integration: 8h 47′ 15″
Processed in Pixinsight

NGC6188_BT200 by Chris Jensen, on Flickr

NGC 3718 is a small but beautiful galaxy in the constellation Ursa Major. Also visible just above it is the galaxy NGC 3729, which is believed to impact NGC 3718 with its gravitational pull.
NGC 3718 is a barred spiral galaxy seen Edge-on. Yes, edge-on despite looking like it is face-on. The blue light is not the spiral arms but instead the galaxy's bulb of light.

The tiny group of galaxies just to the bottom left of the main target is Hickson Group 56 (H56).

22.5 hours exposure time / QHY600M / SVX130 / Bortle 2 Utah Desert Remote Observatories / RGB filters

Credits:
Antoine and Dalia Grelin
https://www.galactic-hunter.com/



More information if needed: https://www.galactic-hunter.com/post/ngc3718

Deep Image of Messier 87 - with Black Hole Jet and Globular Clusters

Deep Image of Messier 87 - with Black Hole Jet and Globular Clusters by Rolf Wahl Olsen, on Flickr


Deep Image of Messier 87 - with Black Hole Jet and Globular Clusters (Annotated) by Rolf Wahl Olsen, on Flickr


The Central Jet of Messier 87 by Rolf Wahl Olsen, on Flickr

This deep image shows the giant elliptical galaxy Messier 87, surrounded by over 1,300 of its globular clusters and with the famous central jet; a powerful stream of material that is ejected from the galaxy's supermassive black hole. Also visible are many satellite galaxies that orbit around M87 as well as faint foreground dust in our own Milky Way.

Messier 87 is a giant elliptical galaxy located in the Virgo galaxy cluster, approximately 55 million light-years away from Earth. It is a massive elliptical galaxy, with a diameter of around 120,000 light-years and a mass estimated to be around 2 trillion times that of the Sun. It is one of the largest galaxies in the nearby universe, and is located at the center of the Virgo galaxy cluster, which contains over 1,000 galaxies.

The central jet of M87 is one of the most spectacular astrophysical phenomena in the universe. It extends more than 5,000 light-years from the galaxy's core and emits intense radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum, from radio waves to gamma rays. The jet is powered by the accretion of matter onto the supermassive black hole, which has a mass of approximately 6.5 billion times that of the Sun.
On April 10, 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration released the first-ever image of the shadow of a black hole. The target was the supermassive black hole at the center of M87. By comparing the observed size of the black hole's shadow to models of black hole accretion and spacetime geometry, astronomers have been able to estimate the mass of the black hole to be around 6.5 billion times that of the Sun. This makes it one of the most massive black holes known.

In addition to its central jet, M87 is also known for its rich population of globular clusters. In this deep image over 1300 of M87's globular clusters are visible! These are dense, spherical clusters of stars that orbit the galaxy's core. M87 has one of the largest populations of globular clusters of any galaxy, with an estimated 12,000 clusters in total. The globular clusters in M87 are among the brightest in the universe, with many of them visible even in small telescopes. The clusters are thought to be some of the oldest objects in the universe, with ages of up to 13 billion years.
Image details:
Date: 17 nights, March - May 2022
Exposure: LRGB: 1216:220:225:250 mins, total 31 hours 51 mins @ -25C
Telescope: Homebuilt 12.5" f/4 Serrurier Truss Newtonian
Camera: QSI 683wsg with Lodestar guider
Filters: Astrodon LRGB E-Series Gen 2
Taken from my observatory in Auckland, New Zealand

Exmouth Eclipse 2023 by Blake Estes, on Flickr

The total solar eclipse from Pebble Beach in Exmouth, Western Australia today. It is a 12 image HDR bracket from 1/8000 sec to 1 second.

Technical details are as follows:

Canon EF 600mm f/4L IS USM III on Wimberly gimbal
UV Haze Filter
1/8000 sec to 1 sec Exposures @ f/11
ISO 1600
12 Exposures
Processed in APP, Lightroom, and Photomatix

Cassiopeia A light echo with unWISE
The image shows infrared light echoes around Cassiopeia A supernova remnant. The infrared echoes appear as rainbow-colored clouds in this false-colored image. Cassiopeia A is left of the red/yellow blob in the center of the image.

The infrared echoes were discoverd in 2005 by Krause et al. with the Spitzer Space Telescope. The infrared echo is accompanied by an optical light echo of scattered light from the supernova, which later helped to determine that Cassiopeia A was a type IIb supernova (Krause et al. 2008).

In the original you can hover with your cursor over the image and if you hover over the large boxes, it will show you links to small movies of the light echo in these regions:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File ... plete).jpg
Copyright: Melina Thévenot + unWISE (CC BY-SA 4.0)
unWISE website: unwise.me
unWISE is based on data by NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Explorer

I used unWISE coadded images (filter W2 4.6 Micron) for this image and calculated the difference of two epochs. For example: Neo 1 is calculated with Neo1-Allwise. Neo 2 is calculated with Neo2-Neo1 etc. I used QFitsView for the calculations.

