Starship Asterisk*

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NGC 3242 "Ghost of Jupiter"
This wide-field image shows the extended cloud of gas near the planetary nebula NGC 3242. Also known as the "Ghost of Jupiter", NGC 3242 is the bright object just to the upper-right from the center of the image. The nature of the extended nebulosity is not yet known. It may either be a shell of gas that was ejected by NGC 3242 when it was a red giant star. Or it may also be a nearby cloud of interstellar gas that is being illuminated by the planetary nebula.

Copyright: T.A. Rector and NOAO/AURA/NSF During the year 2012, we will be releasing every week a new image from the telescopes of Kitt Peak National Observatory, Gemini Observatory and Cerro Tololo Interamerican Observatory. These and past images are available on my website at:

http://aftar.uaa.alaska.edu/

If you wish to be notified of these weekly releases you can subscribe to my Facebook account:

http://www.facebook.com/travisrector

IC 4592 widefield
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ytoropin/6 ... 696089762/
Copyright: Yuriy Toropin

NGC4565 in the filed
http://www.astroimages.de
Copyright: Siggi Kohlert For details and/or a bigger version, please visit my website http://www.astroimages.de/en/gallery/NGC4565.html

Cheers,
Siggi

Browsing through the hubble legacy archive I found this beautiful area that was imaged in 2006. I didn't find any nice hubble palette image of this area, only an image showing the area in bicolor, with less detail. So I decided to make it myself

NGC 6357 Nebula HST imagery
http://www.astro-photo.nl
Copyright: Hubble Legacy Archive/NASA/ESA processing by: André van der Hoeven Full scale imagery here...

Yesterday I took this image of venus with corona approaching the Pleiades. I used my digital camera fujifilm finepix s5600 at 400ASA and 3s exposure.
Copyright:Giuseppe Pappa

This fisheye view of the night sky captures the moon and five planets: Venus is the brilliant "star" in the West (right), near the Plejades cluster. Jupiter is low in the western sky, below (i.e., to the right) of Venus. The red planet Mars shines high the sky, in the constellation Leo, the Lion, east (left) of the Moon. Saturn is just rising over the east-southeastern horizont at left. The fifth planet that is visible in this image is, of course, our Earth.

Follow the link to the flickr page for identification of the planets on the image.

Ony Sky, one Moon, five Planets by herbraab, on Flickr
[attachment=0]fisheyeRaab.jpg[/attachment]
http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7128/6893 ... 9f6a_b.jpg

( Larger image here: http://www.heliotown.com/sprite_image_large.html

Update: Since posting yesterday I now also have a movie of these sprites with radio emission in slow-motion : http://vimeo.com/39703535

Massive Red Sprites over Oklahoma (with Radio Emissions)

This is a photograph of a jellyfish sprite which was followed immediately by a towering double carrot sprite. They occurred over western Oklahoma on March 30, 2012 at 0502:26 UTC during an enormously powerful thunderstorm. I was shooting continuous four second exposures with an infrared modified Canon XS DSLR. My observatory is located in New Mexico, 614 km away from where these large sprites occurred. Quite a distance away!

I was also lucky to capture these sprites with near infrared analog video and VLF-ELF radio and posted a movie here: http://vimeo.com/39658386

Clear skies to you folks,
Thomas Ashcraft
http://www.heliotown.com

I shot this first quarter moon around 4:00 EDT 0n Fri. 3/30/12. I always enjoy seeing the moon in the blue sky and I wanted to share this. I was lucky to have clear skies, since the forcast called for clouds. An hour after I took these the clouds rolled in for the rest of the night.

Daylight Moon
Copyright: Scott Tully Through Clouds
Copyright: Scott Tully

Here is a picture of spiral galaxy M94. This is a spiral galaxy about 16 million light years away in the constellation of Canes Venatici. It is notable for having two ring structures. The inner ring is a site of strong star formation known as the starburst ring. The outer ring is a complex structure of spiral arms.

Northern Lights 360 Pano
http://www.gcollier.com
Copyright: Grant Collier
This is a full 360 degree panoramic photo of the northern lights and the moon over northern Alaska. The bridge over the icy river is part of the Dalton Highway.

Silhouetted Saguaros and the Venus-Pleiades Conjunction
http://www.flickr.com/photos/radicalret ... 041165533/
Copyright: Marion Haligowski


Silhouetted Saguaros and the Venus-Pleiades Conjunction by Radical Retinoscopy, on Flickr


Venus Meets the Pleiades by Radical Retinoscopy, on Flickr

The Venus-Pleiades conjunction of April 2, 2012 was photographed among a mountain lined by saguaro cacti. The photograph was taken among the Union Hills of North Phoenix. This photo is a close crop showing Venus just before it disappeared behind the mountain.

Tarantula Nebula widefield
http://www.flickr.com/photos/andres_vat ... hotostream
Copyright: Andres Vattuone

hello,
yesterday night
1100 D canon + 70 mm f/5.6
6400 iso; 0.8 sec
best regards

Philippe TOSI (FRANCE-Nîmes)

Previous post was found to be at the wrong place. Corrected.

Previous post was found to be at the wrong place. Corrected.

