Astronomical Images - the best from 2020
Featuring:
Clicking on some images won't do anything, and on others might toggle you through an image sequence.
We are rapidly approaching the great conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. On the 19th, the two planets were both visible in the same field of view of my 1000mm focal length 'scope.
Even this degree of closeness is highly unusual. By the 21st they will be really really close, something that hasn't happened for whatever donkeys would call donkeys years.
I found it difficult to get pictures where even a small amount of detail could be seen on Jupiter, without virtually losing Saturn altogether, so in the end I just opted for one in which you could see three of Jupiter Galilean moons.
The real puprose of getting the scope out was to cast off my indolence, and get back to some deep sky imaging.
I have not attempted any pictures (or even looked at) the Crab nebula for a few years now. The little Sony camera produces my best shot of this object..
The Crab nebula is a supernova remnant.
I thought I would have a quick go at something I have consistently produced poor images of - the Horse head nebula in Orion...
This also features the Flame nebula (left), and the really rather bright (in this image) relflection nebula NGC 2023 (centre).
In terms of my efforts on this part of the sky, it's not a bad picture. It is crying out for me to use the pucker Astro camera though - I did have a go last January, but was scuppered by non-imaging related issues.
Just a comparison of the brightest planets as they appeared in September, all taken through the same equipment.
Jupiter and Saturn (top) were imaged on the evening of the 19th, Mars and Venus (bottom) on the morning of the 20th.
I could have turned down the ISO setting for Venus I guess, but actually, overall, there is some sense of the relative brightness of these objects in the images above,
The camera was the Sony A6300, which I'm experimenting with for planetary imaging (it would save me having to have a laptop outside). Each image is derived from a movie, processed in PIPP and Registax 6.
Again looking at Comet C/2020 F3 (Neowise). This is from Bluntisham playing field, and features the light pollution from St. Helens Primary School.
I had set out intending to go to Barleycroft lake, for a more scenic picture, but with work in the morning I decided I didn't want to spend 45 minutes just walking to the lake and back.
It's around 190 10 second exposures spanning over half an hour. You can see this half hour squashed into 12 seconds in the time-lapse movie here.
The focal lengths get shorter (testament to what a grand comet this is). This is 16mm focal length, and you can see the whole of the plough in the image.
The image is a stack of about 150 of the images. Because this was on a fixed tripod, the sky moves across the lens distortion, the stars near the edge don't line up and the stacking process struggles, so it didn't do the full 190 images.
You can see the stars near the edge not lining up, if you big the image (to 25% of the original resolution).
The comet has been dimming the whole time since I first saw it on the 11th July. It is also now moving south relative to the star background, so as I write this (on the 26th) the comet is only just circumpolar, and is no longer a "morning object".
It is also moving west, by the end of next week it will be setting at 1am (midnight really) and won't rise till 3 hours after sunrise. It was also closest to the Earth on the 23rd of July so is going to start fading more rapidly. With a big moon coming up next weekend, it is not going to be an easy naked eye visible comet much longer.
11th July
Goodness me, a naked eye visible comet - and easy naked eye to boot! It's what Pete described as comety.
A picture from the early morning of the 11th July.
What could it portend?
It can't be very often that from one location the ISS passes in front of the solar disk on two consecutive orbits. Here it is doing just that on the 24th June from my back garden:
The track on the left occurred at 08:46 BST, the more central track 96 mins later at 10:22 BST. At the earlier time, with the sun lower in the sky, the ISS was further from my garden, and travelling at a lower angular velocity.
If two passes of the ISS in front of the sun on one day wasn't enough, it was predicted to do the same on the morning of Friday 26th June (as it turned out, it was raining that morning).
For the last six months I've been taking a monthly phone camera image of the Moon and Venus in the evening sky. This is the seventh month, and last evening picture, Venus will be a morning star again in June.
It is also not a phone camera image. I wanted to make sure the innermost planet, Mercury, was visible in the picture, so this is taken with the Canon EOS camera sitting on a tripod.
Because it is a tadge better than the hand held images from my cheap phone, you can big this picture to go to a 50% original resolution image.
