A Nice Surprise

With the smoke from the forest fires starting to move back in, I decided to take a chance at imaging anyway. I couldn't smell the smoke, making me think either 1) my sinuses are stopped up, or 2) the smoke was not a ground level. I'm a little leery of opening the observatory with the smoke, fearing the smoke could ruin the anti-reflective coatings on the corrector plate (on the front of the scope). I had planned on imaging something else instead M77, but I'm glad I settled on M77.

M77

As you can see, M77 is a galaxy, located in the constellation of Cetus. Cetus was the mythical sea monster, but today the constellation is generally called the Whale. The galaxy is about 47 million light years away and contains an active nucleus. An active galactic nucleus is believed to be the result of matter “falling” into a super massive black hole at its center. When the matter falls in, it radiates massive amounts of electromagnetic energy in many bands. Bands, in this case, refers to the visible wavelengths band, and/or radio, microwave, gamma ray, x ray or many other wavelengths of electromagnetic energy. M77 is also classified as a Seyfert galaxy, which is a classification I'm not really familiar with. A chance for more study.

October Fun

Those of you familiar with Blogspot know that the entries are sequential and that Blogspot puts the date of each entry on the page. Therefore, the preceding entries were written before this one, and the images were taken before this one. Right? Well, half right. All the entries were written before this one, but the image shown is just one of many taken in October. I made October lunar month. The goal was to try to image all the entries of the Astronomical League's Lunar List. (see: https://www.astroleague.org/al/obsclubs/lunar/lunar1.html about ½ way down the page, under Related Links, you will find the link to the actual observing list.) Over the years, I have made images of things that I thought were interesting to look at, and as it turns out, I had images of about half to 2/3rds of the Lunar List already imaged. Part of the fun and most of the “bother” was going back over the images to see exactly what I already had. One image could contain several objects, usually craters. The list didn't necessarily group objects by geographical location, since there were better or worse times to view each object. Anyway, I found that I needed about 10 or 20 more objects to complete the list, or so I thought. So, most of my imaging time in October was spent on the moon. After rechecking the list against my new set of images, it turns out I need about another 6 objects to complete the list. Since you have stayed with me this long on this post, I should show you one of the images, and the same one marked up to show what the “target” is. Obviously, the target is the crater Schickard. Hopefully, you will enjoy....

Schickard crater

A Satellite The Size of a Galaxy

And it appears it is a galaxy.

M110

This is M110. Although Charles Messier noted the existence of this galaxy in 1773, he didn't actually include it in his catalog. It was Kenneth Glyn Jones in 1967 that added it to Messier's catalog.

M110 is a satellite galaxy of the much larger M31 galaxy, the Andromeda galaxy. It appears to be a little farther away than M31, being about 2.69 Million light years. This is about a 1.5 hour exposure in total. It was also an unusual night in terms of seeing; the air was steadier than I have seen in a long, long time. It was also unusual in that the smoke from the relatively nearby (about 100 miles) forest fires had been blown out of our area. I wish I had stayed up longer! 

November 20, 2016 Extra

On the night of November 1, 2016 I imaged another Messier object, this time it was M76, also known as the Little Dumbbell Nebula in the constellation of Perseus. Some consider it to be the faintest and therefore most difficult object to see, visually, in the Messier catalog.

M76

If this is the Little Dumbbell, what is the Dumbbell Nebula? That one is known as M27, in the constellation of Vulpecula.

M76 is estimated to be about 2500 light years away. It is called a Bipolar Planetary Nebula.