Nightsky with antennas in the forest of our university campus.
Copyright: Efe Tuncel

Hello
Here is a LRGB version of LEO TRIPPLET
31 exposures of 900s for luminance layer.

FULL SIZE by clicking on this image

Copyright: Philippe Bernhard

Cheers
Philippe Bernhard

NGC3199 Wolf Rayet bow shock

Copyright:Paul Haese

Click herefor larger image

Veil Nebula
http://www.astroccd.eu/crbst_85.html
Copyright: Philippe Bernhard

Hello Starsufer
Thanks to share my photo
Best regards
Philippe BERNHARD

starsurfer wrote:Veil Nebula
http://www.astroccd.eu/crbst_85.html
Copyright: Philippe Bernhard

Hi:

This is an image of Sharpless 2-155, the Cave nebula in Cepheus.

I shot the Cave for more than 16 hours last summer, over four nights between August 26 and September 1, but I've used only the best 10 hours for processing: 300 minutes in luminance (unbinned), and 100 minutes in each of R, G, and B. Ten minute subframes were taken in all channels. Although the raw frames are more than 7 months old, it took until now to do the image processing - so please think of this as a brand new image !

I was drawn to the Cave by its wide expanse of dark nebulae, the deep colours of its emission and reflection nebulae, and the vivid assortment of stars splashed across its field. I set up the shot so that a small grouping of colourful stars would spill into the corner of the frame, as if they were jewels falling out of the entrance to the cave .

The images were taken at my "Cabin in the Sky" observatory, which is located in the South Okanagan region of British Columbia, Canada I used my PlaneWave Instruments CDK17 telescope, operating with a focal reducer at f/4.5, and riding atop a Paramount ME, along with an SBIG STL-4020M camera. Image capture was done with TheSkyX, MaxIm DL, and FocusMax. Image processing was done entirely with PixInsight, except for the use of CCDInspector to evaluate the subexposures and to monitor overall specs during processing. The field of view is about 27' on a side, and the unbinned pixel size is about 0.78".

Thanks for looking!

Howard.
http://www.sfu.ca/~trottier/observatory.html

A piece of summer sky
Copyright: César Cantú
Also: http://www.astrophoto.com.mx/picture.php?/26/category/9

hello, this is Venus and the Pleiades taken on April 2, and the group Moon-Venus-Jupiter on March 26:
regards

I have some time now, so I thought I'd post some comments.

Ah, Yuriy Toropin, the Blue Horse region! It is slightly less blue than some other pictures of this area, and me being a lover of all things blue, well... but I must say that your picture is splendid, dramatic, very colorful and beautifully framed!

Siggi Kohlert, that's a very very handsome portrait indeed of the Needle Galaxy, NGC 4565. I think it looks a bit like a stiff and very wide-rimmed hat in your image, or rather like a "small-headed" person wearing an extremely wide-rimmed hat!

Peppepappa87, I like it! That's a fine picture of the conjunction between Venus and the Pleiades.

herbraab, what a fine all-sky fish-eye picture! We can indeed see lots of planets here, in fact all of the planets that have been known since antiquity, with the exception of fleet-footed Mercury. I like the fact that we can see the conjunction of Venus and the Pleiades in your picture. But tell me, what is that bright orange light to the upper left of the Moon? There is a corresponding light to the lower right of the Moon. Perhaps they are photographic effects due to the brilliance of the Moon.

Thomas Ashcraft, I tried in vain to identify even a single star in your image! But I so enjoy the marvellous intensity of the blue color of the sky. And those red sprites are amazing, of course!

Scott Tully, you wrote:

I always enjoy seeing the moon in the blue sky

Me too! Thanks for sharing this!

azstarman, thanks for taking a fine picture of one of my favorite galaxies, M94. Look at that brilliant starforming ring bursting with the colors red and blue!

Grant Collier, that's a great aurora picture!

Marion Haligowski, I like both your conjunction images.

Philippe TOSI, I like your conjunction image, too.

Oh, what a wonderful Tarantula widefield image, Andres Vattuone! It is quite stunningly beautiful!

Efe Tuncel, that's a fine Moon and Venus image. But to me it is more than that. Those structures that can be seen at the bottom of the pictures look futuristic and art deco at the same time, as if we had stepped inside an old-fashioned science fiction movie to witness a dream about the future in the past. To me, your picture is both mysterious and evocative.

Philippe Bernhard, that's a fine portrait of the Leo Triplet of galaxies. I particularly like how you manage to bring out the individual character of each of the galaxies.

Paul Haese, what an amazing image of the bow shock of a Wolf Rayet star! I'm stunned! I checked this object with my software, but I was unable to identify the Wolf Rayet star itself. The brilliant blue arc that we see in your image might possibly be OIII radiation. It is of course interesting to think that there could be little or no hydrogen here, if the Wold Rayet star has already shed much or most of its hydrogen envelope. Anyway, I found the picture pretty fantastic!

Philippe Bernhard, that's a fine portrait of the Veil nebula. It looks very "Ha and OIII emission"-like to me, and there is certainly nothing wrong with that!

Howard Trottier, that's a very beautiful picture of the Cave Nebula. Thanks for sharing!

César Cantú, that's a fine picture of the center of the Milky Way.

Thierry Legault, I like both of your conjunction images.

Thanks to everyone who contributed images here!

Ann

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