Comet Neowise and Venus


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Welcome to taosastronomer.com!

offering local "hands-on" observing
(visual and imaging) sessions and instruction
viewing and imaging from Rabbit Valley Observatory
a dark sky location on the mesa just west of Taos, NM

 

M33 spiral galaxy in Triangulum

M33 in Triangulum

Image obtained 11-07-2015 through RVO's Megrez 80mm refractor with Orion field-flattener lens, using a Baader-modified Canon XSi DSLR and BackyardEOS image-acquisition software – 20 (of 24 obtained) carefully selected and stacked 260-second luminance frames as well as 8 (of 10 obtained) 200-second luminance frames combined with multiple dark, flat and bias calibration frames shot at ISO 1600 and totaling more than 300 minutes (~114 minutes effective luminance) were used to create this image; optics driven by the Losmandy G-11 mount equipped with Ovision's precision RA worm gear, guided with an Orion SSG3 Monochrome CCD camera using Maxim DL Pro and post-processed with DeepSkyStacker and Photoshop CS3.

 


 

Click the image to see a vastly more detailed one from widely renowned astrophotographer Jerry Lodriguss, who hosts a wonderful DSLR astrophotography website, linked here by clicking this text.

 

from the web: "M33 was probably first found by Hodierna before 1654 (perhaps together with open cluster NGC 752). It was independently rediscovered by Charles Messier, and cataloged by him on August 25, 1764. Nevertheless, William Herschel, who otherwise carefully avoided to number Messier's objects in his survey, assigned it the number H V.17, on the ground of an observation dated September 11, 1784. Also because of the cataloging of Herschel, the brightest and largest HII region (diffuse emission nebula containing ionized hydrogen) has obtained a NGC number of its own: NGC 604 (William Herschel's H III.150); it is situated in the northeastern part of the galaxy; apparently the bright knot near the top of our image. This is one of the largest H II regions known at all: it has a diameter of nearly 1500 light-years, and a spectrum similar to the Orion nebula M42. Hui Yang (University of Illinois) and Jeff J. Hester (Arizona State University) have taken a photograph of NGC 604 with the Hubble Space Telescope, resolving over 200 young hot massive stars (of 15 to 60 solar masses) which have recently formed here."

 

[copyright Rabbit Valley Observatory/Willis Greiner, 2015 -- all rights reserved]


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(all content copyright 2015-2019 Willis Greiner Photography, all rights reserved)