Clear skies, no moon and a 14" telescope made for great viewing last night. With photos!



Great Orion Nebula

 One of the great benefits flowing from the $30 annual membership fee of the Canberra Astronomical Society is that you also get free use of the society's 350mm (14") telescope up on top of Mount Stromlo. A scope worth more than $10,000, with some gorgeous Nagler eyepieces, in an observatory with a roll-off roof. For $30? The only negative about this bargain is the chronic Canberra light pollution...

You can also attach a DSLR camera to the telescope to do your own beginner-level astrophotography.


47 Tucanae globular cluster

And that's just what I did last night. Here are a few of the better shots, with minimal and rushed processing this morning before heading off to work. Hopefully I'll be able to get a reasonable shot of Juptier out of the collection too.

Tarantula Nebula

The Moon came up after midnight, giving me a chance to get some nice sharp close-ups straight off the camera. I hope to stack a few and mosaic them over the weekend...


There are a couple more shots over on my Flickr page.

Some details of the items featured:

The Great Orion Nebula is great to look at through a telescope, but the colour really comes out in the camera. This is the natural colour. All I've done for this single photo (no stacking) is tweak the black levels to try to display the nebulosity without blowing out the stars.
You'll find this through binoculars as a fuzzy spot that forms the middle of the three "stars" of Orion's sword. But Orion the Hunter is upside down in Australia, so let's call it the bent part of the handle of the Big Dipper/Saucepan.

The Tarantula Nebula is easy to find in the Large Magellanic Cloud for Southern Hemisphere viewers. Through binoculars or your telescope's finder scope, look for the blurry patch. It's a large sprawling nebula and this photo doesn't do it justice.

47 Tucanae is the second brightest globular cluster in the sky. It's easy to find in the Small Megallanic Cloud—if you are fortunate enough to live in the Southern Hemisphere!
(The brightest is Omega Centauri, with some 5 million solar masses! But it isn't up in the evening skies right now.)

Alpha Crux is the star at the bottom of the Southern Cross. Except as you can see, it isn't one star it is a binary. Except it isn't —there are three stars in the system, but only Acrux1 and 2 are visible. They are about 430 times the Earth-Sun distance apart and are 321 light years from us.


Alpha Crux binary