Observations of Deep-Sky Objects

These are the observations made by amateur astronomers from around the globe. I'm keen to present the work of an observer (members or not) to further the aims of the Webb Deep-Sky Society. Images, sketches or even your observing notes are of interest.

If you have any observations of your own that you'd like to submit I'd be delighted to hear from you. Please try to include as much detail about the object (after all that's why we observe them) as possible. Time, date, location and observing conditions are useful.

We have observations of these Objects

Which fall into these classes

And these Constellations

Or if you'd just like to browse through our most recent observations

• Messier 61 (NGC 4303) in Virgo

  Astronomical darkness is now at an end for another season, but I have had a busy springtime imaging a number of galaxies. I've been using an ASI 294MC Pro camera and have overcome initial difficulties with achieving an acceptable colour balance and continue to be impressed with what this camera can achieve in relatively small exposure times. I've now reduced the camera gain setting to 50 to maximise the available well depth. This has reduced sensitivity but the end results still look good to me.

  The Italian astronomer Barnabas Oriani discovered M61 on 5th May 1779 when he was following the comet C/1779 A1 Bode - it seems to me that several of the early discoveries of the galaxies of the Virgo Cluster are due to observers following this comet. He described M61 as very pale looking and exactly like the comet. Charles Messier found M61 the same night but mistook it for the comet and it was not until six days later that he realised his mistake, so M61 became another entry in his notes listing nebulae that could be mistaken for comets. Messier described M61 as very faint and difficult to perceive. It took Lord Rose and his 72" telescope to see some of the spiral structures of this galaxy.

  

  I have found M61 to be quite a challenging target for my 8-inch telescope. With an integrated magnitude of 9.7 and 6' x 6' in size, the bright core contrasts with the quite faint spiral arms which hold lots of intriguing detail.

  Image Details

  50 x 2-minutes exposures (gain 50, offset 13)

  • Telescope: 8-inch Ritchey-Chretien.
  • Camera: ZWO ASI 294MC Pro camera.
  • Mount: Skywatcher EQ8.
  • Software: NINA, Pixinsight, Photoshop.

  David Davies - (10 May 2022).

• Supernova SN2022hrs in NGC 4647

  A friend of mine alerted me to this supernova last night, and I dropped what I was doing and slewed the telescope to it. What a lovely sight. The supernova is the bright blueish star in the smaller of the two galaxies, M60 and NGC 4647, in the centre of the image.

  

  Unlike other stars in the image that are in our Milky Way galaxy and are a few tens or hundreds of light-years away, the supernova is 63 million light-years away and is so bright that it almost outshines the galaxy it is in.

  Image Details

  I've taken great care not to saturate any part of the image, processed the data in Pixinsight, and calibrated the colours with the Photometric Colour Calibration tool.

  • Telescope: 8-inch Ritchey-Chretien.
  • Camera: QSI 683 camera with Astrodon filters.
  • Mount: Skywatcher EQ8.

  The data are 20 x 2-min luminance and 12 x 2-min RGB, binned 2 x 2. The location was Cambridge, UK Time: 26 April, 01:30 UT.

  David Davies - (26 April 2022).

• NGC 2683 in Lynx

  Took this last night, pity the moon was high as it added quite a bit of noise to the picture. A single shot, 500 second, FLI full frame camera from back garden observatory Northampton. Not quite as good as the Hubble shot!!

  

  Image Details

  • Telescope: AG14 Orion F 3.8
  • Camera: FLI Microline Camera

  Richard Weatherley - (8 April 2022).

• Messier 68 in Hydra

  I keep a list of the Messier objects that I image and M68 is listed as being too low to observe. It reaches around 10.4 degrees of altitude at my location at which point it is skimming just above the branches of the trees at the end of the field behind my observatory. It is visible above the trees for barely an hour. Last night presented an opportunity to try to observe it, but the sky had become very dark with haze and only a few of the brighter stars were visible by eye. Nevertheless, I had a go.

  I've recently rediscovered the power of binned exposures with my QSI camera, giving an effective pixel size of 10.8um and an ideal image scale of 1.3"/pixel on my 8" RC telescope. My previous experiments with binned exposures were mixed and I stopped using the technique.

  Messier 68 is a globular cluster discovered by Charles Messier in 1780. Messier found it to be unresolvable, but William Herschel first resolved it into stars in 1786. M68 is a rich cluster of around 100,000 stars; it lies at a distance of 33,000 light-years and is around 106 light-years across.

  

  This image is the result of just 10 minutes of exposures each of RGB, 5 x two minutes each, binned 2 x2, as M68 cleared the tops of the trees briefly. Despite atmospheric dispersion, poor sky transparency, horrible seeing and a severely attenuated blue component, I am happy to share the image. I suspect that it is rarely observed in the UK.

