A Break From The Herschels

On the evening of February 5, I wasn't able to see any Herschel objects I would like to image. And, it would appear, there may be quite a few I won't be able to image because they will be too low in the sky and blocked by trees. We'll see. However, I wanted to continue imaging the Messier catalog, so I found, and imaged 5 more objects.

M36

This is Messier 36 (M36) in the consellation of Auriga. This is also the only image made in color that night, which is part of the reason why I'm putting it here. Looking closely, you can see that the stars are blue. Blue stars are hotter than average and usually younger. The stars in M36 are estimated to be about 25 million years old. Compare that to the age of our sun, which is in the range of 4.6 billion years old. The cluster is about 4000 light years from us. It is estimated that these stars may share many similarities with a close by cluster that is easy to spot, the Pleiades.

Decisions, Decisions, Decisions

But this one was an easy one to make.

Reader(s) of the last episode will remember (or just scroll back to the last entry) that I had just imaged 52 Herschel objects. Since that time, I've also imaged 8 Messier objects in roughly the same area of the sky. The decision was to not post all the images, since they are what I'm calling survey images (meaning I'm looking for particularly interesting objects, so I'm surveying what's out there to come back to to make longer exposures and in color). Fifty-two images would take up a lot of internet bandwidth, so I think I will post only the more interesting ones. This might be another to come back to at a later date (probably next year).

M46 and NGC2438

This is M46, an open cluster in the constellation of Puppis (the stern or poop deck of a ship, or so I'm told). The interesting part of this is the planetary nebula that is found in it. The nebula is known as NGC2438, which just happens to be on the Herschel list I'm imaging. So, in this case, I get a two-fer; an M and a NGC object in the same image. M46 is about 5500 light years distant. NGC2438 is the gaseous shroud cast off by a dying star (which is pretty much what all planetary nebulae are) and lies about 3000 light years away.