Astronomical Images - the best from 2024
Featuring:
Clicking on some images won't do anything, and on others might toggle you through an image sequence.
Pick one thing that makes 2024 a memorable year for astronomical imaging. I'm picking aurora....
10th of May.
Some pictures of the most spectacular auroral display I've seen.
(Note that the pictures are much brighter and coloured than the naked eye view).
A click/tap to change image set featuring setting crescent moon.
For a while, you couldn't look anywhere without seeing aurora. Here's a 360 degree panorama.
(Click/Tap the image to go to a better resolution version)
And now to the 10th of October...
Remember 10th May 2024, with 360-degree aurora, 10th October was similar, but different. It never made the 360-degree category, but by late in the evening there were some spectacular views overhead.
Beginning around 19:30, the display just improved by the hour, from a naked eye point of view, it started out with thoughts of "oooh, that's a bit redder than normal!", and ended up with the word "Wow" crossing my mind.
This is the last image I took with the Sony camera (at just after 22:00), it was visually stunning.
You can click/tap to big both these images.
I've seen some really rather good phone camera images of this display (from a number of people who may well be reading this), and they exhibit a steadiness of hand that eludes me. Here's my best two.
The first was taken at 00:005 on the 11th. The second was taken at quarter past one, through the bedroom window, as I was tucking up in bed.
You can click/tap to big this image.
In the second one you can make out the Pleiades at the top, and Orion at the bottom, Jupiter is the bright thing in both images.
Overall, despite not making the 360 degrees of aurora of the 10th May, this was the most impressive northern lights I've seen with the naked eye.
Continuing with 'unpredictable' astronomical events, there were two comets touted as being potentially naked eye visible in 2024.
The first (comet 12P/Pons-Brooks) in March, was only a possible naked eye visible comet and, so far as I was concerned, never made the threshold.
The comet in October had been over hyped for months before it's arrival. It was a bright comet, but I saw it with the naked eye only on one occasion. It was quite low in the sky at the time, so it was a bright comet then, but it dimmed very quickly.
In binoculars, and camera, it was quite spectacular.
16th October - Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS)
I was lucky in terms of breaks in the cloud cover on the 16th. Here's the resulting picture:
The small(ish) image here is a stack of 6 5 second images, largely unprocessed after stacking. This is a cropped image, but there is still some obvious vignetting at the top. I did not take any flat frames, so I reverted to software to get rid of this.
If you click/tap the image to big it, you go to a version which includes that processing. The vignetting has gone, but at the expense of curious grayness in the top half of the image.
Looking at the big image, it's noticeable that this comet displays something I haven't been aware of before - an anti-tail, i.e. a "thin" trail of matter pointing from the comet TOWARDS the sun. I don't like the term anti-tail, two words with negative connotations, which doesn't suit my joyously optimistic personality. I'm going to call it a snoot.
You'll also notice that the tail is long! I would argue it goes off image. That's nearly 9.25 degrees, or half the height of Orion.
A couple of other things about this image. It contains the path of an artificial satellite to the right of the comet. There are five 'strokes' of the satellites path, each corresponding to how far it moved in a single image, and each stroke is offset a bit because the images are aligned on the comet, and the comet was setting. There are only five, and not six, because there is a big gap between the first five images and the last one. As much as possible, I did not include images with cloud obscuring the snoot!
Secondly, if you look towards the bottom right corner of the image, you will see two stars, one of which is oddly fuzzy. It is not a star, it's the globular cluster M5, which featured in the best of 2023 images, see that image here.
My best Jupiter image of 2024 happened to be on the one night (19th December) I took images of 6 of the 7 planets.
Here's a pictorial summary, with the associated blurb:
The planets are all imaged with the same magnification and are ordered in the way they currently appear in the sky.
Starting on the right at 16:38, with Venus:
When I initially set up the telescope, just before sunset, Venus looked steadier than I expected in the eyepiece. By the time I had attached two cameras (and made all other necessary connections and adjustments) it had drifted west and down so was sitting over the row of houses down the road in some really poor seeing.
The image somewhat reflects this.
Venus is really bright (magnitude -4.3). It's only 126 million km away at the moment and shrouded in a reflective covering of cloud. It will continue to brighten as it approaches the Earth, peaking around the 20th February 2025. By that time, it will be only 58 million km away and its apparent diameter will be close to that of Jupiter. It will be showing quite a thin crescent though.
Venus has a diameter of about 12000 km (compared to the Earths 12750 km).