Mercury is slightly higher than the Moon, mid picture, at 22:02 BST, Venus (right) is not far off setting.
Photo details: focal length 100mm, f/4.5, 1/5th second at ISO400, and a bit of post processing and cropping in AstroArt 6.
Yet another clear night. In contrast to many of the objects I've featured recently, M106 is relatively close (22Mly) and should be visible in binoculars. If you use the diagonal across the body of the bear to find M81 and M82, M106 can be found using the same diagonal, but going the other way.
The little fuzzy streak below M 106 is NGC 4248. This is a similar distance, and is in all likelihood a companion galaxy of M 106.
The edge on galaxy that just crept into the frame bottom left (NGC 4217) is much further away at around 60 Mly.
In a single frame you couldn't see either of the last two galaxies mentioned, the near 2 hour exposure time across 278 individual images has worked really well.
24th/25th April
A line of sight group of galaxies that I have imaged (not particularly successfully) before...
The 'Draco Triplet' consists of NGC 5985, the almost face on spiral on the left, NGC 5982, the elliptical in the centre, and the smaller edge on spiral NGC 5981.
I'm beginning not to trust any of the information Stellarium tells me about these things, so let's just say these galaxies are all between 100 and 200 Mly away.
22nd/23rd April
Here's another of those edge on spiral galaxies...
NGC 5907 is closer than the Coma group, at around 50 Mly. This is 85 minutes worth of pictures starting on the 22nd April and finishing at around 1am on the 23rd April.
15th/16th April
Three images taken with the 1000mm focal length f/5 Newtonian with Coma Corrector, the AZ/EQ6 mount, and the little Sony A6300 camera.
I had been considering looking at the first one a few times, but it was always sitting low down in the murk and light pollution. Time is running out this year, so on the 15th April I gave it a go. I took 120 30 second images of this object, but threw away 30 because of obscuring cloudy stuff.
It's the Antennae galaxy, or galaxies to be more precise - NGC 4038 and 4039, in the Caldwell catalogue as C 60 and 61. These two interacting galaxies are 91 Mly away and have interacted so much they have produced two ant like antennae structures swirling off the main body of each galaxy.
These structures are barely visible above the background in this image, there just discernible to the left of the two galaxy nuclei. I had to wind up the background more than I would otherwise have liked just to see this.
You can search the internet for far better pictures, or you can click on this one to see a cropped 50% original resolution version of my image.
I finished imaging this at about 23:35 (BST) on the 15th and went on to what was my main target of the evening.
This is the Coma group of galaxies in the constellation of Coma Berenices.
I hadn't attempted this before, because the galaxies are all rather small and faint. It is looking almost at 90 degrees from the plane of our own Milky Way galaxy. A big proportion of the light that you can see in this image took more than 350 million years to get here.
Clicking on the image goes to a 33% original resolution image.
The image set above took me to just after one o'clock in the morning. I thought I'd finish off with something a bit less challenging for the equipment.
This is M 13, the Great Star Cluster in Hercules.
I've cropped the image, but I couldn't help leaving a galaxy in the top left corner.
15th April
Taken only just into the 15th April (so actually starting just after 23:00 on the 14th in UT (GMT)), this is the same target as the picture from the 31st March, but this time with the 1000mm focal length Newtonian for a bit more detail.
It's NGC 5354, and the Hickson 68 galaxy group.
I quite liked having a bright star in the galaxy picture from 24th of March, so on the 25th I set out with the little 360mm focal length 'scope to image NGC 3184. I took over 2 hours worth of pictures without an SD card in the camera.
On the 26th of March (Frans birthday - Hurrah!) I set out again with the little 360mm focal length 'scope to image NGC 3184, in the constellation of Ursa Major. NGC 3184 is not terribly big, so you would think I would want to use the 1000mm telescope. But I wanted both the 3rd magnitude stars in the frame. The orange star on the left is Tania Australis, 230 light years away. The blue star on the right is Tania Borealis, slightly fainter, but a bit closer at 137 light years. The two stars form the claws on one of the back legs of the Great Bear. Grasped within the claws is the cute little spiral, NGC 3184.
