M56 (May 2018)

M56 is a globular cluster visible in the constellation Lyra.  It is 32,900 light years or so away from us.  It appears to be traveling opposite the direction of most things in the galaxy, orbiting roughly backwards around the center.  Probably it was ripped off a small galaxy that was swallowed billions of years ago by the Milky Way.

This is just a monochrome image.  I enjoy imaging globs so that I can compare them with each other, so I have several of these taken with the same telescope and camera setup.  Then I can see their relative sizes and how many stars I can make visible.  For instance, compare M56 with NGC 7006 and M13.

This image is 10x720" with the SXVF-H9 through the CFF 290 Classical Cassegrain and an Astronomik CLS filter.

NGC 4565 (April 2018)

NGC 4565 appears in the constellation Coma Berenices but is around 44 million light years away.  It is a very large spiral galaxy, which we see nearly edge-on.  It is famous for the dust lane and how its thin shape seems to taper away to nothing at the ends, which are actually extended spiral arms.

The galaxy in the upper left is NGC 4565A and is perhaps 3 million light years closer than 4565.  The piece of fluff directly below the center of 4565 but about level with the lower tip of 4565's left end is IC 3571, perhaps 20 million light years further away.  Other little galaxies in the image shine from hundreds of millions of light years' distance.

This image is 69x480", about 9.2 hours, through the ONTC-Synta Newtonian at f/4.95, with the SXVF-H9C camera and an Astronomik CLS filter.

Haumea from 6:55 am to 8:49 am UT, 3-31-18

Haumea is a dwarf planet that orbits beyond Neptune.  Its orbit is similar to Pluto's (though different in a couple of significant ways).  Haumea is smaller than Pluto, though, only about one-third as large.  And those studying it report that it is not spherical (as Pluto is) but is flattened in two directions. Haumea was discovered only in 2004.

In my image, Haumea is the short line 55% up and 40% from the left side.  That is how much the object appeared to move during the nearly two hours I spent imaging it.

Haumea is very dim.  When I took this image, it was only magnitude 17.31.  It was nearly 7.5 billion miles away.  I identified it by looking at the excellent chart from The Sky Live, the best website I know for finding the location of dwarf planets. I have included a screenshot from The Sky Live, taken at the end of my imaging run.

I have taken images of Pluto and now Haumea.  I hope to pick up some other dwarf planets beyond Neptune later.

The small galaxy at lower left is PGC 1519745; it is something like 1.2 billion light years away.

This image was taken with the CFF 290 Classical Cassegrain at f/8.1 in 480" sub-frames (14 sub-frames in all).  I took these on a nearly full moon, and I could barely see Haumea in the stretched sub-frames.  I'm glad calibration and stacking revealed a bit more!

M51 and NGC 5195 (April 2018)

Just another M51 and companion galaxy NGC 5195.  The grand spiral M51 lies perhaps 25 million light years from here.  M51 appears to be quite a bit smaller than our own galaxy. The companion, NGC 5195, is interacting with M51.  These two always amaze visually as well.

This image is 26x480" with the SXVF-H9 through CFF 290 Classical Cassegrain at f/8.1 and an Astronomik CLS filter.

M102 or NGC 5866 (March 2018)

This galaxy is known as NGC 5866 and probably is the 102nd item in Messier's list of not-comets.  There is some historical dispute about 102 being a duplicate of 101, but what I've read suggests that it is not.  I don't think anyone who had seen both through the eyepiece could believe these two were the same object.  M101 looks like a faint but fuzzy patch, or several of them, and M102 looks like a single flying saucer. Also, they are just not that close to each other.

M102 is about 47 million light years away.  We see it in the constellation Draco.

To the left and down from M102 is galaxy NGC 5866A, which is only about 27 million light years away, not connected at all to M102.

This image is 23x480" (just over three hours) with the SXVF-H9C through the ONTC-Synta Newtonian.

M66 (March 2018)

Galaxy M66 is 37 million light years away.  It appears in our constellation Leo.

The image also shows several background galaxies.  In the upper right corner you can find galaxy PGC 1417198, magnitude 17.18 and 1.2 billion light years away. In the upper left corner, galaxy PGC 3542444 shines at magnitude 17.95 and is 2.9 billion light years away! Wow! That must be some galaxy! Just below that and a little to the right is PGC 1423398, which is  magnitude 17.85 and 1.9 billion light years from us.  (These distances come from SkySafari.)

The dimmest stars in this image are +19 magnitude.

This image is 42x480" (5.6 hours) over two nights with the SXVF-H9C through the ONTC-Synta Newtonian and Baader MPCC II.

M66 was actually the first deep sky object I ever imaged eleven years ago. A year later, ten years ago this month, I obtained what I thought was a decent image. I posted about it here.

Quasar: QO957+561 A/B (March 30, 2018)

This is an image of the so-called "Twin Quasar."  The two dots near the center upper-half of the image are light from a quasar, a galaxy that is very far away,  The upper dot is called A and the lower one B. The light from B is combined with that of a galaxy that appears so close to B that my telescope cannot distinguish between the two.  But astronomers with larger telescopes have taken spectra of these light sources and discovered that they are very distant.

They are so far away that the expansion of the universe has red-shifted their spectra.  The two dots A and B have a red-shift measured at 1.41, and the galaxy that appears near B is red-shifted 0.355.  Astronomers have found a galaxy cluster in the line of sight at a red-shift of around 0.5.  We can translate these measurements into light years.  The light from quasar components A and B has been traveling 8.7 billion years.  The light from the galaxy appearing next to B left its source 3.7 billion years ago.  The galaxy cluster in the area produced the cluster's light around 5 billion years ago.  My image shows only A and B, not the galaxies in between us and them.  But a nice Hubble Telescope image here shows the galaxy near B and the background cluster.

This is a record for me.  I've never recorded light as old as 8.7 billion years!

What is even more remarkable, the galaxy and cluster between us and A and B acts as a gravitational lens.  A and B are actually a single light source! We see them as two because the strong gravity of the galaxy and cluster in between acts as a lens, bending the light from the far-away quasar into what we see as two images, A and B.  This is proof that gravity bends light, and it is a predicted effect of the theory of relativity.  The Twin Quasar was the first gravitational lens discovered, in 1979, and it is the first one I have imaged.

This image is 21x480" with the SXVF-H9C through the CFF Classical Cassegrain at f/8.1.  As always, the telescope performed wonderfully.  This image was taken under a nearly full moon.  The Twin Quasar is in western Ursa Major, however, so quite far from the full moon in late March.

I relied on this paper in writing this brief summary.