Astronomical Images - the best from 2021
Featuring:
Clicking on some images won't do anything, and on others might toggle you through an image sequence.
Jupiter, Saturn and Venus over Berry Fen, Earith.
A waning gibbous Moon. A combination of 33 images, stacked and sharpened in Registax 6.
The small image above is 18% of the sensor resolution. I you click on it to big it, you see a jolly nice 67% resolution image.
I was using the 360 mm focal length 'scope with the Sony camera pointing at the East Veil nebula (after my success with the West Veil earlier in the month).
Not as crisp as my previous image of the West Veil. I could blame the increased breeze on the 29th, but it is actually just slightly out of ideal focus.
The nebulae are the edges of the same clump of debris from a supernova that occurred between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago.
At around 2400 light years away, the supernova would have been visible in daylight, and cast shadows at night.
The debris has now expanded to be 130 light years across, so the East and West edges are far enough apart to not fit into a single frame with the equipment used.
Apparently, in images taken with the HST between 1997 and 2015, the expansion of the debris has been directly observed.
Here is a merged picture of the two full frame images, showing the extent of this supernova remnant (with a white blob the apparent size of the Moon for comparison).
7th September
This is the West Veil nebula, taken with the Sony camera on the 360mm focal length 'scope.
6th into 7th September
I was again using the Atik GP to image Jupiter, and a shadow transit of Io (or at least the end of it). Here is the best picture from a wodge of images spanning 88 minutes.
A nice enough picture for me to show it at 200% of the sensor resolution.
You can easily see Io and its shadow, and also the Great Red Spot, to the left and down from the moon shadow. This is not as great, or possibly as red, as it has been in the past.
The image below is an animation from across the 88 minute span, at fairly random intervals, and at 50% of the sensor resolution. You can see the rotation of the planet, and I have also included the two moons to the right of Jupiter.
Ganymede is the brighter of the two, the other is Europa, which is close to its maximum apparent angular distance from the planet (which is why it appears to be hardly moving).
While I had the barlow lens out for planetary imaging on the evening of the 6th, I thought I would try some deep sky imaging with it and the Sony camera. I had used it successfully for the Ring Nebula in Lyra, way back in September 2016 (see the last item in the "Best pictures from 2016/2017" below). I thought I would choose something smaller than the Ring Nebula. NCG 7048 is a planetary nebula in Cygnus, with an apparent diameter slightly larger than Jupiter (about one quarter the apparent size of the long axis of the Ring Nebula).
I was reasonably convinced I was pointing in the right direction, but could not see it in initial single images. I moved the 'scope around a bit, hoping it would appear in one of the images, but eventually gave up.
I directed the 'scope to point at one of my favourite planetaries, M27 - the Dumbbell nebula. It pointed directly at it. So I took some frames of that instead.
The colours didn't come out particularly well, and I've toned down the red quite a bit to get rid of noise in the image. I don't think 30 seconds at ISO 5000 was quite long enough, but it was as long as the tracking would stand.
Saturn is still low in the sky this year, but will be getting slowly higher every year.
The picture was generated using PIPP and Registax6 software from movies taken with the Sony A6300. I'm going to go back to the Atik GP camera and laptop for the next go at this, it allows for more control of what the camera is doing.
12th August
Some clear skies predicted, so a chance to catch the tail end of the Perseid meteor shower maximum.
I was taking pictures with a 16mm focal length, which covers quite a big sky area.
Between bursts of cloud cover, I took 126 30 second images, between 22:18 and 23:46 BST. Three of these had potential meteor candidates on them:
Each picture is a very heavy crop of the frame containing the meteor.
Meteor one is not from the Perseid shower, two and three are Perseids I believe.
Meteor 2 is the interesting one.
I pointed the 'scope at the Eagle nebula (the iconic "Pillars of Creation"). Although I had imaged this a couple of years ago, my scheme was to try and get a longer total exposure time.
Imaging started at 00:48, I intended to let it carry on to around 02:30.