Clicking on the image takes you to a 33% original resolution version.
24th March
I was back out with the same setup again, on the 24th of March.
This time looking at M109.
Phad is a 2.4 magnitude star, a mere 83 light years away.
The galaxy M109 is 83 MLy distant. The picture, if you big it, shows a number of smaller galaxies.
22nd March
On the 22nd of March I was using the 200mm diameter, 1000mm focal length Newtonian telescope, looking at NGC 4490.
This is a long image set, beginning at 21:44 on the 22nd, and finishing at 00:12 on the 23rd. As usual, clicking on the image goes to a picture at 33% of the original resolution.
NGC 4490 and the smaller NGC 4485 form an interacting galaxy pair around 30 Mly away. They are in the ARP catalogue of interacting galaxies as ARP 269.
Given the length of the image set, I had hoped to see more detail around the periphery of these two galaxies. It doesn't seem to exist.
The pair can be found not too far outside of Picture 1 above, in the constellation of Canes Venatici.
2nd/3rd March
It is now the Spring months (according to the Met Office), and Spring is the time for galaxy observation.
Here are a couple more. I didn't need the widish angle of the 360mm focal length telescope to get two galaxies in this time, so this is with the Sony A6300 on the 1000mm focal length Newtonian reflector (with Coma corrector).
Top of the image is NGC 4631, the Whale Galaxy. This is another one in the Caldwell Catalogue (C 32). Towards the bottom of the image is NGC 4656, The Crowbar Galaxy or Hockey Stick Galaxy, you can choose (Hockey Stick is obviously more jolly).
If you click on the image to big it you go to a 50% original resolution image, slightly cropped vertically, but more heavily cropped horizontally.
The two galaxies are both around 23 Mly away, and the interaction between them is believed to be the cause of the kink in the Crowbar. At the very end of the crowbar is separately designated galaxy, NGC 4567. The Whale galaxy has its own little calf, NGC 4627.
The picture is derived from 204 30 second exposures, so over an hour and 40 minutes exposure time, spanning midnight from the 2nd to the 3rd March.
I had issues with flat frames using AstroArt6 - a multi-coloured sky background that I couldn't really get rid of. DeepSkyStacker was far more favourable towards the flat frames, but didn't produce the crispness or colour of AstroArt6. As result, the image here is a 50:50 merge of a stack of lights/darks and flats from DeepSkyStacker, and a stack of just lights and darks from AstroArt6.
We continue the series of phone camera images of the Moon and Venus. This is the fourth consecutive month.
The image features a moderately full river Great Ouse at Earith bridge.
8th February
Early Saturday evening and I had a walk down to Berry Fen with the Canon Camera and lightweight tripod. I was hoping to see Venus and Mercury, but cloud rolled in from the West, obscuring Mercury.
Looking East however, the Moon was now well risen.
The original picture was taken at 100th of a second, to bring out the reflection of the Moon on the water. To actually see a tiny bit of detail in the Moon,
which one naturally does when looking at the scene, the Moon you see in the picture here is taken from a 4000th of a second exposure of the same scene (brightened up a bit).
We were on holiday in Norfolk, hoping for clear skies. Luckily the 28th of January was clear. The main target of the evening was Comet C/2017-T2, nicely placed close to the wonderful double cluster in Perseus.
If you click on the image to big it you go to a cropped 50% of original resolution image.
I had hoped the comet might have been a bit bigger and brighter by now, no matter, I'm sure you can see it.
A close conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, the usual 'four bright planets' picture, and two passes of the ISS in front of the Sun.
For scenic images: A slim crescent Moon with Mercury and Venus, the Moon and Venus over the river Great Ouse, and the full Moon over Berry Fen.
Comets: Comet C/2017-T2 near the double cluster in Perseus, and the excellent comet C/2020 F3 (Neowise).