The colors represent the time at which the infrared echo appears (I shorten NEOWISE-R as Neo):
Neo 1 is red, Neo 2 is orange, ..., Neo 7 is blue. Neo 1 was taken around 2014 and Neo 7 around 2020, so it is a 6 year time-frame.

Night vision of the carrelets of the Gironde estuary (France)
https://www.flickr.com/photos/julienlooten/

Copyright: Julien Looten





You have probably already seen these wooden huts on stilts, inseparable from the landscapes of the Charente-Maritime and the Gironde estuary... These huts hung between sky and earth constitute a dream shelter to fish and admire the landscapes of this region. They are very popular with photographers.

These ones, located between the village of Talmont-sur-Gironde, and Les Monards, were perfectly oriented towards the west, towards the Milky Way. The latter is visible in its entirety, forming a magnificent arch thanks to a 180° panorama. In the centre of the image, the constellation Orion is visible close to the horizon. Further to the right, Venus is associated with a zodiacal light and lies perfectly under the arch of the Milky Way. To the right of Venus, the constellation Cassiopeia is also visible. The horizon is marked by a succession of luminous zones corresponding to the towns and villages of Gironde located on the other bank of the estuary.

Panorama of 22 photos, unit exposure of 13s. That is to say 5 minutes of total exposure. Canon Eos 6d Astrodon, Sigma 28mm f1.4.

ngc2442 by Mathieu Guinot, sur Flickr

Hello,

The beautiful NGC 2442 (lower spiral structure) and NGC 2443 (upper horizontal spiral arm) are two parts of a single intermediate spiral galaxy, commonly known as the Meathook Galaxy or the Cobra and Mouse. It is located about 50 million light-years away in the constellation Volans. The asymmetric structure is tought to come from a past tidal interaction. The elliptical galaxy NGC 2434 can also be seen in the top right, as well as several other galaxies. I volontary kept that North at top orientation for some aesthetic reasons.

Data acquired from 2022/12/19 to 2022/12/24 at El Sauce Observatory with CDK 24 Telescope and FLI PL09000 Camera :
L : 12x600s
R : 12x600s
G : 12x600s
B : 12x600s
Processed in april 2023 with Pixinsight and Photoshop.

Copyright : Mathieu Guinot & Telescope Live

M20 - The Trifid Nebula
Captured using a 6" f/4 newtonian + ASI1600, on an Orion Sirius mount from the Deerlick Astronomy Village (Bortle 3) the other morning.

Link to full res image:
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/528 ... 21b6_o.png

Full acquisition/processing info:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/leftysast ... datetaken/

Sun through a homemade Solar Filter
https://www.Naztronomy.com
Copyright: Nazmus Nasir

This is the sun taken on 4/21/2023 from the outskirts of Boston, MA as part of my solar eclipse/solar safety outreach that I'm doing in person and over YouTube. The total cost of this is about $12 although the effective cost is much less.

This is a single 1/200 sec exposure at ISO-400 with the AT60ED refractor and 2x Barlow, shot with the Canon T5i.

NGC 7635 The Bubble Nebula

The Bubble Nebula is 7 light-years across – about one-and-a-half times the distance from our sun to its nearest stellar neighbor, Alpha Centauri – and resides 7,100 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cassiopeia.

The seething star forming this nebula is 45 times more massive than our sun. Gas on the star gets so hot that it escapes away into space as a "stellar wind" moving at over 4 million miles per hour. This outflow sweeps up the cold, interstellar gas in front of it, forming the outer edge of the bubble much like a snowplow piles up snow in front of it as it moves forward.

Dense pillars of cool hydrogen gas laced with dust appear at the upper left of the picture, and more "fingers" can be seen nearly face-on, behind the translucent bubble.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/194102627@N04/
Copyright: Lluís Romero
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/528 ... 1910_k.jpg

M51 beauty / LRGB

Copyright: Martin Hochbruck 21h total exposure
Astrobin: https://astrob.in/q2vkj5/0/
taken in beautiful Astro Finca Olivar - Gaucin / Andalucia
https://finca-olivar-gaucin.com/en/

Peering deep into the the core of M42 by William Ostling, on Flickr

Full write-up here: https://theastroenthusiast.com/peering- ... re-of-m42/

This is yet another image from telescope live. Although the total exposure time was a little over 45 minutes, the fact that Orion is so bright meant that the snr was still quite high. I’ve been iterating through versions of this image to figure out the best method of HDRing the core, and I feel like I’ve been settling on a pretty solid method using MMT. The detail in the core that I managed to pull out is really interesting to look at, so I highly recommend looking at the full PNG or the cropped views down below.