  Image Details

  • Telescope: 8" Ritchey-Chretien
  • Camera: QSI 683 with Astrodon RGB filters
  • Mount: Skywatcher EQ8.

  David Davies - (24 March 2022).

• A closeup of Messier 87 (Virgo A or NGC 4486)

  A few months ago I bought a ZWO ASI 294MC Pro camera for use with electronically assisted astronomy. More recently, I've been exploring its use for more general astrophotography and whilst I still have some issues to resolve, it does produce some pleasing images. Using this one-shot camera has also led to a rethink of my image processing workflow and I now use Pixinsight for calibration and image stacking, splitting the one-shot colour subs into their RGB components for realignment and integration later.

  M87, in the constellation Virgo, is a supergiant elliptical galaxy with several trillion stars. It is of the most massive galaxies in the local universe, and it has a large population of globular clusters. It also has a jet of energetic plasma that originates at the black hole in the core of the galaxy and extends at least 4,900 light-years into space.

  The French astronomer Charles Messier discovered M87 in 1781. It is about 53 million light-years from Earth and has many satellite galaxies.

  The following images record my exploration of M87, a galaxy that I had not yet visited. I started with a general view of M87 and its environs,

  

  Then a close-up view of M87 showing many of the surrounding background galaxies and a close-up view with a less aggressive stretch.

  

  Finally a third image presents a clear view (at two o'clock) of the jet from the black hole at the centre of the galaxy.

  

  Image Details

  The image comprises 60 subs of two-minutes exposure each.

  • Telescope: 8-inch Ritchey-Chretien telescope with an x0.7 reducer
  • Camera: ASI ZWO 294 MC Pro
  • Mount: Skywatcher EQ8
  • Software: NINA, GSS, PHD2, Pixinsight, Photoshop, Topaz Denoise

  David Davies - (3 March 2022).

• A Bit of Fun with M42

  I suspect the Orion Nebula, M42, is the most popular target in the beginner astro-imager's sky. So it is not a target I would normally share; I'm sure you've seen many versions. However, here are a couple of images with a bit of a story of me continuing to learn and change.

  I'm a member of a small team of astronomers doing online outreach for the Cambridge Institute of Astronomy (IOA). Since lockdown, each clear Wednesday evening during the winter months, we will attempt to observe and present online, objects of particular interest in the night sky, often related to the subject of a talk. This activity certainly tests the mettle of my ability to find and present images of objects quickly and demands the best performance from my equipment.

  Last year, therefore, I purchased a ZWO ASI 294 MC Pro camera and Sharpcap to provide colour images quickly with Sharpcap providing imaging stacking in real-time. I've found it to be an excellent electronically assisted astronomy (EAA) tool and it has transformed my enjoyment of observing to one with a more real-time appreciation of objects, as opposed to extended sessions of imaging a single object with my QSI CCD camera.

  M42, of course, has been one of our Wednesday evening targets and I've been astonished at the deep contrast between the brightness of the Trapezium core and the much fainter outer reaches of the nebula.

  Once our online session had ended, I set about exploring what the ZWO camera could do with the subject. I gathered a range of exposures ranging between 100 x four seconds and 10 x five minutes and then blended the images together in Photoshop. I have two images to share.

  The first is of the Trapezium region using exposures ranging from four seconds to two minutes and blending the images to provide a high dynamic range view. Many of the fainter stars in the Trapezium region are well shown but my telescope is not big enough to separate stars e, f and g in the Trapezium.

  

  The second image also blends the five minutes exposures of the outer regions of the nebula and shows well the convoluted gas clouds of emission and reflection that are sculpted by the newly born stars at the core.

  

  Image Details

  RGB exposures: 4 secs, 30 secs, 120 secs and 300 secs.

  • Telescope: 200mm Ritchey-Chretien plus a 0.7x reducer to give 1160mm focal length at F/5.8
  • Camera: ASI ZWO 294 MC Pro
  • Mount: Skywatcher EQ8
  • Software: Sharpcap, Deep Sky Stacker, Pixinsight, Photoshop, Capture One, Topaz Studio 2, Topaz Denoise AI

  David Davies - (20 January 2022).

• NGC 2237 in Monoceros

  I took this last night, but the camera was not cooled, I forgot to set it, think it was the excitement of a clear night!! My observatory is in my back garden in Boughton which is on the edge of Northampton.

  

  Image Details

  It is a 500 second single shot, which has been slightly cropped, taken with a FLI microline colour using sparse configuration in full frame. The result is processed in Maxim.

