M42 Orion nebula

First image of the Orion Nebula with the new QHY8L camera; it consists of 10 subexposures of 360 seconds and for the center another 5x40 seconds. Also 5 darks, 10 flats and 10 bias frames. All stacked in DSS, Fits Liberator and finally PS.

ISON Perihelion

Comet ISON is approaching perihelion, stay tuned around 17:00 GMT time (UTC now) to watch live images at http://cometison.gsfc.nasa.gov/#.

Very nice site to follow, which i have been doing for a couple of months now is: http://www.brucegary.net/ISON/
It looks like ISON will hold during its journey around the Sun and we are in for quite a show in the days to come!

Clear skies!

Betelgeuse - the red supergiant

[WIKI]:

Betelgeuse, also known by its Bayer designation Alpha Orionis (α Orionis, α Ori), is the ninth-brightest star in the night sky and second-brightest in the constellation of Orion.
The star is classified as a red supergiant of spectral type M2Iab and is one of the largest and most luminous observable stars. If Betelgeuse were at the center of the Solar System, its surface would extend past the asteroid belt, possibly to the orbit of Jupiter and beyond, wholly engulfing Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars.

Betelgeuse is roughly 1180 times the radius of the Sun — able to contain over 2 quadrillion Earths (2.15 × 10^15) or more than 1.6 billion (1.65 × 10^9) Suns. That is the equivalent of Betelgeuse being a football stadium like Wembley Stadium in London with the Earth a tiny pearl, 1 millimeter in diameter, orbiting a Sun the size of a mango.

M13 - Globular Cluster in Hercules (NGC 6205)

M13 was discovered by Edmond Halley in 1714, and catalogued by Charles Messier on June 1, 1764.
It is a globular cluster of aprox. 300.000 stars in the constellation Hercules at 25.100 light-years away from Earth.
M13 is about 145 light-years in diameter, the brightest star is the variable star V11 with an apparent magnitude of 11.95.

Here is my first try at M13 taken from the city:

FOV Calculator

Hi folks,

Last night i came across an extremely useful site for amateur astronomers/astrophotographers who are starting out but don't know exactly what equipment to buy. You might know what telescope you want, but are not sure exactly which camera to get (CCD or DSLR); or perhaps you already have a DSLR camera and want to acquire a telescope.
Because the question is: what will be my Field Of View ? In other words what exactly will you see using your combination of camera and telescope. This of course also depends on what objects you plan to capture.
The below website allows you to select from a variety of telescopes, cameras and then select the celestial object from a database (Object menu) and it will show the FOV and also the portion of the image you can see with the given combination. You can also simulate adding Barlows or Focal reducers.
Very nice !!

The link:

http://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/field-view-calculator

Cheers !

Another image of M42

The below image is also a stack of 30 subframes of M42, but this time done with DeepSkyStacker, then tweaked a bit with the FITS Liberator and then the RGB channels were assembled in Photoshop and some additional processing was also done.

The Great Orion Nebula (M42)

The below images are edited in Photoshop from a stack of 30 subframes at 30sec exposure and they represent, as far as i can tell, a small portion in the center of the well-known Orion Nebula.

Stay tuned for more images !

M57 - the Ring Nebula

WIKI:

"The Ring Nebula (also catalogued as Messier 57, M57 or NGC 6720) is a planetary nebula in the northern constellation of Lyra.[5] Such objects are formed when a shell of ionized gas is expelled into the surrounding interstellar medium by a red giant star, which was passing through the last stage in its evolution before becoming a white dwarf."