M56 (May 2020)

Here's one I keep shooting, but I think this is the first color image.  M56 hits the imaging part of my tree-free sky at just the right moment each spring.  I seem to collect light from it over and over.

M56 is about 33,000 light years from us and contains a mass of 230,000 suns!  That's a lot.  It rises with the constellation Lyra, after M57, and before Cygnus.

This image is 12x900" through the 203mm Synta-ONTC Newtonian at f/4.95 with the Atik 460EXC camera.  The frames were taken between 2 and 5 am a few weeks ago.

Mercury Venus Moon Conjunction (May 24, 2020 UTC)

Mercury at top, Venus to the right, and can you see the moon peeking out between the cloud banks?  I looked through a telescope, too, and saw Venus's thin crescent and Mercury's waxing near-gibbous.

And here is the sunset beforehand:

Hoag's Object (May 19, 2020)

Can you see it?  Hoag's Object looks like a yellow star with a ring around it.

Hoag's Object is also called PGC 54559.  It lies in the constellation Serpens.

It is a galaxy, but astronomers were initially unsure how to characterize it.  Its discoverer in 1950, Arthur Hoag, thought it might be a galaxy or a planetary nebula.  Hoag also proposed that it was a galaxy gravitationally lensing another galaxy far behind it, bending the farther galaxy's light into a ring.

But the yellow-red center of Hoag's Object and the ring surrounding it sit at the same distance from us, so the system could not be a gravitational lens.  Also, the center is not bright enough to be that massive. Hubble images clearly show the yellowed, older center to be ringed by a blue crop of newer stars. Relatively recent studies have shown that the blue ring lights up the inner edge of a larger ring of hydrogen surrounding the galaxy. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1307.6368.pdf

Unlike some ring galaxies that seem to have formed from a collision, Hoag's Object seems peaceful, copacetic.  It is about 600 million light years away.

PGC 1659902 is on the far right, mag 16.68, 1.2 billion light years away.

PGC 1658877 is just above it and a little left, mag 18.11, 1.3 billion light years away.

PGC 1652138, almost directly below Hoag's Object in roughly the middle of the frame, is mag 17.14, 620 million light years.

Lower far left, PGC 1647373, mag 17.42, 1.3 billion light years.

I did not find labels for the other galaxies in the image.

The faintest stars in the image are < mag 19.

This is 11x900" with the 203mm Synta-ONTC Newtonian, taken with the Atik 460EXC.

Or try the inverted monochrome version:

Makemake, April 30, 2020, from 5:33 to 8:01 UTC

This image was taken on April 30, 2020, from 5:33 to 8:01 UTC.  Makemake is the short streak just above the center of the frame, next to a bluish star.  Here is a cut-out with the well-known space-arrow nebula pointing at the dwarf planet:

The image is 13x600" exposures, with 4 dropped frames within the named time frame. Camera: Atik 460EXC, Astronomik CLS filter. Telescope: 203mm Synta-ONTC Newtonian at f/4.95, Baader MPCC.

At the time, Makemake was 431.23 light minutes from eath.  It's light took 7 hours 11 minutes to reach earth.

Down is west in this image. The planet's movement was from up to down in this frame, the dwarf planet appearing to head west, in retrograde.

The dim star to the right and a little above where Makemake started is mag 18.65.

The bright galaxy at 1:30 o'clock from Makemake is PGC 140072, 1 billion light years away.

The galaxy just to its right at 4:30 is mag 18.35 PGC 1699049, 2.8 billion light years away.  It's companion just to the right is PGC 3802286 at 2.7 billion light years, mag 18.99.  I did not find information for the galaxy below them that forms with them an equilateral triangle.

The bright star to the left of Makemake is mag 12.41.

To the left and down at 7 o'clock from there is a mag 17 star, and just left of it another galaxy, PGC 1697253, mag 18.16, 1.8 billion light years.

Other than that, the spot of fuzz in the upper right quadrant of the large image is PGC 1702155, mag 17.2, 1 billion light years away.

The brightest star in the image is SAO 82643, mag 9.21, 289 light years away, type KO.

Below that is SAO 82639, mag 9.73, 960 light years distant, type G2.

And the bright star to the bottom right is TYC 1993-1675-1, mag 9.8.

Here is a screen shot from SkySafari.  (The dim galaxies show up only at a more minute scale.)

And here is a black & white inverted version:

M63 (April 2020)

I was fortunate to make a trip to an observatory north of Huntsville, TX, to meet a few friends and do some imaging.  I took my youngest son with me, and we camped.  The sky was hazy until 11:30, but I was anxious to do some imaging, so while waves of mild haze passed overhead, I took five 1800" frames of M63.  When it was over, I wasn't sure if I'd have anything, but this is more than I would get at home.  So light pollution at home v. intermittent haze at a much darker site?  Haze and darkness win.

M63 is about 29 million light years away in the constellation Canes Venatici.

You can see a real time warp in this image.  The bright star superimposed over the galaxy is HD 115270, just 3,300 light years away. M63 is 8,790x further away, at 29 million light years.  A fuzzy spot seemingly hovering within the left back curve of M63 (which we see only through M63's spiral arm) is PGC 4018103, a galaxy 1.2 billion light years.  That is 41x further than M63 and a lot older.

Other highlights include

• in the far upper left, PGC 2197647, 1.1 billion light years away; 
• the pair PGC 2196920 and 2196677, 920 million light years away, visible just above the bright red star above and to the right of M63; 
• PGC 2187167, 1.1 billion light years away at about 5 o'clock and one galaxy length away from M63; and 
• 2MASX J13145076+4142467, which is an elliptical at the far bottom right.  This last galaxy has a redshift-based distance of about 600-650 million light years.

This is 5x1800" with the Atik 460EXC through the 203mm Synta-ONTC Newtonian.