Deep Sky: M1, Barnard 33, M106, the Draco Triplet (NGC 5985, NGC 5982 and NGC 5981), NGC 5907, the Antennae galaxies NGC 4038 and NGC 4039, the Coma group of galaxies, M13, NGC 5354 and the Hickson 68 galaxy group, NGC 4490 (ARP 269), M109, wide field NGC 3184 (nice picture), and NGC 4631 with NGC 4656 (whale and crowbar galaxies).
Clicking on some images won't do anything, and on others might toggle you through an image sequence.
December 2020
19th DecemberWe are rapidly approaching the great conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. On the 19th, the two planets were both visible in the same field of view of my 1000mm focal length 'scope.
Even this degree of closeness is highly unusual. By the 21st they will be really really close, something that hasn't happened for whatever donkeys would call donkeys years.
I found it difficult to get pictures where even a small amount of detail could be seen on Jupiter, without virtually losing Saturn altogether, so in the end I just opted for one in which you could see three of Jupiter Galilean moons.
The real puprose of getting the scope out was to cast off my indolence, and get back to some deep sky imaging.
I have not attempted any pictures (or even looked at) the Crab nebula for a few years now. The little Sony camera produces my best shot of this object..
The Crab nebula is a supernova remnant.
I thought I would have a quick go at something I have consistently produced poor images of - the Horse head nebula in Orion...
This also features the Flame nebula (left), and the really rather bright (in this image) relflection nebula NGC 2023 (centre).
In terms of my efforts on this part of the sky, it's not a bad picture. It is crying out for me to use the pucker Astro camera though - I did have a go last January, but was scuppered by non-imaging related issues.
September 2020
19th/20th SeptemberJust a comparison of the brightest planets as they appeared in September, all taken through the same equipment.
Jupiter and Saturn (top) were imaged on the evening of the 19th, Mars and Venus (bottom) on the morning of the 20th.
I could have turned down the ISO setting for Venus I guess, but actually, overall, there is some sense of the relative brightness of these objects in the images above,
The camera was the Sony A6300, which I'm experimenting with for planetary imaging (it would save me having to have a laptop outside). Each image is derived from a movie, processed in PIPP and Registax 6.
July 2020
21st JulyAgain looking at Comet C/2020 F3 (Neowise). This is from Bluntisham playing field, and features the light pollution from St. Helens Primary School.
I had set out intending to go to Barleycroft lake, for a more scenic picture, but with work in the morning I decided I didn't want to spend 45 minutes just walking to the lake and back.
It's around 190 10 second exposures spanning over half an hour. You can see this half hour squashed into 12 seconds in the time-lapse movie here.
The focal lengths get shorter (testament to what a grand comet this is). This is 16mm focal length, and you can see the whole of the plough in the image.
The image is a stack of about 150 of the images. Because this was on a fixed tripod, the sky moves across the lens distortion, the stars near the edge don't line up and the stacking process struggles, so it didn't do the full 190 images.
You can see the stars near the edge not lining up, if you big the image (to 25% of the original resolution).
The comet has been dimming the whole time since I first saw it on the 11th July. It is also now moving south relative to the star background, so as I write this (on the 26th) the comet is only just circumpolar, and is no longer a "morning object".
It is also moving west, by the end of next week it will be setting at 1am (midnight really) and won't rise till 3 hours after sunrise. It was also closest to the Earth on the 23rd of July so is going to start fading more rapidly. With a big moon coming up next weekend, it is not going to be an easy naked eye visible comet much longer.
11th July
Goodness me, a naked eye visible comet - and easy naked eye to boot! It's what Pete described as comety.
A picture from the early morning of the 11th July.
What could it portend?
June 2020
24th JuneIt can't be very often that from one location the ISS passes in front of the solar disk on two consecutive orbits. Here it is doing just that on the 24th June from my back garden:
The track on the left occurred at 08:46 BST, the more central track 96 mins later at 10:22 BST. At the earlier time, with the sun lower in the sky, the ISS was further from my garden, and travelling at a lower angular velocity.
If two passes of the ISS in front of the sun on one day wasn't enough, it was predicted to do the same on the morning of Friday 26th June (as it turned out, it was raining that morning).
