Astronomical Images - the best from 2013/14

Featuring:

Jupiter and the Moon.
M1 (the Crab nebula) M42 (Great nebula in Orion), the M81 and M82 galaxies together and M101

For some images, clicking on the image will take you to a larger version (or a larger version of a different image), from which you can return here using the Back button on your browser.
Clicking on some images won't do anything, and on others might toggle you through an image sequence.

March 2014

11th March

After 5 months of messing around with cameras, webcams, lenses and software I've finally got some Jupiter pictures that are half worth looking at.

February 2014

28th February

Another spiral galaxy, M101 in Ursa Major was well placed, 7 150 second exposures at ISO 3200...

2nd February

The M81 and M82 galaxies (13 stacked 30 second exposures at ISO 3200). If you compare this with other images on the web you might notice the Supernova in M82.

December 2013

29th December

It was telescope night round Pete's on Saturday 28th. Good to spend a couple of hours just visually observing. Pete's newly completed Dobsonian mount was in operation - stable, but some tweaks to smooth out the motion still required. Pete was quicker at finding things in the Dob than I was with my equatorially mounted refractor. When I got home, there was a break in the neighbourhood light pollution soon after the cricket commentary started. Intermingled with listening to England lose once again, I took these stacked images of Orion's sword, this time with the "Running Man" nebula at the top of the image. (5 x 3 min exposures ISO 1600)

25th December

At 4:30am on Christmas morning, the moon now near last quarter.

1st December

The crab nebula (16 stacked photos taken around 00:30 on the 1st.):


That's the end of the best of 2013/14 images.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mikes astronomy images 2025

Image
December 2025 Christmas Day - the Christmas tree cluster! Up really early on Christmas day to take this picture of NGC 2264, aka 'the Christmas Tree Cluster". Click/tap to go to a bigger image. The question is 'where is the Xmas tree?'. Is it the bright blue patch near the top with the great big white bauble on top? Is it the silhouetted conical shape bottom left? Nasa provides the answer in this webpage in which some Nasa employee had some right good fun with colours. Turns out it's the whole thing, and my image is upside down (for Xmas tree purposes anyway). A bit like this... but it's worth following the Nasa link above for a better interpretation, and also some information on the object. In addition to not really knowing where the Xmas tree was in the image, prior to taking the image above I managed to point the SeeStar at the wrong object, NGC 2169. Took me a while to realis...
Read more

Mikes astronomy images 2026

Image
January 2026 28th January - Moon, Sun and Jupiter. Let's start with the Moon, and an image taken at 16:15, still daylight but the sky darkening towards the East where the moon was well risen. (Image courtesy of Colette). I was using the QHY camera I use for planetary imaging, but this time with no barlow lens, so just the 1000 mm focal length. The Moon doesn't quite fit in the frame. (Click/tap to big the image) Somehow, I managed to create an image that was a bit too over-sharpened, and a bit too contrasty for my liking, but it did bring my attention to a feature I have not noticed before. The oval sea at the right of the image is the Mare Crisium. Just to the left of this is the small bright ray crater Proclus. I say small, it's 27km across so a decent hike. To the left of this there appears to be a fan like area of darkness. I thought 'that's odd', and checked out another image to see if it was ...
Read more