Jason Nishiyama @evilscientistca@octodon.social
Teacher, astronomer, political scientist and father.
This is what happens when the autoguide system goes haywire during a 10 minute exposure on a telescope...
From Saturday - the Galaxies M66 (L) and M65 (R) in the constellation Leo. 0.2m telescope. 5 min L, 2 min each RGB.
M66 is ~31 Mly from Earth, M65 is ~40 Mly away.
@CobaltVelvet who needs reasons?
@Catpult Thanks! 🙂
@bg Thanks! 🙂
@CountZero Thanks! 😀
From 2 weekends ago. Barred spiral galaxy M109. 14 minutes L, 4 min each R, G, and B. M019 is about 67 Mly away in the constellation of Ursa Major.
Whooohooo!
Messier 101 is a galaxy in Ursa Major. It is about 22 million light years from Earth. Image from last Saturday. 13 minutes L, 5 minutes each R, G and B. 0.2m f3.9 telescope.
Tonight's project complete.
Messier 34 is an open cluster in the constellation of Perseus. It's about 1500 ly away and on the order of about 200 million years old making it fairly young.
@francois 10th magnitude. Thanks!
@kmicu Gaia is however insanely accurate in its measurement compared to Earth based measures. Accuracy in the 10s of micro-arcseconds. Thats distances out to >20kly... https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/science-performance
Light travels under an inverse square law. That is if you double the distance you get 1/4 the light.
We can use this property of light to measure the distance to objects if we have a way of determining their intrinsic (actual) brightness and measure their apparent brightness here on Earth.
From Saturday night, galaxy M108 in Ursa major. 19 minutes L, 4 minutes each R, G, and B. 0.2m f3.9 Newtonian telescope.
We measure the distance to nearby stars by how much they shift over the period of a year as the Earth moves around the Sun in its orbit. This is our most accurate distance measurement for objects outside of the solar system.
From astronomy outreach last night, the Baker-Nunn telescope.
Finally Photoshop was used to bring the R, G and B mosaics together into a single colour RGB image.
These 18 processed images (6 each in R, G, and B) were then transferred back to the Mac for processing in photoshop. Photoshop merged the 18 images into three mosaics, one for each of R, G, and B.