By 02:00, the sky was getting noticeably brighter (the Milky Way being far less obvious that it had been at 01:45). With a view to actually going to bed, I stopped imaging. This was only about 5 minutes longer exposure time than my previous effort.
Here's the result:
Unsurprisingly, this is not a lot different to the image from 2019. It is a tadge more in focus - he said trying to justify the effort.
I do like this nebula though, if only because of its fame from the Hubble picture.
10th June
Partial eclipse day, hurrah.
At the start of the eclipse it was solidly overcast. Part of me hoped that this state of affairs would continue, and provide me with a rock solid excuse.
I can't lie, it turned into intermittent clears bits, so here are the results....
Exposure times and ISO settings are a bit random, due to variable cloud cover combined with lackadaisicalness on the part of the operator.
There were some very small sunspots around at the time, as well as faculae. If you click on the image above you go to a 50% resolution version of the 11:34 original, processed such that you might stand a chance of seeing these.
Don't worry if you can't see them, the spots are almost indistinguishable from the dust that naturally accumulates on your screen.
9th/10th June
M57, the Ring Nebula in Lyra has featured before on these pages (see the 2016/2017 highlights below for a comparison). In the absence of any better ideas, I thought I would have a look at it again, this time with the Sony camera.
The picture here is a 100% resolution, heavily cropped version of the stack of images. You can see the barred spiral galaxy IC 1296 a bit more clearly than in my previous images, but the colours of M57 itself don't match those from the pucker Astro camera.
If you click on the image you go to a bigger field of view version (but still cropped) at 50% of the original resolution.
Note that the nebula itself has been processed slightly differently to the background, to bring down its relative brightness.
This is M94. A galaxy around 16 Mlys away.
I've tried to process this to bring out the real extent of the outer regions - you may have to play around a bit with your angle of view to see this though.
Jupiter, Saturn and Venus over Berry Fen.
The Moon, Jupiter and Saturn, and a partial eclipse of the Sun.
Some Perseid meteors.
The East and West Veil nebulae, M27 (Dumbbell nebula), M16 (Eagle nebula), M57 (Ring nebula) and M94 (bright galaxy in Canes Venatici).
Clicking on some images won't do anything, and on others might toggle you through an image sequence.
December 2021
5th DecemberJupiter, Saturn and Venus over Berry Fen, Earith.
October 2021
25th OctoberA waning gibbous Moon. A combination of 33 images, stacked and sharpened in Registax 6.
The small image above is 18% of the sensor resolution. I you click on it to big it, you see a jolly nice 67% resolution image.
September 2021
29th SeptemberI was using the 360 mm focal length 'scope with the Sony camera pointing at the East Veil nebula (after my success with the West Veil earlier in the month).
Not as crisp as my previous image of the West Veil. I could blame the increased breeze on the 29th, but it is actually just slightly out of ideal focus.
The nebulae are the edges of the same clump of debris from a supernova that occurred between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago.
At around 2400 light years away, the supernova would have been visible in daylight, and cast shadows at night.
The debris has now expanded to be 130 light years across, so the East and West edges are far enough apart to not fit into a single frame with the equipment used.
Apparently, in images taken with the HST between 1997 and 2015, the expansion of the debris has been directly observed.
Here is a merged picture of the two full frame images, showing the extent of this supernova remnant (with a white blob the apparent size of the Moon for comparison).
7th September
This is the West Veil nebula, taken with the Sony camera on the 360mm focal length 'scope.
6th into 7th September
I was again using the Atik GP to image Jupiter, and a shadow transit of Io (or at least the end of it). Here is the best picture from a wodge of images spanning 88 minutes.
A nice enough picture for me to show it at 200% of the sensor resolution.
You can easily see Io and its shadow, and also the Great Red Spot, to the left and down from the moon shadow. This is not as great, or possibly as red, as it has been in the past.
The image below is an animation from across the 88 minute span, at fairly random intervals, and at 50% of the sensor resolution. You can see the rotation of the planet, and I have also included the two moons to the right of Jupiter.
