I remember watching the Iris Nebula for the first time with my 224MC camera in EAA mode. I still think this is one of the most fascinating objects in space. I tried imaging it twice before, last year. The first round I wasted a good 6 hours of data by using the wrong filter. The second time I forgot to check the weather reports and ignored a wind warning causing most of my subs to be ruined.
So here’s about 9 hours or so on this magnificent object. The combination of blue core, dark dust and gold speckled stars is just something else.
In other news, I upgraded my coma corrector to the TS GPU and while doing some tests yesterday I immediately noticed the difference in quality, so this is my last image with my baader mpcc.
I’ve been reading about brown dwarfs lately. So yes, it’s time for some deep, faint stuff again.
These are so called substellar objects, they have more mass than planetary gas giants but less mass than regular main sequence stars. These objects have not enough mass and density to generate hydrogen fusion and the end result is basically a “failed star”.
These stars come in various subclasses. There are the M dwarfs (also called red dwarfs) and then the cooler L, T and finally Y dwarfs. The Y class are so cool that they are probably the hardest objects to detect, JWST even detected Y stars with negative temperatures.
I decided to focus on the L stars and started to compile lists with potential candidates to photograph.Making that list was interesting in itself because the unique feature of brown dwarfs is that they emit most of their light in the near infrared. This means that determining the magnitude of the objects was a bit more difficult than usual.
This near infrared also has other consequences. It means we can’t use our traditional broadband UV/IR cut filters. So I decided in the end to do it as rough as possible: no filters, no guiding, no dithering and just see what happens.
The first one is 2MASS J18071593+5015316 in Hercules. This is an L1 class brown dwarf about 47 light years away. Visually it’s located not too far from the galaxy cluster abell.
The second is 2MASS J12043036+3212595 in Ursa Major. This is an L0 class brown dwarf about 65 light years away. The big galaxy in the corner of the image is NGC4062.
The last one is LSPM J1438+6408 in Draco. This is another L0 class brown dwarf about 55 light years away. This is probably the brightest one, I could see it after a few frames sitting close to the faint galaxy PGC52318.
Summer is upon us. I was up late and was amazed at seeing the summer triangle and even Cassiopeia in crisp clear conditions. Unfortunately there was a bit of a breeze but that couldn’t stop me from getting almost 3 hours integration time on this beautiful edge-on galaxy in Coma Berenices.
I’ll wait a few weeks now for Cygnus to be high enough to start some projects on that area. In the meantime I hope to have some clear skies to focus on star spectra.
