Play Time

I've decided on another imaging “campaign,” this time being the objects in the Caldwell catalog that are visible from my northern latitude. As with most catalogs, there is much crossover between them. The Caldwell catalog consists of 109 objects. I have filtered out objects below -39 degrees declination (can't see them) and of the objects left (I had already imaged some NGCs while doing the Herschel list), I have already imaged all but 25; at least at the start of this endeavor I needed 25. Since the start, I have imaged 3 more. One of those images proved to be a little more interesting than the others, for a reason that I hope will become obvious. It's C35.

C35. OK, the galaxy is just to the LEFT of center.

Although the target is a galaxy in the middle of the picture, which is actually hard to spot because it's an elliptical and looks very star-like, the target is not what's interesting. It's everything else.

C35 with some other objects identified.

The program ASTAP has supplied the information in this image, and the next one, showing what's identifiable in the image. That's quite a lot! But wait, there's more!!

OK, that A LOT!

Asking ASTAP to annotate “deeper” showed this! There's so much there, I can't really see exactly how much I've managed to actually capture, but I think it's a lot.

Moving on. While starting this venture, I missed one target, C61, and had to come back to it the next night. Neither night was exactly clear, but both were fair. At any rate, instead of C61 the first night, I went to the open cluster that looks like a globular, M4.

M4

Not too bad, considering the amount of clouds around.

Finally, I experimented with some Barlow lenses to see their effect. The target was the sun. Seeing is always a big problem for imaging the sun, but I wanted to know if better resolution is really visible with that scope. Well, you can decide for yourself; here are images of a sunspot and a few prominences, false colored, of course.

One of the first sunspots of the new cycle 25. 2x Barlow used

And a prominence  below the sunspot. 2x Barlow.

Same sunspot as above. 3x Barlow.