  • Telescope: AG14 Orion F 3.8
  • Camera: FLI Microline Camera

  Richard Weatherley - (3 January 2022).

• Barred spiral galaxy NGC 2146 in Camelopardalis

  I was doing some electronically assisted observing some four weeks ago and was intrigued by the sight of NGC 2146. I had not investigated this galaxy previously and returned to it some nights later for a closer look.

  

  This galaxy was discovered by Friedrich Winnecke, a German astronomer, in 1876. Despite its distorted presentation, it is not listed in the Arp Atlas of peculiar galaxies. It seems that the cause of the twisted presentation of this galaxy is not fully understood. Some have proposed that a close encounter with a nearby galaxy, such as NGC 2146A, which is to the top left of the uncropped image, is the cause of the disturbances. However, the significant difference in their radial velocities doesn't support this hypothesis.

  Moreover, radio-based observations show little evidence of the disturbances we see in the optical wavelengths. Perhaps we are looking at a post-merger state of two galaxies, now merging into one. It is a starburst galaxy with significant star formation ongoing, and two supernovae have been observed in recent years. Some of the star-forming regions are just visible at the resolution limit in this image.

  

  NGC 2146 is listed as being between 50 and 70 million light-years away. I find it interesting to reflect that all of the higher mammals on earth have evolved during the time the photons captured by my camera have traversed the void after emission from this galaxy.

  Image Details

  • Telescope: 200mm Ritchey-Chretien.
  • Camera: QSI 683 camera.
  • Mount: Skywatcher EQ8.

  The image comprises 38 x five minutes of luminance plus 15 x five minutes each of RGB.

  David Davies - (16 December 2021).

• The Skull Nebula (NGC 246) in Cetus

  I've always considered the Skull Nebula to be too low in the sky, with a maximum altitude of just 26 degrees from my location, to image successfully. However, clear skies on the nights of 30th and 31st October gave me an opportunity to attempt it.

  NGC 246 is a planetary nebula in the constellation of Cetus and was discovered by William Herschel in 1785. Stephen O'Meara writes about it in his book Deep Sky Companions: The Caldwell Objects and discusses the visibility of the central 12th magnitude star. It turns out that this star is readily visible in my image but it is not the dwarf star responsible for the nebula. The central star is, in fact, at least a triple system. There is a 14 magnitude companion, an orange dwarf star, type G8-K0 V, just 3.8" from the primary. Further, in this link to Stars and Skulls: new ESO image reveals eerie nebula, ESO describes work by the ESO VLT in 2014 that reveals a third red dwarf star.

  

  The first inspection of my captured image revealed that the central star was not round. My first reaction was to think that I had some sort of guiding error but I quickly realised that other stars in the image did not exhibit the same feature and this set me to investigate further. Inspection of the central star revealed a blue-white primary star and an orange companion. There is just a hint of the companion visible in the image processed to bring out the nebula and its structure. I reprocessed the data to see what could be revealed by stretching the image only slightly to limit the blooming of star images. I then used this second image as an additional luminance layer on the original image to reveal the companion 14 magnitude orange dwarf star.

  

  Image Details

  • Telescope: 200mm Ritchey-Chretien.
  • Camera: QSI 683 camera.
  • Mount: Skywatcher EQ8.
  • Software: PixInsight and Photoshop

  The data comprise 15 x five-minutes subs each of RGB and 51 x five-minutes luminance subs - eight hours of data.

  David Davies - (20 November 2021).

• NGC 7538 in Cepheus

  It's been a while since I shared an astrophotography image with you. Indeed, I think my last one was in April.

  During April, my suspicions that something was seriously amiss with my EQ8 mount were confirmed and resulted in a complete dismantle and rebuild with parts repaired and other parts replaced as upgrades. The work took until late July when I was able to start re-tuning the mount and working with some new software tools.

  This image, therefore, represents my return to imaging with the repaired equipment.

  I selected NGC 7538, Sh2-158 as my target. This is quite a small but very attractive star-forming region in Cepheus is around 9,100 light-years from us. It has been reported to contain the largest protostar system observed to date, around 300 times the size of our solar system. It is not frequently imaged as most prefer to concentrate on its brighter and showier close neighbour, the Bubble Nebula.

  

  Image Details

  The image data was gathered during September 2021 and comprises nine hours of LRGB data, with two hours each of RGB in 10-minute subs and three hours of luminance data, also in 10-minute subs all binned 1x1.

  • Telescope: 200mm Ritchey-Chretien, Lodestar off axis guider.
  • Camera: QSI 683 with Astrodon filters.
  • Mount: Skywatcher EQ8.

  David Davies - (7 October 2021).