This galaxy is one of the furthest Messier objects at 32 million light-years. I took a total of 5 hours integration time for this galaxy and ended up with a very messy noisy soup. I’m not sure why exactly, these were perfect galaxy shooting conditions: no moon, clear skies, no wind.

The name Phantom Galaxy is due to its very low surface brightness. It’s one of the hardest Messier objects to observe visually and needs very dark skies to do so.

I’m happy with the result after processing. We can even see some of the star formation regions in this beautiful spiral galaxy.

I had one more clear night last weekend and my plan was to use the evoguide on the Heart Nebula. Unfortunately I seem to have lost an adapter somewhere so I had to figure out something else to do. I really wanted to image something bright after all the faint galaxies from the last weeks.

I ended up collecting around 5 hours of data on the Pacman Nebula and processed it in a light HOO palette.

I also invested a bit more time lately in learning more about Pixinsight and I will probably reprocess some of my older data. Additionaly I hope to have some time during the week to observe and image Neptune.

So I’ve been reading a lot about Halton Arp lately. Arp is famous for a lot of things in astronomy. He compiled the magnificent Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies and wrote Seeing Red: Redshift, Cosmology and Acamedic Science. He’s most famous (or infamous) for claiming that red-shifted quasars that visually seem close to a galaxy, might actually be connected somehow to that galaxy. This statement has huge consequences for the definition of redshift, it would mean redshift might not be the best way to calculate distances in space and thus undermine the whole big bang theory.

Now this was years ago and sadly Arp passed away in 2013. Today you can still find articles, youtube videos and forum posts from people who agree with Arp, usually followed by a typical internet style debate ranging from ‘there’s a crisis in cosmology’ to ‘we live on a flat earth’.

Hubble data confirms that Arp was wrong though and that these quasars, even if they look closely connected to a galaxy visually, are actually millions of light-years removed from the objects they seem close to.

All this reading about Arp’s adventures inspired me to take pictures of faint weird galaxies and quasars. I compiled a nice little list in excel of all 338 ARP objects from the Atlas, sorted them by magnitude and viewing season and captured two of them last weekend.

On the first image we have Arp 78, a spiral galaxy 130 million light years away. Its weird shape is explained by the interaction with smaller companion galaxies which can be seen on the left of the galaxy and very faintly on the right too.

On the second image we have two galaxies, ARP 37 is the one on the top, it’s also known as Messier 77 and it’s a beautiful spiral galaxy about 47 million light years away. Another spiral galaxy is in the picture, viewed edge-on. It’s NGC1055 – 52 million light years away. The distance between the two galaxies is estimated at 7 million light years.

Both images have a rather short total integration time (1.5 hours for ARP 78 and 2.5 hours for ARP 37) so I struggled a lot with removing the noise and getting some detail out of the galaxies. Still I’m happy with the result.

In the next months I hope to image more of these Arp galaxies. They are all small and faint so I always need to find a nice way to frame them, preferably with other nice targets in the field of view. If I can find some really cool ones I will try to increase my total integration time too.

There’s a lot happening in this picture. The big galaxy in the upper right is NGC7331, it’s a galaxy that is similar in size and structure as our Milky Way – about 40 million light years away. The smaller galaxies around it are actually much further out at 300-350 million light years.

The small group of galaxies on the bottom left is Stephan’s Quintet. This group of galaxies was imaged recently by the JWST and is sitting in a rich field of galaxies in the constellation of Pegasus.

There are many more galaxies in this field of view and I’m trying to figure out as much as possible about them.

On the downside there are some obvious guiding issues going on in this picture that I really need to fix. Especially if I want to hunt down more of these elusive ARP objects.

When I had my first peek at Andromeda I was using my 8 inch dob and could only see the big fuzzy ball of light from this massive galaxy. Still an amazing sight and hard to believe I could watch another galaxy from my garden. This thing is huge – visually it’s almost 6 times a full moon and has more than a trillion stars in it.

In the last few months I started thinking how to approach bigger and wider targets such as this one. I contemplated buying a fancy refractor but in the end the solution was much simpler. I purchased the skywatcher evoguide 50ed as I needed a decent guide scope anyway, mounted my 533 MCP on it with a field flattener and put the whole assembly in the finder bracket of my 130 pds. This is not ideal because it means guiding at a focal length that is much larger than the imaging scope but it seems to work just fine for now. I need to fix some of the issues (tilt in the corners) but otherwise I’m happy with the image.

If Andromeda is our big sister, then M33 or the Triangulum Galaxy is our little brother. Together with our Milky Way they make out the 3 biggest members of the Local Group.

This galaxy is very special. It has tons of star forming regions and we can actually observe emission nebulae that are sitting within the galaxy 5 million light years away.

This is a tricky object. It’s huge but also very dim. I took 6 hours of integration time in total and this is my result.

We have clear skies again! It’s been a couple hot and humid weeks now with little to no opportunities to image but finally I could get some integration time in the last two nights. My main target for August is the Helix Nebula, but I’m starting to wonder if that one will remain elusive again this year, it’s just too low on the horizon to get proper time with it from my backyard.

So I started imaging the Triangulum Galaxy, I’m at 6 hours of data and hope to start post-processing soon.

While doing that I got curious about another target on my list: ARP273, one of the most beautiful galaxies in Halton Arp’s Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies. We’re actually looking at two interacting galaxies here, UGC1810 and UGC1813. The result is a beautiful ‘cosmic rose’ figure.

This is my deepest image yet, we’re looking at a structure that is 300 million light years away.

I didn’t image for like 4 weeks or so and the sky looks already very different. Vega is up high, Andromeda is appearing and Jupiter & Saturn have joined the night sky spectacle.

I remember as a kid feeling summer lasting forever, blissful times without school or other obligations. But in today’s world time just flies by.

Yesterday I pointed my scope at NGC6820 and NGC6823. The latter is a small open cluster sitting in the former, an emission nebula. They both reside in Vulpecula, some 6000 light years away from us.

I’ve been really lucky lately with some great clear nights, mostly during weekends. I don’t really have time to image during the week and summer nights are already short enough. Last night must have been one of the warmest nights I’ve ever seen here. Unfortunately everything that could go wrong did go wrong.

I didn’t really have a plan so I decided to radomly point the scope at the Lion Nebula to see what kind of detail I could get out of the head of the lion. It’s a magnificent region with emission, reflection, star formation and two Wolf-Rayet stars lighting the whole area on fire.

This is what went wrong:

• I had some periodic guiding issues causing my stars to be all over the place
• Trying to fix this made me lose focus a few times
• Might also have lost a bit of collimation by tinkering on the scope all the time
• Insects kept flying into the camera cooler

The result is a bit of a hot mess that I had to overprocess to make something out of it. I will definitely try this object again with proper integration time and hopefully with some better results.

I shot this one back in April when it was still low in the sky. This is less data but in much better conditions. It’s a magnificent object and one of the key pieces of the summer sky if you ask me. Stellar winds from a Wolf-Rayet star, 5000 light years away from us.