Moving eastwards, 17:10, Saturn:
I had expected Saturn to be in far steadier air as it was higher in the sky and had not yet reached the destroyer of all seeing that is the houses down the street. My expectations were optimistic.
Saturn is easily naked eye visible at magnitude 1, but, unless you are familiar enough with the constellations to know that there isn't a magnitude 1 star there, it is easy to overlook. It's a big planet, 117000 km in diameter, but a long way away, about 1500 million km.
Further East, 17:38, Neptune:
With a magnitude of 7.8 Neptune is only just visible with the maximum exposure for my planetary camera. This led to issues processing the images, which I won't dwell on, save to say that the size of the planet in the image is the order of 30% bigger than one might expect. Neptune is less than half the size of Saturn at 49500 km, and much further away 4470 million km. Radio communication to Neptune would spend over 4 hours in transit.
Neptune is noticeably blue.
Looking East South East now, 18:09, Uranus:
At magnitude 5.6 Uranus is notionally a naked eye visible object. I've never come close to seeing it with the naked eye, even back in a less light polluted era. It's bright enough to be an easy object for the camera though. Uranus is a greenish gassy lump slightly bigger than Neptune at 51000 km, and much closer at 2800 million km.
The real target for the evenings observing was Jupiter, the solar system combo above features the image from 20:33:
Jupiter is huge, 143000 km in diameter, and relatively close, 616 million km. The image includes the moons Io, visible above the right edge of disk of Jupiter with its shadow to the left, and Ganymede to the left of Jupiter.
Finally, 23:31, Mars:
Really bright, really red, Mars is just 6792 km is diameter (not much over half Earth size) and is a mere 104 million km away. The closest thing we've looked at. The polar cap in the northern hemisphere is its most obvious feature.
The above were my only telescopic pictures of Venus, Uranus, Mars and (if you can call it an image, more like a clump of excessively over brightened pixels I would say) Neptune in 2024.
I did get a nicer image of Saturn in 2024, on the 17th of October....
You may have noticed that my Jupiter images are peppered with its satellites (the four Galilean ones anyway), and this never seems to happen for my Saturn pictures. Well, here are three of Saturn's moons:
Titan is the second biggest moon in the Solar system, with a diameter of 5152 km it is not much smaller than Jupiter's Ganymede at 5268 km (our moon - 3745 km). Rhea and Tethys are not so big. This is the first time ever (!) I have seen these last two either at the eyepiece of, or in an image from, a telescope of mine. I was almost shocked when they appeared during the processing (never saw them while I was taking the images). You'll notice Saturn is a tadge on the over-exposed side to get this image.
And for completeness, here's the combo picture I generated back on 28th July 2024 showing the change in angle of Saturns ring system over 9 years:
As Saturn moves around its nearly 30 year orbit. the plane of its ring system is always orientated in the same plane relative to the greater universe.
(I'll bet this is not true - it will precess in the same way as the Earths axis of rotation or the Moons orbital plane does).
It follows that the angle at which we view the rings will depend on what direction in the greater universe we are looking when we observe Saturn. i.e., what constellation it is in.
Here's a little combo picture of views of Saturn picked from my "Best of" pages from the last few years:
In June 2015, Saturn was near the border of Libra and Scorpio, 18 degrees below the celestial equator, so never getting particularly high in the sky. The rings were close to presenting their widest view, and getting wider.
There is a gap in the images as Saturn trundles its way through the southernmost zodiacal constellations of Scorpio and Sagittarius, the rings reaching the steepest angle of view sometime in 2016 or 2017. By August 2021, Saturn is back to being 18 degrees below the equator in the constellation of Capricorn. The ring system is now noticeably narrowed. In November 2023, Saturn has moved into Aquarius, now only 13 degrees below the equator, the rings continue to narrow, as they do up until July 2024, with Saturn still in Aquarius but now only 6.5 degrees below the equator.
At the end of June 2024, Saturn started it retrograde motion. This is where the Earth whizzes around its orbit, "overtaking" the ponderous Saturn, which appears to suspend its overall west to east movement through the constellations, and starts going backwards. So, the angle at which we view the ring system changes, and the rings will be getting wider for a time.
They will be edge on sometime in 2025, then begin widening again, and we get to see the other side. As Saturn progresses into the northern zodiacal constellations, the rings get wider, peaking around 2031/2032 when Saturn will be in Taurus/Gemini. Great views of the planet to be had then, as they were when it was in the same part of the sky two orbits earlier in 1972, when Saturn was the first object I looked at through my first telescope.
