Another CG image, completed just after Christmas Day, showing CG 15 (lower right) in Puppis and CG 16 (upper left) in Carina. Two more for the growing catalog of CGs here.
More details at Astrobin coming soon.
Continue reading
CG season is also rain season in Namibia, so it took a while to gather enough data for image, adding to the growing catalog of CGs here.
More details at Astrobin coming soon.
Continue reading
Some old narrowband data of the Helix was sitting for quite a while on my hard disk. Recently I started to adopt the “Foraxx” palette described in The Coldest Nights blog and used this technique with the SHO data, but combined both the SHO Foraxx and Bicolor Foraxx results, with a bit of RGB mixed in, and added RGB stars. Hope that the result isn’t too bad. ;-)
See an older post for a “classic” rendering of NGC 7293.
More details at Astrobin (70 % crop).
Continue reading
[Updated image]
Has been quite a while since I last imaged this large, beautiful spiral galaxy in the southern constellation of Sculptor, NGC 253 known as the Silver Dollar Galaxy, Silber Coin Galaxy, or just Sculptor Galaxy.
A lot of H-alpha data has been used, thus the rendition is different from the DSLR attempts back in 2016.
More Details at Astrobin.
Continue reading
Continuing the with the cometary globules, here comes CG 11, also part of my growing catalog of CGs here at Gallery > Photography > Astrophotography > Cometary Globules.
More details at Astrobin. Also posted to Spektrum Leserbilder Astronomie.
Continue reading
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).
More details at Astrobin.
Continue reading
Supernova SN 2024abfo‘s brightness increased steadily from our first measurement at 16.91 mag on 17 Nov 2024 until peak brightness was reached during the night 06 Dec 2024, at 13.81 mag, more than fifteenfold. Meanwhile, brightness is back at 16.73 mag on 11 Apr 2025 (all values median mag of the dataset).
Discovery by ATLAS (ATLAS-STH_ATLAS-03) on 15 Nov 2024 reported a brightness of 16.79 mag with filter “orange-ATLAS”, measurements by Pan-STARRS (PS1_GPC1) two days later on 17 Nov 2024 reported 16.63 mag with filter “i-P1”.
Our amateur measurement with 137 datasets in total now cover a period of 146 days, quite an achievement I’d say. ;-)
Due to using an L filter (Baader UV/IR cut) and not a V band filter, the measurements here overestimate the brightness by approx. 0.2 mag. With almost full moon and low altitude (meanwhile NGC 1493 is setting quite early), the last two measurement have a higher uncertainty, up to 0.08 mag.
IAS – Internationale Amateursternwarte e.V. – Hakos Observatory, Namibia
IAS remote telescope “Dieter”
Data aquisition by Martin Junius and Stephan Messner.
Technical details see previous post. Photometry measurements with L filter.
More strange creatures: lonely cometary globule CG 7 plowing through the dust clouds of Vela, as it seems. Maybe looking for the small planetary nebula NGC 2792? (Can you find it? If not, see the annotated image below.)
Also included in my growing catalog of CGs here.
More details at Astrobin.
Continue reading
Still on the hunt for cometary globules, here’s CG5 trying to escape the evil clouds with tendrils already stretching in its direction … ;-)
Meanwhile, I created an extra page in the gallery with some information on CGs and the related astrophotography so far.
More details at Astrobin, as always.
Continue reading
Continuing the hunt for cometary globules, those strangely shaped dark clouds, mostly in the constellation of Puppis. This image shows CG3 and less prominent CG25 to the right, together with the spiral galaxy NGC 2427.
More details at Astrobin.
Continue reading