Ganymede is the brighter of the two, the other is Europa, which is close to its maximum apparent angular distance from the planet (which is why it appears to be hardly moving).
While I had the barlow lens out for planetary imaging on the evening of the 6th, I thought I would try some deep sky imaging with it and the Sony camera. I had used it successfully for the Ring Nebula in Lyra, way back in September 2016 (see the last item in the "Best pictures from 2016/2017" below). I thought I would choose something smaller than the Ring Nebula. NCG 7048 is a planetary nebula in Cygnus, with an apparent diameter slightly larger than Jupiter (about one quarter the apparent size of the long axis of the Ring Nebula).
I was reasonably convinced I was pointing in the right direction, but could not see it in initial single images. I moved the 'scope around a bit, hoping it would appear in one of the images, but eventually gave up.
I directed the 'scope to point at one of my favourite planetaries, M27 - the Dumbbell nebula. It pointed directly at it. So I took some frames of that instead.
The colours didn't come out particularly well, and I've toned down the red quite a bit to get rid of noise in the image. I don't think 30 seconds at ISO 5000 was quite long enough, but it was as long as the tracking would stand.
August 2021
17th AugustSaturn is still low in the sky this year, but will be getting slowly higher every year.
The picture was generated using PIPP and Registax6 software from movies taken with the Sony A6300. I'm going to go back to the Atik GP camera and laptop for the next go at this, it allows for more control of what the camera is doing.
12th August
Some clear skies predicted, so a chance to catch the tail end of the Perseid meteor shower maximum.
I was taking pictures with a 16mm focal length, which covers quite a big sky area.
Between bursts of cloud cover, I took 126 30 second images, between 22:18 and 23:46 BST. Three of these had potential meteor candidates on them:
Each picture is a very heavy crop of the frame containing the meteor.
Meteor one is not from the Perseid shower, two and three are Perseids I believe.
Meteor 2 is the interesting one.
June 2021
13th JuneI pointed the 'scope at the Eagle nebula (the iconic "Pillars of Creation"). Although I had imaged this a couple of years ago, my scheme was to try and get a longer total exposure time.
Imaging started at 00:48, I intended to let it carry on to around 02:30.
By 02:00, the sky was getting noticeably brighter (the Milky Way being far less obvious that it had been at 01:45). With a view to actually going to bed, I stopped imaging. This was only about 5 minutes longer exposure time than my previous effort.
Here's the result:
Unsurprisingly, this is not a lot different to the image from 2019. It is a tadge more in focus - he said trying to justify the effort.
I do like this nebula though, if only because of its fame from the Hubble picture.
10th June
Partial eclipse day, hurrah.
At the start of the eclipse it was solidly overcast. Part of me hoped that this state of affairs would continue, and provide me with a rock solid excuse.
I can't lie, it turned into intermittent clears bits, so here are the results....
Exposure times and ISO settings are a bit random, due to variable cloud cover combined with lackadaisicalness on the part of the operator.
There were some very small sunspots around at the time, as well as faculae. If you click on the image above you go to a 50% resolution version of the 11:34 original, processed such that you might stand a chance of seeing these.
Don't worry if you can't see them, the spots are almost indistinguishable from the dust that naturally accumulates on your screen.
9th/10th June
M57, the Ring Nebula in Lyra has featured before on these pages (see the 2016/2017 highlights below for a comparison). In the absence of any better ideas, I thought I would have a look at it again, this time with the Sony camera.
The picture here is a 100% resolution, heavily cropped version of the stack of images. You can see the barred spiral galaxy IC 1296 a bit more clearly than in my previous images, but the colours of M57 itself don't match those from the pucker Astro camera.
If you click on the image you go to a bigger field of view version (but still cropped) at 50% of the original resolution.
Note that the nebula itself has been processed slightly differently to the background, to bring down its relative brightness.
April 2021
18th AprilThis is M94. A galaxy around 16 Mlys away.
I've tried to process this to bring out the real extent of the outer regions - you may have to play around a bit with your angle of view to see this though.
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