Me and my wife had a 3 hour motorcycle trip on the highway during Foehn. We went to the Palfries which is about 1800m high. Up there was this beautiful Lenticularis cloud which looks almost like a flying saucer:
Adam, David, and Piotr, thanks for posting your fabulous images!
Re: Recent Submissions: 2010 November 15-18
Posted: Mon Nov 15, 2010 5:27 pm
by Ann
Oh my goodness, what a picture of Stephan's Quintet! Amazing! Super-superior! Hubble at its best, and then you've done some top-class processing, Hunter Wilson!
Let's begin with the apparently largest but intrinsically far smallest of the galaxies, the non-member foreground galaxy NGC 7320. You can almost count the stars in it! Wow!!! And I love the blue color of the disk of this galaxy, of course. And look at the bulge of NGC 7320. The bulge is small, not very bright at all, and barely yellow. The nucleus is very small and not extremely bright. This is typical of small galaxies.
Oh, but look at the other galaxies, the actual members of Stephan's Quintet! Note how they all have very yellow "main bodies" - the color has something to do with redshift, too. Also note how their inner bulges are so bright that they look all white.
Now look at the galaxy on the left, NGC 7319, the one with the relatively smooth and not strongly blue long arms. A lot of dust is passing right in front of the disk and nucleus of NGC 7319 - it reminds me a little of NGC 1316:
Of course, it also reminds me of NGC 4038:
NGC 4038 has dust lanes cutting across its nucleus, just like NGC 7319.
NGC 7319 has relatively smooth and not strongly blue arms, which are undoubtedly made up predominantly of intermediately aged stars. There are, however, some obvious clusters in it. Young stars appear to form in the densest dust lanes. Note the arm at far left - it has many slightly bluish knots of almost identical brightness. What are they? Could they be large numbers of young to intermediate globular clusters?
Now look at the violently interacting pair, NGC 7318 A and NGC 7318 B. I think it is B to the left, and clearly B is the center of all the action here - enormous tendrils of hydrogen gas have been flung out of it and put in a state of violent star formation. You can almost hear the hissing and roaring as all that hydrogen gas is being converted into thousands of O and B stars! NGC 7318 A, on the other hand, the galaxy that B is colliding with, may just be an ordinary elliptical galaxy suffering a titanic cosmic traffic accident!
Finally, look at all those background galaxies. Amazingly fantastic. And the entire picture is incredibly beautiful, too!
Re: Recent Submissions: 2010 November 15-18
Posted: Mon Nov 15, 2010 5:36 pm
by Ann
Adam, your picture of IC 59 is very beautiful. It is fun to compare it with IC 63. I think that IC 59 has traditionally been described as a reflection nebula, blue in color, while NGC 63 has been called a red emission nebulae. Your image shows that both these nebulae contain both a reflection and an emission part - the emission part, interestingly, is seen at the edge of these cosmic clouds, whereas the centers of them reflect the blue light of the star that lit them up, Gamma Cassiopeia.
NGC 2264: Jewels in the Furnace of Monoceros
Copyright: Louie Atalasidis [attachment=0]NGC 2264_Louie.jpg[/attachment][/i]
Re: Recent Submissions: 2010 November 15-18
Posted: Mon Nov 15, 2010 6:04 pm
by hewholooks
Ann wrote:Oh my goodness, what a picturews of Stephan's Quintet! Amazing! Super-superior! Hubble at its best, and then you've done some top-class processing, Hunter Wilson!
(Remainder clipped - not because it doesn't merit repeating, but for space)
Thanks, Ann, for the nice comments and the very informative post. I continue to thoroughly enjoy processing this Hubble Legacy Archive data, and after a web search, I simply could not believe that this one had not been re-done any time recently. While the official Hubble image of this data is full of good information, I found it lacking in aesthetics - thus my own little version here. The individual FITS images for each wavelength were in excess of 140mb each and had my computer groaning under the load. Once I had the data combined, I cut the image size in half to work with it in a reasonable fashion. It started at about 111 inches across at 72pixels/inch.
I'm glad you liked it - it's a heck of a set of data.
David Kaplan, I love your image. The lenticular cloud is spectacular, of course, but the entire landscape looks like a magnificent painting or a sharply detailed dream. It is so hyper-realistic that it looks unreal, and at the same time it is overwhelmingly real.
Look at the rosy light that suffuses the entire picture in spite of the blue sky. Look at the soft undulating shape of the hills, that nevertheless suddenly rise into a sharply pointed peak - it is suddenly possible to "see" that landscape as a titanic sleeping animal, whose ears are that strange "peak", whose nose is the dark shape far to the right and whose back stretches away to the left. I love those mostly oblong patches of snow on those green hills, as if this was a naturally green animal with oblong white leopard spots. The white spots on the ground find their counterpart in the white spots and lines in the blue sky.
It is a truly magical picture. Thank you for posting it.
Mike, I am the wrong person to try to impress with planetary nebulae. I think so little of them that I have instructed my astronomy software to turn them off. (Data shown: Planetary nebulae: Off.)
But just a few days ago Rogelio Bernal Andreo posted a stunningly deep wide angle image of the constellation of Cassiopeia. As I looked at the the picture at greatest magnification, I suddenly saw this red arc not far from the Owl Cluster. A planetary nebula! It had to be! But which one? I chaecked my astronomy software. It showed me nothing in that spot. Well, yes, it did show me something, an arc-shaped nebula contour, but there was no information about this being a planetary nebula. (And why not? Because I had instructed my astronomy software to turn the planetary nebulae off. Ohh. )
But hey, look! Now you, Mike, post an image of the same planetary nebula! At least I'll take credit for recognizing it when I saw it. Sharpless 188, eh?
Thanks for enlightening me!
Ann
Re: Recent Submissions: 2010 November 15-18
Posted: Tue Nov 16, 2010 8:47 pm
by geissi
Hello,
a few days ago I could check out my new 80 mm medium format lens.
I tried to get some shots of Cygnus and it's large nebula areas.
This wideview image shows an amazing amout of deep sky objects.
A few of them have been marked on a separate pic.
The imaged FOV is about 25° x 26°
Location: Remseck, southern Germany, balcony observatory
Date: 13th of November 2010
Lens: Mamiya 80 / 1.9 medium format photo lens
Camera: FLI ML 16803-65
Fiters: H-alpha, OIII and SII
Mount: 10micron GM2000 (no guiding
Exposures:
- 6 x 1200 sec H-alpha (1x1)
- 3 x 1200 sec OIII (1x1)
- 2 x 1200 sec SII (1x1)
- je 1 x 300 sec RGB only for colored stars overlay
color-method: narrowband tone-mapping
H-alpha = red channel
OIII = cyan channel
SII = deep red channel
NGC891: Water, water everywhere... nor a drop to drink www.astronomica.es
Copyright: Jaime Fernandez
Please, visit my website to enjoy an animated full-sized labeled/unlabeled mouseover of this picture, As idle as a painted ship...Upon a painted ocean.
(mouseover to drop labels)
Terrific image, good job. I love these so deep pictures.
Re: Recent Submissions: 2010 November 15-18
Posted: Thu Nov 18, 2010 7:49 am
by Matteo Morino
Thanks a lot for these very happy comments about my image!
This Orion image, is one of those where I had more satisfaction because I used an achromatic refractor!
I like challenges!
Thanks again and see you on my website ok!??
Matteo
And look at the bulge of NGC 7320. The bulge is small, not very bright at all, and barely yellow. The nucleus is very small and not extremely bright. This is typical of small galaxies.
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