Astronomy pictures thread

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NGC2264 (The Christmas Tree Cluster/Cone Nebula) last night.

Camera: Canon Rebel T8i (modified)
Telescope: 92mm f/5.5 triplet (Astrotech AT92) with focal reducer
Exposure: 49x300sec (4hr 5min total) at ISO 400
Acquired using BackyardEOS, stacked using DeepSkyStacker, processed using PixInsight, BlurXterminator, NoiseXterminator and StarXterminator
 
Jingle Bells Jingle Bells Jingle all the way... I can't wait for spring.
 
Got the ALPY600 (slit spectroscope) mounted again and working well. Am contributing data to the AAVSO spectroscopy group. More information is know about the stars from Spectroscopy than any other means.

Here is the spectrum of star gamma UMa (Phecda). The dips in the chart are absorption lines corresponding the Hydrogen Balmer series. Care to learn a little about Quantum mechanics?
 

Very cool. Nice work!
 
And a couple more to confirm the calibration is good. If it's not AAVSO will kick them, but they look good to me. The first one is Betelgeuse an M1-type star and the second is Mahasim an A0V star. Both sent to AAVSO.

 
Okay this is the final physics lesson (for today). The visible light from the two stars above shows strength (higher X axis) and distribution (Y axis). This is a colorized visualization of how the spectroscope evaluates the light from distant stars. The shape of the curve (the continuum) demostrates why Betelgeuse appears orange and Mahasim appear white. Think of heated steel, the hotter Mahasim appear white, while the cooler Betelgeuse appears orange to the naked eye.
The x axis represents the entire visual spectrum.
 
Total lunar eclipse tonight/early Friday morning. Hope some of you have clear skies and can be up to take a look.

Will be fighting clouds and wind here but I am not going down without a fight and a lot of coffee since I find it damn hard to stay up late anymore.

Times in CDT, adjust for your time zone or better yet check a site like timeanddate.

Eclipse Stages Worldwide Local Time CDT
Penumbral Eclipse begins Mar 13 at 10:57:28 pm
Partial Eclipse begins Mar 14 at 12:09:40 am
Full Eclipse begins Mar 14 at 1:26:06 am
Maximum Eclipse Mar 14 at 1:58:43 am
Full Eclipse ends Mar 14 at 2:31:26 am
Partial Eclipse ends Mar 14 at 3:47:52 am
Penumbral Eclipse ends Mar 14 at 5:00:09 am
 
I can't wait to go through my data. Made it this far, well past max eclipse.
Might have to tear down in a hurry with cloud cover expected to increase along with precipitation potential.
Plan to keep it going as long as it seems practical.
 
I really lucked out. Clouds weren't much of a problem and though it was very windy everything went smoothly.

A composite:


Max eclipse.


While watching a meteor streaked through my view through my 11x70 binoculars. That was pretty awesome to see. I happened to catch it on video. This was made by stacking the video frames.


When it was time to tear down I was greeted by moon dogs and a lunar halo.
 
Preparing for a little spectroscopy outreach.

This cell phone adapter works - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B093QJBR67 It even comes with a blue-tooth shutter control.

Just thread the StarAnalyser into the eyepiece and go. Of course cloudy skies are predicted for the next several days.

This is power lines a mile away ...

 
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For amusement I decided to try to make sense of the picture before reading your entire post and I was wondering what you were doing with so many high voltage lines for spectroscopy until I read the rest and realized you were testing your system.

Good luck with the outreach.

Kind of amazing what cell phone cameras can do now.

So you weren't setting up to take spectroscopy of Tesla coil streamers if it was too cloudy. Darn.
 
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Newly discovered Comet SWAN25F this morning.



Crop to show detail


A version with the stars and the comet stacked separately

Camera: Canon Rebel T8i (modified)
Telescope: 92mm f/5.5 triplet (Astrotech AT92) with focal reducer
Exposure: 30x30sec (15min total) at ISO 1600
Processed using PixInsight, StarXterminator and NoiseXterminator
 
Great capture and processing Eric. The comet looks like it's about to dive into the sunlight and out of view for us in the northern hemisphere.
 
foolsgold said:
Great capture and processing Eric. The comet looks like it's about to dive into the sunlight and out of view for us in the northern hemisphere.
Click to expand...
Thanks! Yeah that may have been my last chance at this one. Unless it gets ridiculously bright on the other side of the sun I think it'll become a Southern hemisphere object.
 
These bad boys that dive in from above our northern hemisphere aren't around long for us to see.

 
HUBBLE DISCOVERS SUPERMASSIVE “STAR” IS ACTUALLY 2 STARS

NASA shared a jaw-dropping image of a star cluster inside a nebula, located 8,000 light-years away.

The brightest object in the frame was once believed to be a single monster star - 200 to 300 times the mass of our Sun.

But surprise:
@NASAHubble
revealed it’s actually two separate stars, not one.

Space just keeps humbling us.

Source:
@NASA


GROK
The image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope reveals a star cluster in a nebula 8,000 light-years away, where a previously identified supermassive star (200-300 times the Sun’s mass) was found to be two distinct stars, challenging earlier assumptions based on advanced spectroscopy data from a 2023 Hubble study.

This discovery aligns with a 2018 peer-reviewed paper in The Astrophysical Journal suggesting binary star systems are more common in dense stellar regions, potentially reshaping models of stellar evolution and mass distribution in nebulae.

The finding echoes a historical precedent: Edwin Hubble’s 1923 observation of a variable star in Andromeda proved the universe’s vastness, overturning the then-dominant view that spiral nebulae were part of the Milky Way, a shift documented in Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.
 

Pretty simple blackbody radiation. Clear absorption lines in the distribution curve. Probably from our atmosphere in N2 and H20 unless you've already adjusted for those.
 

This is an image in hydrogen Alpha wavelength of the Elephant Nebula.

The weather here has been horrendous for months, the AP140 was configured to use a AP-155TC reducer (.76x) yielding a FL of 5.6.

TheSkyX software @focus3 routine was used to focus the 3nm Chroma Ha filter with 60" subs.

The QHY600m grabbed 5-10' subs binned 1X1 of the Elephant trunk last night before the clouds rolled in.

More data will be gathered when the clouds go away.
 
I had a rare clear night Friday night and noticed there was severe weather potential to my north to so I went for red sprites. Clear nights that aren't obscured by smoke have been exceedingly rare here. Really lucked out.

Red sprites are an upper atmosphere space weather phenomena that occur above some very powerful lightning strikes.










 
Great capture so far. Clear skies to you.
 
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