SAS Astronomy Pictures of the Month [September, 2024]
Integrated Flux Nebulae in Cepheus, Cygnus and Camelopardalis
Here’s a beautiful capture of IC342, known as the “Hidden Galaxy”.
This galaxy resides behind one arm of the Milky Way which contains a dense cloud of interstellar gas and dust. The dust gas absorbs about 90% of the light coming to us making the galaxy very difficult to see even with large amateur telescopes, thus the name “Hidden galaxy.” It would be one of the brightest galaxies in the sky without the dust in the way. This is a classic face-on spiral which, in many ways, resembles our own Milky Way galaxy. Discovered in 1895, it was first thought to be a part of the local group of galaxies but is now considered part of the Maffei group of near-by galaxies.
Imaging Details:
Scope: 6″ f/6 custom Newtonian
Exposure: RGB 90 min (Optolong L Quad Enh.), Lum: 178 min (uv/ir filter)
Processed in Pixinsight and Photoshop
Photo by David Murray
NGC6951 – Barred spiral galaxy in Cepheus located about 75 million light years from Earth. If you zoom in on the center of the galaxy, you can see a 5-arc second radius star formation ring, nicely resolved. The nucleus is very active, with a supermassive black hole at its center.
This was taken with my 12″ Meade Classic and focal reducer, using my ASI2600mc cooled camera. I stacked 338 3-min unguided exposures for a total exposure time of 17h over 5 nights, processed in Pixinsight and GIMP.
Photo by Terry Riopka
IC5146 the Cocoon nebula — a bright emission nebula (stellar nursery) and star cluster. The dark nebula Barnard 168 surrounds the nebula and is visible by the reflected light of numerous bright stars in the region.
David Murray says: “So July and August have been terrible months for imaging, however I got several nights of good OSC data for the Cocoon nebula then 4 hours of mono data with my ASI1600M camera. I found an easy way to align the RGB and mono images (use PI Dynamic Alignment process) even though they are from different camera formats, so I could then combine them into an LRGB image. The dust clouds show up well in the mono image but are barely visible in the RGB image but that only has to supply chrominance data.”
Imaging Details:
Scope: 6″ f/6 custom Newtonian
Exposure: RGB 130 min (Optolong L Quad Enh.), Lum: 240 min (uv/ir filter)
Processed in Pixinsight and Photoshop
Photo by David Murray