Best Sun image of 2024....
17th August - Sunspots.
Two fairly large sunspots, plus a few minor ones:
You can click/tap the image to go to a better resolution version,
or just look at the interesting bits.
Going backwards through the year, let's start on 31st October with...
THE GHOST OF CASSIOPEIA
(Click/tap to big).
The bright start is Gamma Cassiopeiae (the middle star of the familiar W shape of the constellation), magnitude 2.1. It is the light from this star being reflected from the nebula that makes it easily visible in the image from my non-astro camera.
In the image you can see more nebulosity in the top left. This is all part of the same thing, images more sensitive to the HII emission line show a continuous nebula extending over 2 degrees of arc (compared to the 0.5 degrees in this image). 2 degrees would equate to a nebula size of about 19 light years.
(Ignore the odd dark thing in the bottom right corner - this is a flat frame issue - or could it be the work of sprites?)
Next, from the 8th of June, Caldwell 19, aka the Cocoon Nebula, a combination of emission/reflection nebula in Cygnus. The Milky Way runs through Cygnus, so this is a rich star field. Figures I have seen suggest the nebula is a mere 3200 light years distant, with a diameter of around 15 light years. From my image, the bright part for the nebula would be less than 10 light years across at that distance
(Click/Tap the images to go to better resolution versions)
Almost finally, from the 10th of January...
This is the Rosette Nebula, a star forming H II region in Monoceros, close to Orion, about 5000 light years away.
A lot of the light output from the nebula is at the red end of the spectrum associated with H alpha emission line. Red enough to be largely removed by the filters on my non-astro camera. I couldn't see anything of the nebula in a single frame, so I was quite pleased with how this turned out.
(Click/Tap the image to go to a better resolution version)
I get a bit confused by the NGC numbers in this area of sky, there are a lot very close together. I'm pretty sure though that NGC 2244 is the open cluster consisting the bright stars near the centre of the image.
On the same evening as the Rosette Nebula picture I took a passable image of the Great Nebula in Orion. This made me wonder if anyone else could make out the bear with the big arse and great big rear feet padding away from us, with his head turned round and inviting us to follow him into the cold nebula.
Here's a click/tap to change image, starting with the 2024 image, then the an image from December 2014, and finally - the definitive guide to seeing the bear.
If you want to send me similar outlines of the particular creature you spotted, please feel free. I can collect them all together and then head off to the psychoanalyst.
During 2024 I was shying away from from the usual suspects in terns of galaxies, trying not to repeat myself. So nothing particularly spectacular. Here are two images I like....
From the 31st of October
THE GHOST OF MIRACH
Mirach is the central of the three bright stars of Andromeda, At magnitude 2.0. Less than 7 arc minutes away is an elliptical galaxy (NGC 404) about 10 million light years distant.
(Click/tap to big).
10 million light years is close for a galaxy, but not close enough to be part of our local group apparently.
That wasn't scary at all. Ghost in this context means that when observing this thing visually, the galaxy looks like a ghost image of Mirach produced by a defective eyepiece (I guess).
And from the 12th of May - "The Box"
This is a grouping of 4 galaxies (Hickson 61) consisting of:
NGC 4175 (top left corner of the box in my image), an edge on barred spiral about 197 million light years distant;
NGC 4174 (bottom left), spiral galaxy about 193 million light years away;
NGC 4169 (bottom right), spiral galaxy about 193 million light years away;
and NGC 4173 (top right), spiral galaxy about 50 million light years away (the odd one out).
(Click/Tap the image to go to a better resolution version)
The box is on the right of the image. The bright yellow star on the left is magnitude 7.6 (not bright). To the left of this is a face on spiral galaxy, NGC 4185, around 200 million light years away.
Image details:
153 30 second exposures at ISO 4000.
Mid point 23:40 BST on 12th May 2024.
12th September - In the South Downs National Park.
The South Downs National Park has been a National Park since March 2010, it's the youngest National Park.It has also been an International Dark Sky Reserve since May 2016 - and it shows....
A single 4 second picture of Orion's belt and sword rising. I say 'rising', this was looking uphill and over a hedge, so M42 (the Great Nebula in Orion) actually had an altitude just shy of 14 degrees.
You can 'big' this image, if you do you may be able to see the Flame Nebula, and the nebula M78, which I've marked on the smaller picture as a guide.
Aurora, comets, planets, small apparent size galaxies and some nice nebulae.
