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Super Nova (SN 2011dh)
approx 6 hrs
LRGB 8 hrs digital processing
June 19th 2011
Brian McGaffney
Occurence on M51 shown here in detail taken at the Nutwood Observatory.
Compared this to the image of M51 taken only a month before. This Super Nova was
of a yellow supergiant star, at 14 magnitude, 14-18 times our solar mass. M51
is about 25 million light years from our galaxy.
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M31
Standard Nikon D80 DSLR
William Optics M110, 690mm focal length, f6.0
0.8 factor field flattener to yield an effective 552mm @ f4.8
Skywatcher EQ6 Pro German Equatorial with drive, polar aligned for photo
None
498 seconds (8.3 minutes)
1
Contrast enhanced with Photoshop Elements
August 31, 2008 |
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M81
20 inch Truss Scope
ME
10 hrs.
20 hrs
March 2011
Brian McGaffney
Taken at the Nutwood Observatory March 2011. Part of the pair M81 and M82.
Perhaps the most perfect Spiral Galaxy in the night sky, thanks to close
encounters with its neighbour M82 some 600 million years ago. It is a bright
galaxy with magnitude of about 6.2.
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M82 (Cigar Galaxy). Hi Res close-up (24 meg) CCD image LLRGB (6,3,2,2) hrs.
Taken at Nutwood Observatory April 2011.
f9 Ceravolo, ME mount, guided subs 20 min
Messier 82 (M82, NGC 3034) is a remarkable galaxy of peculiar type in constellation
Ursa Major. It is usually classified as irregular, though probably a distorted disk
galaxy, and famous for its heavy star-forming activity, thus a prototype member of
the class of starbursting galaxies.
Forming a most conspicuous physical pair with its neighbor, M81 (THE showpiece
galaxies for many Northern hemispherers), this galaxy is the prototype of an
irregular of the second type, i.e. a "disk" irregular. Its core seems to have
suffered dramatically from a semi-recent close encounter with M81, being in a
heavy starburst and displaying conspicuous dark lanes. This turbulent explosive
gas flow is also a strong source of radio noise, discovered by Henbury Brown in
1953. The radio source was first called Ursa Major A (strongest radio source in UMa)
and cataloged as 3C 231 in the Third Cambridge Catalogue of Radio Sources.
In the infrared light, M82 is the brightest galaxy in the sky; it exhibits a
so-called infrared excess (it is much brighter at infrared wavelengths than in the
visible part of the spectrum). This behaviour can also be observed for the companion
of M51, NGC 5195, and the peculiar galaxy NGC 5128 (Centaurus A). The visual
appearance is that of a silvery sliver, as John Mallas decribed it.
Recently, over 100 freshly-formed (young) globular clusters have been discovered
with the Hubble Space Telescope. Their formation is probably another effect
triggered by the encounter with M81. It was estimated that the most recent tidal
encounter occurred between about 50 and several 100 million years ago: STScI's
most recent number was 600 million years, when the 100-million-year-long period
of heavier interaction began.
As a member of the M81 group, M82 is 12 million light years distant
Brian Mcgaffney
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NGC 772 Spiral Galaxy
NGC 772 is a spiral galaxy, approximately 130 million light-years away,
in the constellation Aries. Below and slightly to the right, is the satellite
galaxy NGC 770, which is probably responsible for NGC 772's peculiar shape.
Also, there are a lot of dwarf galaxies visible in the immediate neighborhood
that may also be interacting with NGC 772.
Brian McGaffney - Nutwood Observatory |
