Jason Nishiyama @evilscientistca@octodon.social
Teacher, astronomer, political scientist and father.
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.
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.
The now ~4800 images were then transferred to a Windows machine where the program Registax was used to create 6 images covering the Moon in R, G, and B. Registax registered the images, threw out about half due to quality, then combined and processed the images for sharpness.
The software from the Meade LPI puts out RGB FITS files. The ~1600 individual files had to be separated into their red, green, and blue components for processing. This was done on a Mac in IRAF.
The Moon from last night. This was made from a mosaic of images from a Meade LPI webcam-type imager. The image processing for this was rather involved.
Betelgeuse is the brightest star in Orion and is seen as the reddish star near the top centre of Orion in this image. It is a red supergiant star near the end of it's life and if it replaced our Sun would extend past the asteroid belt. It will die as a supernova.
Stars that are fusing hydrogen into helium fall along the line that goes from upper left to bottom right on the HR Diagram. This is known as the main sequence. Once the hydrogen in their core is spent, stars evolve up and to the right of the diagram.
From last night. The open cluster M67.
Last night's Moon.
Stephan's Quintet is a cluster of 4 galaxies with a fifth galaxy closer and in the line of sight. It is one of the first compact galaxy groups discovered.
