Two of my hands-down favorites have posted images here: Adam Block and Rogelio Bernal Andreo. Adam, I'm still using your 260 galaxy images from your stint at NOAO as a source of reference. If I can't find a color image of a galaxy anywhere else, chances are I can find it "at your place".
Of course, these days your galaxy images look so much better, and your latest galaxy picture is another proof of the fact. What is more, your images combine a fine resolution with a fantastic wide-angle "skyscape quality". We will almost certainly get several galaxies for the price of one when you produce galaxy images.
Galaxy NGC 1042 is one of my favorites, for the simple reason that it was used by James D Wray as a "poster child for blue knots" in his Color Atlas of Galaxies. Now you show it to us in full RGB glory. The galaxy has a multitude of blue star clusters and pink emission nebulae to show off, indeed.
Yes, but NGC 1042 is not the only galaxy in your field! Fascinatingly, there is a small aqua-colored contorted spiral to the right of NGC 1042. I guess it could be a slightly reddened background galaxy. And that is not all. There is a fascinating interacting little pair, whose components are too faint to even have a designation in my software, but they show up beautifully in your image. And elliptical galaxy NGC 1052 is superimposed on a small cluster of, apparently, mostly edge-on and lenticular galaxies, making NGC 1052 look like a Cd galaxy, the biggest class of ellipticals in the universe. In this case, it is apparently just a line of sight coincidence.
Finally, in the complete version of your image which is available at
http://www.caelumobservatory.com/mlsc/n1042.jpg, there is a fascinating, butterfly-shaped galaxy(?), which appears to be made up of an intermediate-to-old, neutral-colored population of stars. But in the center of this cosmic butterfly blazes an intensely blue nucleus. Fantastic! This galaxy qualifies as one of the weird unexplained structures of the nearby universe, in my opinion.
But Adam, you have posted images of the Bubble Nebula as well. These images elegantly demonstrate the RGB color difference between the pinkish Bubble Nebula itself and the more brick-red ionized structures outside it.
And Rogelio, you are most definitely another of my "wide-angle RGB" heroes! When I first saw your Lyra image, I almost jumped out of my chair. Who had managed to capture the intense blue-white glow of Vega when seen through a telescope so perfectly? Who, but Rogelio Bernal Andreo?
Your Lyra image reminds me ever so slightly of cycling through a part of my hometown of Malmö called Djupadal. As I cycle there, I'll pass residential homes, nice little 1930s style houses for the most part... then there will be 1960s style houses, and homes from the 1950s... 1970s...
But the thing is, Djupadal is all residential homes. There is nothing else there. No stores, no restaurants, no hairdressers' saloons, nothing.
Fascinatingly, the constellation Lyra is a bit like Djupadal. There are stars there. Stars, stars, stars. A bewildering multitude of stars. And little else. Yes, there is that famous planetary nebula, the Ring Nebula. In your image it is teardrop-shaped, with no "hole" visible in the middle. It is small, intensely bright, and slightly red at the edges.
Anyway, this portrait of Lyra is another wonderful achievement of yours, Rogelio. I thought I could see, at largest magnification, that there appeared to be a population of small blue stars at lower left in your image, but that the young stars seemed to disappear at upper right. It was fun to see Epsilon Lyra too, by the way: It is easy to see in your image that Epsilon Lyra is a double star, but not that it is a "double-double".
I had to thank Adam and Rogelio before I could write anything else here, and now I will have to come back later, which may be a while.
Ann