Few astronomical sights excite the imagination like the nearby stellar nursery known as the Orion Nebula. The Nebula’s glowing gas surrounds hot young stars at the edge of an immense interstellar molecular cloud. Many of the filamentary structures visible in the featured image are actually shock waves – fronts where fast moving material encounters slow moving gas. The Orion Nebula spans about 40 light years and is located about 1500 light years away in the same spiral arm of our Galaxy as the Sun. The Great Nebula in Orion can be found with the unaided eye just below and to the left of the easily identifiable belt of three stars in the popular constellation Orion. The featured image, taken last month, shows a two-hour exposure of the nebula in three colors. The whole Orion Nebula cloud complex, which includes the Horsehead Nebula, will slowly disperse over the next 100,000 years.

Website: https://theastroenthusiast.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_astronomy_enthusiast/

Selene with Aphrodite
http://www.perseus.gr
Copyright: Anthony Ayiomamitis
A very impressive sight as evening approached with the western sky enriched by the presence of the crescent Moon along with bright Venus less than two degrees apart. It was quite difficult getting a foreground subject with the Moon and Venus owing to the pair being quite high in the sky. Out of desperation I enlisted the collaboration of a couple of tall palm trees.

Further details in relation to this result at https://www.perseus.gr/Astro-Conjunctions-20230423.htm .

NGC 5033 and others
So when planning this imaging session I wanted to choose something that may not be images alot....taking the road less travelled potentially and boy am i happy i did I have spent multiple weeks under botle 4 skys and an average of 25% moon to capture this gem. In this craft of astrophotography there are always ups and downs and things to learn within and without I have come along way but am still learning every time i sit out under that night sky. let me know your thoughts and i hope you enjoy my attempt at NGC 5033
if youd like to check out the full resolution image you can find it here https://www.astrobin.com/full/t28de5/0/
NGC 5033 is an inclined spiral galaxy located in the constellation Canes Venatici. Distance estimates vary from between 38 and 60 million light years from the Milky Way. The galaxy has a very bright nucleus and a relatively faint disk.
NGC 5033 contains a Seyfert nucleus, a type of active galactic nucleus. Like many other active galactic nuclei, this galaxy's nucleus is thought to contain a supermassive black hole. The bright emission seen in visible light (as well as other wavebands) is partially produced by the hot gas in the environment around this black hole.
Integral field spectroscopic observations of the center of NGC 5033 indicate that the Seyfert nucleus is not located at the kinematic center of the galaxy (the point around which the stars in the galaxies rotate). This has been interpreted as evidence that this galaxy has undergone a merger. The displacement of the Seyfert nucleus from the kinematic center may destabilize the rotation of gas in the center of the galaxy, which could cause gas to fall into the Seyfert nucleus. The gas would be compressed by the enormous gravitational forces in the center of the Seyfert nucleus and become hot, thus making the nucleus appear bright or "active".
Technical Stuff:
43H and 20MINs total hours of integration
233*300s L
96*300s H
54*300s R
70*300s G
67*300s B
Scope: ASKAR 130 PHQ (1000mm Focal length)
Guide scope: ASKAR OAG
Mount: Ioptron CEM70
Main Camera: ZWO 294mm pro (Bin 2 120gain)
Guide Camera: ZWO 174mm mini
Focuser: ZWO EAF
Filter wheel: ZWO EFW
Filters: ANTILA LRGB and 3nm HA
Capture Computer: MELE Quieter 3
Capture software: NINA
EDITINGL PIXINSIGHT

Total Solar Eclipse from Exmouth, Australia
Copyright: Alson Wong

MINERAL MOON


MORE DETAILS
https://www.astrobin.com/full/jy04yi/0/

The Moon is usually seen in subtle shades of gray or yellow.
The different colors are recognized as corresponding to real differences in the chemical composition of the lunar surface.
The blue tones reveal areas rich in ilmenite, which contain iron, titanium and oxygen, mainly titanium, while the orange and purple colors show regions relatively poor in titanium and iron. The white/gray tones refer to areas with greater sun exposure.

EQUIPMENT:
ZWO ASI 6200MC COLED
Spirit 150mm
Baader Lunar Filter

Date: 04/06/2023
Location: Munhoz - MG - Brazil


PROCESSING AND CAPTURE: Software: Adobe Photoshop, SharpCap, AutoStakkert AutoStackert and Registax 6.
Copyright: Fernando Oliveira de Menezes
Email: Barretosmed@hotmail.com
(Organizing author of the book Astrofotografia Amadora no Brasil)https://clubedeautores.com.br/livro/ast ... -no-brasil

This series of Total Solar Eclipse was taken from Com, Timor-Leste.
Took the Sun with solar filter every 3 minutes.
Took foreground during totality and merge them to each partial eclipse.

Nikon 800 + Nikon 14-24 mm (@14mm)

Taken by Thanakrit Santikunaporn