Not every image I take is so monumental that it deserves the full ‘deep dive’ treatment in its own blog post so here’s a variety of things that I’ve shot from Namibia.
Note: you can click on any of the photos to get a larger view
NGC 7293 – The Helix Nebula
I’ve been trying to get a good shot of the Helix for years! It’s in the constellation Aquarius which doesn’t get all that high in the sky and for the past few years I always keep missing it, or have the wrong telescope on the mount at the observatory. This is a Planetary Nebula class object which by and large are very small objects in the telescope so my ‘best’ shot was one with my long focal-length telescope but only got the blue and green layers so I never had a completed image.
This is the full frame of the camera
But as Planetaries go, this one is one of the largest because it’s close to us, only 650 light-years distant and is in fact the closest Planetary Nebula to the Sun. So even though I have a wide-field telescope setup here I thought it’d be worth a try even though 90% of the camera frame was going to be cropped away since my camera is pretty high-resolution.
It turned out better than I expected and I was able to pull out some wispy extended detail in processing and have bright, vibrant colors as well. So it was a good call on a night where there wasn’t much else to shoot in that part of the sky whilst trying to dodge that light-polluting Moon!
The Helix Nebula was the first planetary nebula discovered to contain ‘knots’. These knots are radially symmetric, and are described as "cometary", containing bright cusps and tails. There are estimated to be more than 20,000 cometary knots in the Helix; excluding their tails, each one is approximately the size of our Solar System.
47 Tucanae – NGC 104
47 Tucanae would be the finest Globular Cluster in the sky if it weren’t for Omega Centauri (separate blog post about that you can read here: Omega Centauri).
47 Tucanae next to the SMC dwarf galaxy. A chance alignment, 47 Tucanae is in the Milky Way and the SMC is 200,000 light-years away.
This is a deep southern object since it’s very close to the South celestial pole and has a surprising, but chance alignment with another prominent player in the south, the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), a nearby dwarf galaxy that is a ‘big hit’ on moonless nights down here.
Weighing in with about 2 million stars it is a spectacular object in its class and is about twice as big as a typical large globular like M 13, the Hercules Cluster.
This thing is about 13,400 light years away making it one of the closer globulars to the Sun and is actually moving towards us in the galaxy.
At one point they did a survey of 34,000 of the stars in 47 Tucanae with the Hubble Space Telescope seeing if they could detect any Jupiter-sized planets passing in front of their host stars and didn’t find any at all, bolstering the theory that there’s something about the environment in globular clusters that prevents planet formation when planets are pretty common around regular stars in the Milky Way.
The Cat’s Paw Nebula and NGC 6357
I’ve always liked the “Cat’s Paw” since I found out about it and a photo I took of it years ago was a turning point in my astrophotography in that it was one of the first images I took in monochrome with a camera and filter wheel I eventually sent back (sensor too small) but it opened my eyes to the power and detail you can get in black-and-white cameras and filter wheels as opposed to ‘one-shot-color’ (OSC) cameras.
The shot I got of the Cat’s Paw in 2020 was not a problem for the small sensor size and even the fact that I (again) only managed to shoot green and blue I still got an image that looked real cool, even if it was completely the wrong color.
So as I was casting around for targets on this trip, the Cat’s Paw was high in the sky so I thought I’d have a bash at it four years later but then I noticed that there was this other, similar nebula not very far away and that they would both fit nicely in the large camera frame I’ve got here so I figured out how to get them in there. One problem though was that the new thing had only “NGC 6357” as its name and being so close to the cool-sounding Cat’s Paw I thought we should figure out a name for it. Mom suggested “The Tiger’s Eye” Nebula which was great and kept with the ‘feline’ storyline, and I kinda think I would go with The Venus Flytrap Nebula. Technically the Nebula does have a name, the “War & Peace Nebula” but that’s based on images taken in the infrared spectrum where one side looks like a dove and the other a skull. If you have a suggestion for a name leave it in the comments!
The Cat’s Paw has some really cool detail in the “pawprints” but far from being the “also-ran” in this image is NGC 6357 which ends up being very interesting. It’s about 8000 light years away in the general direction of the center of the Milky Way, (6500 for Cat’s Paw) and for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, it’s forming some of the most massive stars in the whole Milky Way!
That star you see blazing away in the center of the cloud is 200 times the mass of the Sun, one of the most massive stars we know of and the stars close to it are designated as Pismis 24, the last entry in a catalogue of star clusters by Paris Pişmiş, an Armenian-Mexican astronomer in the early 20th century; this is the first time I’ve heard of that catalogue.
The False Comet – NGC 6231
Ok, this is a crazy target and one that has always tickled me. The name “False Comet” is not widely used and doesn’t have any real correlation to a photo but in dark skies, with the naked eye, the bright double star Zeta Scorpio 1 & 2 on the right, progressing left through that nice open cluster NGC 6231 and then that streamer of stars heading to the cloudy IC 4628 looks at a glance, like a little comet! I had never been able to see it that way from home because of light pollution but here–well I get it now. And, I was looking for targets and it fit nicely in the camera frame so boom, there it is!
Half Moon (First Quarter)
The Moon is a really great target, and as much as we bitch about it sucking up the dark skies we like for deep-sky photography it’s one of only two celestial objects we can see surface detail on; Mars is the other one.
I’ve shot the moon a bunch of times but never got it at exactly half phase like this. When I do my stargazes in Hilton Head, if we are within a couple days of half-moon I tell people to look very carefully along the line that separates the day side from the night side and look for really interesting shadow-play that happens with crater walls, central peaks crater floors, and texture in the smooth areas.
Well there you have it, four astrophotos and a bonus photo!
Looking forward to getting my dark skies back so I can start staying up all night again!
Carpe Noctem,
Bill Gwynne