Clicking on some images won't do anything, and on others might toggle you through an image sequence.
Aurora
Pick one thing that makes 2024 a memorable year for astronomical imaging. I'm picking aurora....
10th of May.
Some pictures of the most spectacular auroral display I've seen.
(Note that the pictures are much brighter and coloured than the naked eye view).
A click/tap to change image set featuring setting crescent moon.
For a while, you couldn't look anywhere without seeing aurora. Here's a 360 degree panorama.
(Click/Tap the image to go to a better resolution version)
And now to the 10th of October...
Remember 10th May 2024, with 360-degree aurora, 10th October was similar, but different. It never made the 360-degree category, but by late in the evening there were some spectacular views overhead.
Beginning around 19:30, the display just improved by the hour, from a naked eye point of view, it started out with thoughts of "oooh, that's a bit redder than normal!", and ended up with the word "Wow" crossing my mind.
This is the last image I took with the Sony camera (at just after 22:00), it was visually stunning.
You can click/tap to big both these images.
I've seen some really rather good phone camera images of this display (from a number of people who may well be reading this), and they exhibit a steadiness of hand that eludes me. Here's my best two.
The first was taken at 00:005 on the 11th. The second was taken at quarter past one, through the bedroom window, as I was tucking up in bed.
You can click/tap to big this image.
In the second one you can make out the Pleiades at the top, and Orion at the bottom, Jupiter is the bright thing in both images.
Overall, despite not making the 360 degrees of aurora of the 10th May, this was the most impressive northern lights I've seen with the naked eye.
Comets
Continuing with 'unpredictable' astronomical events, there were two comets touted as being potentially naked eye visible in 2024.
The first (comet 12P/Pons-Brooks) in March, was only a possible naked eye visible comet and, so far as I was concerned, never made the threshold.
The comet in October had been over hyped for months before it's arrival. It was a bright comet, but I saw it with the naked eye only on one occasion. It was quite low in the sky at the time, so it was a bright comet then, but it dimmed very quickly.
In binoculars, and camera, it was quite spectacular.
16th October - Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS)
I was lucky in terms of breaks in the cloud cover on the 16th. Here's the resulting picture:
The small(ish) image here is a stack of 6 5 second images, largely unprocessed after stacking. This is a cropped image, but there is still some obvious vignetting at the top. I did not take any flat frames, so I reverted to software to get rid of this.
If you click/tap the image to big it, you go to a version which includes that processing. The vignetting has gone, but at the expense of curious grayness in the top half of the image.
Looking at the big image, it's noticeable that this comet displays something I haven't been aware of before - an anti-tail, i.e. a "thin" trail of matter pointing from the comet TOWARDS the sun. I don't like the term anti-tail, two words with negative connotations, which doesn't suit my joyously optimistic personality. I'm going to call it a snoot.
You'll also notice that the tail is long! I would argue it goes off image. That's nearly 9.25 degrees, or half the height of Orion.
A couple of other things about this image. It contains the path of an artificial satellite to the right of the comet. There are five 'strokes' of the satellites path, each corresponding to how far it moved in a single image, and each stroke is offset a bit because the images are aligned on the comet, and the comet was setting. There are only five, and not six, because there is a big gap between the first five images and the last one. As much as possible, I did not include images with cloud obscuring the snoot!
Secondly, if you look towards the bottom right corner of the image, you will see two stars, one of which is oddly fuzzy. It is not a star, it's the globular cluster M5, which featured in the best of 2023 images, see that image here.
Planets
My best Jupiter image of 2024 happened to be on the one night (19th December) I took images of 6 of the 7 planets.
Here's a pictorial summary, with the associated blurb:
The planets are all imaged with the same magnification and are ordered in the way they currently appear in the sky.
Starting on the right at 16:38, with Venus:
When I initially set up the telescope, just before sunset, Venus looked steadier than I expected in the eyepiece. By the time I had attached two cameras (and made all other necessary connections and adjustments) it had drifted west and down so was sitting over the row of houses down the road in some really poor seeing.
The image somewhat reflects this.
Venus is really bright (magnitude -4.3). It's only 126 million km away at the moment and shrouded in a reflective covering of cloud. It will continue to brighten as it approaches the Earth, peaking around the 20th February 2025. By that time, it will be only 58 million km away and its apparent diameter will be close to that of Jupiter. It will be showing quite a thin crescent though.
Venus has a diameter of about 12000 km (compared to the Earths 12750 km).
