@spsheridan and I gave ourselves a new telescope for Christmas. It’s a Unistellar Equinox 2. I’m flabbergasted at the images we’re able to capture in Los Angeles (think the home of light pollution). The first pic is NGC 2683, another GALAXY. How crazy is that? The second one is the Orion Nebula. I’m blown away by this.
Three of the four Galilean Moons are visible in this picture along with, of course, Jupiter. (The fourth one might be to the far right...)
Thought they were a linear smudge or reflection from the planet until I realised they were three distinct other objects. Felt a whoosh of excitement with that revelation!
Taken with my mobile phone up to the lens of our telescope in 2016.
A friend of mine asked me to take a photo of tonight's full moon with my ultra-telephoto setup (1000mm mirror lens), but the problem wasn't in reach or collimation but in a lot of the atmosphere in the way of getting a sharp shot. So I used my #FullFrame cam instead of a crop sensor one that would've zoomed in on it a bit more... Anyway, this is the result (with some post-processing):
It’s always nice to see the Orion Nebula for the first time in the season. Other fun things tonight: the double stars Castor and Gamma Ari; the star clusters M35, M37, and M38; and some very long looks at Jupiter, which is close to its closest point in its orbit to Earth right now. #Astronomy#AmateurAstronomy
I've updated the AT-HYG (Tycho-HYG combined catalog) to v2.1 at https://github.com/astronexus/HYG-Database. This update adds a color index (blue - visual magnitude) field for all the Tycho stars as well as adding some radial velocity data that was missing in v2.0. #Astronomy#AmateurAstronomy
NGC 281 the Pac-Man Nebula is in Cassiopeia along one of the arms of the W. It is a site of moderate star formation, with several bright stars in the middle and dark areas hiding newborn stars. This image is fuzzy because I slew to a new part of the sky and didn't refocus. 😭 I took 3 separate frames after refocusing but had to move on. The link below is to a stack with just the 3 in-focus images. Will definitely need to try again.
NGC6960 the Western Veil Nebula, aka Witch's Broom. This is my favorite of the bunch. It's such an iconic object in the sky, and I'm still so happy I was able to capture it.
NGC7000 the North America Nebula. This large nebula is located in Cygnus, the Swan, and passes overhead in the late summer. Its iconic shape is created by a large dark nebula, possibly another piece of itself, sitting in front of the brighter nebula. Sorry you'll have to rotate your head to the see the resemblance, I need a wider angle to get the whole thing properly vertical!
A picture with a Galaxy smartphone looking through an H-Alpha scope at the eclipse. I have a bunch of video taken with a proper camera I'll process later. We called this gigantic prominence the "Lobster"! #Astrophotography#AmateurAstronomy#Eclipse#Sun
There is a new release in the AT-HYG (Augmented Tycho - HYG) catalog at https://github.com/astronexus/HYG-Database. AT-HYG v2.0 adds 3D velocity data (proper motions and radial velocities) from Gaia DR3 to the catalog. High-quality velocity information is available for over 2.3M Tycho-2 stars, a large improvement over the original HYG, which has 120K stars. #Astronomy#AmateurAstronomy
@thomasconnor Does that star have a name? Can it be seen with midrange amateur equipment, like 5-8" telescopes? What is its period? Might make for a fun #AmateurAstronomy project. #AAVSO
PICTOR is a publicly accessible, free to use, open source radio telescope.
This is pretty cool. Over the past few days I submitted a couple of observing requests which haven't been processed yet, looking forward to getting the data.