May 2020
24th MayFor the last six months I've been taking a monthly phone camera image of the Moon and Venus in the evening sky. This is the seventh month, and last evening picture, Venus will be a morning star again in June.
It is also not a phone camera image. I wanted to make sure the innermost planet, Mercury, was visible in the picture, so this is taken with the Canon EOS camera sitting on a tripod.
Because it is a tadge better than the hand held images from my cheap phone, you can big this picture to go to a 50% original resolution image.
Mercury is slightly higher than the Moon, mid picture, at 22:02 BST, Venus (right) is not far off setting.
Photo details: focal length 100mm, f/4.5, 1/5th second at ISO400, and a bit of post processing and cropping in AstroArt 6.
April 2020
25th/26th AprilYet another clear night. In contrast to many of the objects I've featured recently, M106 is relatively close (22Mly) and should be visible in binoculars. If you use the diagonal across the body of the bear to find M81 and M82, M106 can be found using the same diagonal, but going the other way.
The little fuzzy streak below M 106 is NGC 4248. This is a similar distance, and is in all likelihood a companion galaxy of M 106.
The edge on galaxy that just crept into the frame bottom left (NGC 4217) is much further away at around 60 Mly.
In a single frame you couldn't see either of the last two galaxies mentioned, the near 2 hour exposure time across 278 individual images has worked really well.
24th/25th April
A line of sight group of galaxies that I have imaged (not particularly successfully) before...
The 'Draco Triplet' consists of NGC 5985, the almost face on spiral on the left, NGC 5982, the elliptical in the centre, and the smaller edge on spiral NGC 5981.
I'm beginning not to trust any of the information Stellarium tells me about these things, so let's just say these galaxies are all between 100 and 200 Mly away.
22nd/23rd April
Here's another of those edge on spiral galaxies...
NGC 5907 is closer than the Coma group, at around 50 Mly. This is 85 minutes worth of pictures starting on the 22nd April and finishing at around 1am on the 23rd April.
15th/16th April
Three images taken with the 1000mm focal length f/5 Newtonian with Coma Corrector, the AZ/EQ6 mount, and the little Sony A6300 camera.
I had been considering looking at the first one a few times, but it was always sitting low down in the murk and light pollution. Time is running out this year, so on the 15th April I gave it a go. I took 120 30 second images of this object, but threw away 30 because of obscuring cloudy stuff.
It's the Antennae galaxy, or galaxies to be more precise - NGC 4038 and 4039, in the Caldwell catalogue as C 60 and 61. These two interacting galaxies are 91 Mly away and have interacted so much they have produced two ant like antennae structures swirling off the main body of each galaxy.
These structures are barely visible above the background in this image, there just discernible to the left of the two galaxy nuclei. I had to wind up the background more than I would otherwise have liked just to see this.
You can search the internet for far better pictures, or you can click on this one to see a cropped 50% original resolution version of my image.
I finished imaging this at about 23:35 (BST) on the 15th and went on to what was my main target of the evening.
This is the Coma group of galaxies in the constellation of Coma Berenices.
I hadn't attempted this before, because the galaxies are all rather small and faint. It is looking almost at 90 degrees from the plane of our own Milky Way galaxy. A big proportion of the light that you can see in this image took more than 350 million years to get here.
Clicking on the image goes to a 33% original resolution image.
The image set above took me to just after one o'clock in the morning. I thought I'd finish off with something a bit less challenging for the equipment.
This is M 13, the Great Star Cluster in Hercules.
I've cropped the image, but I couldn't help leaving a galaxy in the top left corner.
15th April
Taken only just into the 15th April (so actually starting just after 23:00 on the 14th in UT (GMT)), this is the same target as the picture from the 31st March, but this time with the 1000mm focal length Newtonian for a bit more detail.
It's NGC 5354, and the Hickson 68 galaxy group.
March 2020
26th MarchI quite liked having a bright star in the galaxy picture from 24th of March, so on the 25th I set out with the little 360mm focal length 'scope to image NGC 3184. I took over 2 hours worth of pictures without an SD card in the camera.
