NGC 3184 is a spiral galaxy in Ursa Major. Also known as the
Little Pinwheel Galaxy, its distinctive blue color comes from a relatively small
number of young, bright stars. The galaxy has two H II regions, NGC 3180 and
NGC 3181 (see astrometry image). I was only able to capture around 35 minutes
of data with the RASA 8 and Mallincam DS10C before the galaxy was lost in trees,
but the image is still usable.
The Sun on 4.28.2022. The Sun was imaged through haze (hence the poor image), but a number of active regions can be seen, most of them capable of producing C-Class flares.
Coddington’s Nebula (IC 2574) is a dwarf spiral galaxy. It
is believed that 90% of its mass is in the form of dark matter. This image was
difficult to capture as there was a light, high haze in the sky and occasional
cirrus clouds drifting across the field. The image was captured as 457 single
frames, comprising a little less than an hour of continuous imaging. The files
were initially processed in Siril with an automatic script. I used Astroflat to
reduce the sky gradients, with tweaks in Topaz Denoise and Affinity Photo. The nebula is the concentrated haze in the center of the image. I
was surprised at the surrounding nebulosity captured, and I’m not really sure if it is
real, or whether the high haze contributed in some way.
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The Sun continues to be active, with several impressive prominences on display today.
Discovered by Pierre Méchain and verified by Charles Messier in 1789, the Sunflower Galaxy (or Messier
63) was one of the first galaxies in which spiral structures were identified
(by Lord Rosse, in the mid-19th century). In visible light, the
large-scale spiral structure of the galaxy is not well defined. As such, it is
classed as a flocculent (or “fluffy”) galaxy. The arms of the galaxy are
brightly illuminated by giant, blue-white stars. This highly cropped image,
taken with the RASA 8, shows the structure of the galaxy quite well. In the
wide-angle annotated image (the original from which I took the crop), the lenticular galaxy NGC 5103 is also visible in
the top, right hand corner (click to zoom in and take a closer look).
This image is a stack of 218 x 10s integrations taken with a RASA 8 and Mallincam DS10C camera. Normally, I would guide and dither when capturing, but PhD2 was not talking to the telescope mount and I had close to perfect polar alignment, so I just captured it anyway. There have been lots of discussions about dithering and whether it can be dispensed with if you have excellent alignment. In this image, that would seem to be the case, as there was no evidence of "walking noise" (a "sleet like" noise that has a consistent direction on the stacked frame due to fixed noise in the imager) on the stacked image.
Lots of clouds and water vapor today. In my experience, a high amount of water vapor in the atmosphere degrades Ha imaging, so today's images of the Sun are very suboptimal. Here are 2 images, showing the active areas and another showing an impressive promience. AR 2993-94 continues to pose a threat of M-class flares.
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A string of active regions runs across pretty much the whole disk of the sun today (4.24.2022)--a big change from what was visible just a few days ago. The main active regions are AR 2293-2294, which has the potential to produce M-Class solar flares. Here's an inverted image of the sun, and, for a change, a white light image of the disk showing sunspots and penumbral areas.
This is a 4.5 hour integration of the Pelican Nebula, taken with a Dwarf 3 scope. Stacked and processed in Stellar Studio and Photoshop PS.
