Ad Astra Observatory

Very pretty horse head nebula! Thanks for sharing.

M

—–Original Message—–
From: Jimbo S. Harris
Sent: Sunday, January 13, 2008 9:30 AM
Subject: A rare clear night in January

Hi all,

It was preternaturally clear out last night. I kept expecting the clouds to roll in, and they kept refusing to do it, and I finally had to give up at 3am when I couldn’t stay awake any longer. I’m out of practice, clearly.

Such a long winter’s night produced a wealth of images. There are new images on the following pages of my website. As always, the latest ones are to the left; you can compare to my earlier work by scrolling to the right.

The Horsehead Nebula in Orion. Finally got one I’m proud of. Look at those diffraction spikes!

(check out the detail in the red-channel-only image too)

M51, The Whirlpool Galaxy in Ursa Major. Getting pretty good at this one; looking forward to shooting it with some more magnification.

(nice comparison to the one next to it; more or less same detail, but the sky background is much darker in this shot)

NGC2239, a portion of The Rosette Nebula in Monoceros. A swing and a miss (the center of the nebula is off the upper right hand corner of the image), but some nice detail if you squint. The nebula is dim enough that I couldn’t tell if I’d gotten it. So I had to shoot 2 hours of images, plus processing, to get this result. Ouch.

M35, an open cluster of young stars in Gemini. The blue color means they’re young stars, still burning hot. The few orange stars in the cluster are old before their time. They were likely giant stars that burned through their fuel more quickly than their companions. Live fast, die young.

Enjoy!

Keep looking up,

Jimbo