Moving eastwards, 17:10, Saturn:
I had expected Saturn to be in far steadier air as it was higher in the sky and had not yet reached the destroyer of all seeing that is the houses down the street. My expectations were optimistic.
Saturn is easily naked eye visible at magnitude 1, but, unless you are familiar enough with the constellations to know that there isn't a magnitude 1 star there, it is easy to overlook. It's a big planet, 117000 km in diameter, but a long way away, about 1500 million km.
Further East, 17:38, Neptune:
With a magnitude of 7.8 Neptune is only just visible with the maximum exposure for my planetary camera. This led to issues processing the images, which I won't dwell on, save to say that the size of the planet in the image is the order of 30% bigger than one might expect. Neptune is less than half the size of Saturn at 49500 km, and much further away 4470 million km. Radio communication to Neptune would spend over 4 hours in transit.
Neptune is noticeably blue.
Looking East South East now, 18:09, Uranus:
At magnitude 5.6 Uranus is notionally a naked eye visible object. I've never come close to seeing it with the naked eye, even back in a less light polluted era. It's bright enough to be an easy object for the camera though. Uranus is a greenish gassy lump slightly bigger than Neptune at 51000 km, and much closer at 2800 million km.
The real target for the evenings observing was Jupiter, the solar system combo above features the image from 20:33:
Jupiter is huge, 143000 km in diameter, and relatively close, 616 million km. The image includes the moons Io, visible above the right edge of disk of Jupiter with its shadow to the left, and Ganymede to the left of Jupiter.
Finally, 23:31, Mars:
Really bright, really red, Mars is just 6792 km is diameter (not much over half Earth size) and is a mere 104 million km away. The closest thing we've looked at. The polar cap in the northern hemisphere is its most obvious feature.
The above were my only telescopic pictures of Venus, Uranus, Mars and (if you can call it an image, more like a clump of excessively over brightened pixels I would say) Neptune in 2024.
I did get a nicer image of Saturn in 2024, on the 17th of October....
You may have noticed that my Jupiter images are peppered with its satellites (the four Galilean ones anyway), and this never seems to happen for my Saturn pictures. Well, here are three of Saturn's moons:
Titan is the second biggest moon in the Solar system, with a diameter of 5152 km it is not much smaller than Jupiter's Ganymede at 5268 km (our moon - 3745 km). Rhea and Tethys are not so big. This is the first time ever (!) I have seen these last two either at the eyepiece of, or in an image from, a telescope of mine. I was almost shocked when they appeared during the processing (never saw them while I was taking the images). You'll notice Saturn is a tadge on the over-exposed side to get this image.
And for completeness, here's the combo picture I generated back on 28th July 2024 showing the change in angle of Saturns ring system over 9 years:
As Saturn moves around its nearly 30 year orbit. the plane of its ring system is always orientated in the same plane relative to the greater universe.
(I'll bet this is not true - it will precess in the same way as the Earths axis of rotation or the Moons orbital plane does).
It follows that the angle at which we view the rings will depend on what direction in the greater universe we are looking when we observe Saturn. i.e., what constellation it is in.
Here's a little combo picture of views of Saturn picked from my "Best of" pages from the last few years:
In June 2015, Saturn was near the border of Libra and Scorpio, 18 degrees below the celestial equator, so never getting particularly high in the sky. The rings were close to presenting their widest view, and getting wider.
There is a gap in the images as Saturn trundles its way through the southernmost zodiacal constellations of Scorpio and Sagittarius, the rings reaching the steepest angle of view sometime in 2016 or 2017. By August 2021, Saturn is back to being 18 degrees below the equator in the constellation of Capricorn. The ring system is now noticeably narrowed. In November 2023, Saturn has moved into Aquarius, now only 13 degrees below the equator, the rings continue to narrow, as they do up until July 2024, with Saturn still in Aquarius but now only 6.5 degrees below the equator.
At the end of June 2024, Saturn started it retrograde motion. This is where the Earth whizzes around its orbit, "overtaking" the ponderous Saturn, which appears to suspend its overall west to east movement through the constellations, and starts going backwards. So, the angle at which we view the ring system changes, and the rings will be getting wider for a time.
They will be edge on sometime in 2025, then begin widening again, and we get to see the other side. As Saturn progresses into the northern zodiacal constellations, the rings get wider, peaking around 2031/2032 when Saturn will be in Taurus/Gemini. Great views of the planet to be had then, as they were when it was in the same part of the sky two orbits earlier in 1972, when Saturn was the first object I looked at through my first telescope.
