SAS Astronomy Pictures of the Month [February, 2025]
The Crab Nebula, Mars at opposition and Tiangong - the Chinese Space Station!
Photo by David Murray
The Crab Nebula, known as M1, is located in the constellation Taurus. It’s a supernova remnant – an expanding cloud of gas left behind by a massive star that exploded at the end of its life. The explosion was identified as a “guest star” by Chinese astronomers in 1054AD!
David Murray created this image using his 8” f/6 Newtonian with a 2.5x PowerMate, for a total focal system length of 3069mm!
Additional details:
Camera: ASI533
Optolong L-Quad filter
72 x 3 min exposures
Processed in PixInsight and Photoshop
Photo by David Murray
More beautiful images of Mars right during opposition on Jan. 16! David also used his 8” f/6 Newtonian with a 2.5x PowerMate (3069mm FL) to acquire these images. He stacked the best 4% of 20K video frames. Images were processed in PIPP, Autostakkart, enhanced in Registax 6, and post-processed in Photoshop.
Photo by Terry Riopka
Finally! After about 4 tries, I was finally able to track Tiangong, the Chinese Space Station! The images are not great, but not bad for a first imaging attempt. I decided to take advantage of the large chip size of my ASI2600mc and use it (along with my 2.5X Powermate) to image the CSS. I had tried before using my standard planetary camera ASI385, but the chip was just too small to accommodate the tracking error of my Paramount MyT. Then I tried the ASI2600mc using a 1024 width ROI to get the frame rate up, but the FOV was too small even for that! Finally I thought I’d try the entire frame (6248 x 4176)… I was getting only about 2 frames per second, but it worked! I was able to make manual adjustments during the tracking to keep the station in the FOV and even had time to start adjusting focus, though with much room for improvement.
I used my ASI2600mc with a 2.5X Powermate and UV/IR cut filter. I tracked the station from about 4:59pm EST for 2.5 minutes on Jan. 8, 2025, acquiring just over 300 frames. The best dozen are shown here in chronological order as it traversed the sky. I also uploaded a drawing of the actual space station here for comparison.
