My Astronomy

 

 

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My Telescopes

My Main Telescope - C14 and Paramount ME

My new Paramount MyT and 8-inch Ritchey-Chretien Telescope

MyT Hand Controller

My Meade 12 inch SCT on a CGEM (Classic) Mount

My 4 inch Meade Refractor with Sky Watcher Guidescope and ZWO camera on a CGEM (Classic) Mount

Skywatcher Star Adventurer Mount with Canon 40D

 

My Solar setup using a DSLR and Mylar Filter on my ETX90

DSLR attached to ETX90. LiveView image of 2015 partial eclipse on Canon 40D

Astronomy Blog Index
About the Site

 I try to log my observing and related activities in a regular blog - sometimes there will be a delay but I usually catch up. An index of all my blogs is on the main menu at the top of the page with daily, weekly or monthly views. My Twitter feed is below. I am also interested in photograping wildlife when I can and there is a menu option above to look at some of my images. I try to keep the news feeds from relevant astronomical sources up to date and you will need to scroll down to find these.

The Celestron 14 is mounted on a Paramount ME that I have been using for about 10 years now - you can see that it is mounted on a tripod so is a portable set up. I still manage to transport it on my own and set it all up even though I have just turned 70! It will run for hours centering galaxies in the 12 minute field even when tripod mounted.

 

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Monday
Oct272014

Five galaxies in Vulpecula and the Crab Nebula

This is one of the 430 images from my Saturday Night's session. It shows 5 galaxies in a single image.

This lists the galaxies in order of the major axis size in minutes of arc.

The fainter galaxies are just visible on the image so the limiting magnitude on the 30 second image is about magnitude 18.

 PGC 64678 or NGC 6921, the brightest galaxy, is estimated to be at a distance of around 55 MParsecs (NED Data) which is about 180 million Light Years. It is moving away from us at 4567 km/s so in an hours time it will be 16 million km further away - not much chance of any NGC 6921 residents popping in for a chat then! Also if we travelled at the speed of light for 180 million years to go to see them they would have gone anyway....... It makes your head hurt.

 

I also took a 30 second image of the Crab Nebula