The Sun
Best Sun image of 2024....
17th August - Sunspots.
Two fairly large sunspots, plus a few minor ones:
You can click/tap the image to go to a better resolution version,
or just look at the interesting bits.
Nebulae
Going backwards through the year, let's start on 31st October with...
THE GHOST OF CASSIOPEIA
(Click/tap to big).
The bright start is Gamma Cassiopeiae (the middle star of the familiar W shape of the constellation), magnitude 2.1. It is the light from this star being reflected from the nebula that makes it easily visible in the image from my non-astro camera.
In the image you can see more nebulosity in the top left. This is all part of the same thing, images more sensitive to the HII emission line show a continuous nebula extending over 2 degrees of arc (compared to the 0.5 degrees in this image). 2 degrees would equate to a nebula size of about 19 light years.
(Ignore the odd dark thing in the bottom right corner - this is a flat frame issue - or could it be the work of sprites?)
Next, from the 8th of June, Caldwell 19, aka the Cocoon Nebula, a combination of emission/reflection nebula in Cygnus. The Milky Way runs through Cygnus, so this is a rich star field. Figures I have seen suggest the nebula is a mere 3200 light years distant, with a diameter of around 15 light years. From my image, the bright part for the nebula would be less than 10 light years across at that distance
(Click/Tap the images to go to better resolution versions)
Almost finally, from the 10th of January...
This is the Rosette Nebula, a star forming H II region in Monoceros, close to Orion, about 5000 light years away.
A lot of the light output from the nebula is at the red end of the spectrum associated with H alpha emission line. Red enough to be largely removed by the filters on my non-astro camera. I couldn't see anything of the nebula in a single frame, so I was quite pleased with how this turned out.
(Click/Tap the image to go to a better resolution version)
I get a bit confused by the NGC numbers in this area of sky, there are a lot very close together. I'm pretty sure though that NGC 2244 is the open cluster consisting the bright stars near the centre of the image.
On the same evening as the Rosette Nebula picture I took a passable image of the Great Nebula in Orion. This made me wonder if anyone else could make out the bear with the big arse and great big rear feet padding away from us, with his head turned round and inviting us to follow him into the cold nebula.
Here's a click/tap to change image, starting with the 2024 image, then the an image from December 2014, and finally - the definitive guide to seeing the bear.
If you want to send me similar outlines of the particular creature you spotted, please feel free. I can collect them all together and then head off to the psychoanalyst.
Galaxies
During 2024 I was shying away from from the usual suspects in terns of galaxies, trying not to repeat myself. So nothing particularly spectacular. Here are two images I like....
From the 31st of October
THE GHOST OF MIRACH
Mirach is the central of the three bright stars of Andromeda, At magnitude 2.0. Less than 7 arc minutes away is an elliptical galaxy (NGC 404) about 10 million light years distant.
(Click/tap to big).
10 million light years is close for a galaxy, but not close enough to be part of our local group apparently.
That wasn't scary at all. Ghost in this context means that when observing this thing visually, the galaxy looks like a ghost image of Mirach produced by a defective eyepiece (I guess).
And from the 12th of May - "The Box"
This is a grouping of 4 galaxies (Hickson 61) consisting of:
NGC 4175 (top left corner of the box in my image), an edge on barred spiral about 197 million light years distant;
NGC 4174 (bottom left), spiral galaxy about 193 million light years away;
NGC 4169 (bottom right), spiral galaxy about 193 million light years away;
and NGC 4173 (top right), spiral galaxy about 50 million light years away (the odd one out).
(Click/Tap the image to go to a better resolution version)
The box is on the right of the image. The bright yellow star on the left is magnitude 7.6 (not bright). To the left of this is a face on spiral galaxy, NGC 4185, around 200 million light years away.
Image details:
153 30 second exposures at ISO 4000.
Mid point 23:40 BST on 12th May 2024.
Best dark skies
12th September - In the South Downs National Park.
The South Downs National Park has been a National Park since March 2010, it's the youngest National Park.It has also been an International Dark Sky Reserve since May 2016 - and it shows....
A single 4 second picture of Orion's belt and sword rising. I say 'rising', this was looking uphill and over a hedge, so M42 (the Great Nebula in Orion) actually had an altitude just shy of 14 degrees.
You can 'big' this image, if you do you may be able to see the Flame Nebula, and the nebula M78, which I've marked on the smaller picture as a guide.
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