On the 26th of March (Frans birthday - Hurrah!) I set out again with the little 360mm focal length 'scope to image NGC 3184, in the constellation of Ursa Major. NGC 3184 is not terribly big, so you would think I would want to use the 1000mm telescope. But I wanted both the 3rd magnitude stars in the frame. The orange star on the left is Tania Australis, 230 light years away. The blue star on the right is Tania Borealis, slightly fainter, but a bit closer at 137 light years. The two stars form the claws on one of the back legs of the Great Bear. Grasped within the claws is the cute little spiral, NGC 3184.
Clicking on the image takes you to a 33% original resolution version.
24th March
I was back out with the same setup again, on the 24th of March.
This time looking at M109.
Phad is a 2.4 magnitude star, a mere 83 light years away.
The galaxy M109 is 83 MLy distant. The picture, if you big it, shows a number of smaller galaxies.
22nd March
On the 22nd of March I was using the 200mm diameter, 1000mm focal length Newtonian telescope, looking at NGC 4490.
This is a long image set, beginning at 21:44 on the 22nd, and finishing at 00:12 on the 23rd. As usual, clicking on the image goes to a picture at 33% of the original resolution.
NGC 4490 and the smaller NGC 4485 form an interacting galaxy pair around 30 Mly away. They are in the ARP catalogue of interacting galaxies as ARP 269.
Given the length of the image set, I had hoped to see more detail around the periphery of these two galaxies. It doesn't seem to exist.
The pair can be found not too far outside of Picture 1 above, in the constellation of Canes Venatici.
2nd/3rd March
It is now the Spring months (according to the Met Office), and Spring is the time for galaxy observation.
Here are a couple more. I didn't need the widish angle of the 360mm focal length telescope to get two galaxies in this time, so this is with the Sony A6300 on the 1000mm focal length Newtonian reflector (with Coma corrector).
Top of the image is NGC 4631, the Whale Galaxy. This is another one in the Caldwell Catalogue (C 32). Towards the bottom of the image is NGC 4656, The Crowbar Galaxy or Hockey Stick Galaxy, you can choose (Hockey Stick is obviously more jolly).
If you click on the image to big it you go to a 50% original resolution image, slightly cropped vertically, but more heavily cropped horizontally.
The two galaxies are both around 23 Mly away, and the interaction between them is believed to be the cause of the kink in the Crowbar. At the very end of the crowbar is separately designated galaxy, NGC 4567. The Whale galaxy has its own little calf, NGC 4627.
The picture is derived from 204 30 second exposures, so over an hour and 40 minutes exposure time, spanning midnight from the 2nd to the 3rd March.
I had issues with flat frames using AstroArt6 - a multi-coloured sky background that I couldn't really get rid of. DeepSkyStacker was far more favourable towards the flat frames, but didn't produce the crispness or colour of AstroArt6. As result, the image here is a 50:50 merge of a stack of lights/darks and flats from DeepSkyStacker, and a stack of just lights and darks from AstroArt6.
February 2020
27th FebruaryWe continue the series of phone camera images of the Moon and Venus. This is the fourth consecutive month.
The image features a moderately full river Great Ouse at Earith bridge.
8th February
Early Saturday evening and I had a walk down to Berry Fen with the Canon Camera and lightweight tripod. I was hoping to see Venus and Mercury, but cloud rolled in from the West, obscuring Mercury.
Looking East however, the Moon was now well risen.
The original picture was taken at 100th of a second, to bring out the reflection of the Moon on the water. To actually see a tiny bit of detail in the Moon,
which one naturally does when looking at the scene, the Moon you see in the picture here is taken from a 4000th of a second exposure of the same scene (brightened up a bit).
January 2020
28th JanuaryWe were on holiday in Norfolk, hoping for clear skies. Luckily the 28th of January was clear. The main target of the evening was Comet C/2017-T2, nicely placed close to the wonderful double cluster in Perseus.
If you click on the image to big it you go to a cropped 50% of original resolution image.
I had hoped the comet might have been a bit bigger and brighter by now, no matter, I'm sure you can see it.
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