Another widefield, two-panel mosaic with the remote Epsilon-130D and well known objects in the heart of the Milky Way: Trifid and Lagoon with a lot of surrounding nebulae and star clusters.
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Imaged at the IAS Hakos Observatory, Namibia with the 20″ Philipp Keller Cassegrain at full focal length of 4500 mm, f/9, this oddball object is listed both as a galaxy (PGC 49877) and a planetary nebula (Fr 2-8).
Quoting from Planetary Nebulae in the Solar Neighbourhood: Statistics, Distance Scale and Luminosity Function by David John Frew
Fr 2-8 (Fr 1400-5102, AM 1357-504, LEDA 49877). This small nebula, about 2′ across, was found serendipitously from SHASSA field 057, while measuring a Hα flux from the nearby PN MeWe 2-4, and has been confirmed spectroscopically as a high-excitation PN, with the 2.3m MSSSO telescope. The position is coincident with the SIMBAD ‘galaxy’ AM1357-504 (Arp & Madore 1987). It had been independently noted as a PN by Cˆote et al. (1997), but no details were provided in their paper.
Interestingly enough, the team around IAS member Uwe Glahn observed this object visually at Hakos back in 2009.
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Results from the second night at the IAS observatory on the Gamsberg plateau with the 28 inch Newtonian “Wolf-Peter-Hartmann-Teleskop”, adding to my growing catalog of cometary globules.
Alas, sky flats at dusk didn’t work well, so some of the dust struture seen here may be artefacts of the calibration and gradient removal.
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First result from this year’s trip to Namibia, including two nights at the IAS observatory on the Gamsberg plateau using the mighty 28 inch Newtonian telescope for astrophotography. I came across this field of view when observing the supernova SN 2026cff in NGC 3660 with the IAS remote telescope and noticed the near-by, peculiar Hoag-type galaxy PGC1000714 with its ring structure.
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Continuing the growing catalog of cometary globules, here comes CG 14.
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An assortment of nebulae in Sagittarius, very close to the well-photographed Lagoon, thus sort of completing the Lagoon footprint, which made me come up with this nickname.
This is a narrowband (SII, H-alpha, OIII) plus RGB image. For rendering the NB data, I used the “Foraxx” palette described in The Coldest Nights blog along with other techniques. Worked rather well, a pure SHO approach would yield a very green image. Stars are color-calibrated RGB.
Emission and reflection nebulae in this field: IC 1274/1275/4684/4685, NGC 6559
The strange object below and right of NGC 6559 is the planetary nebula PN M 1-41
(RA 18 09 30.10, DEC -24 12 26.0).
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Continue readingTwo years in the making, here comes a new Night in Namibia time-lapse video.
Special thanks to:
Internationale Amateursternwarte e.V. https://www.ias-observatory.org/
Locations: TimBila Camp Namibia, IAS Observatory Hakos and Hakos Astrofarm, Namibia
An mj’s photography production https://photo.m-j-s.net/
Time-lapse photography Copyright (C) 2023-2025 Martin Junius
Music “Sequenced Variations 1” Copyright (C) 2025 Martin Junius
(Home-made in my studio, hopefully avoiding Youtube Content-ID hell)
More on-site OSC data from the IAS Hakos observatory, the reflection nebula IC 4601 in the constellation Scorpius.
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And one more. ;-) Of course, Omega Centauri aka NGC 5139 is a jewel in the southern sky and a go-to-target. So Omega Centauri’s photons were the “first light” for the ASI 2600 MC Duo on the AK3 astrograph, but I messed up focussing and had to redo it later.
All three globular clusters here in the blog were processed in PixInsight and Lightroom with the same color calibration and processing steps. Interestingly enough, their appearance varies quite a bit!
Also compare this with be previous image of Omega Centauri.
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Another globular cluster, only about 9 degrees from M4 towards the constellation Ophiuchus, Messier 62 or NGC 6266 against the dense background star field of the Milky Way.
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