salutations Celestial Sight Seers! David Fuller here with eyes on the sky I have been working on
my astrophotography and I have been making some improvements I got a long way to go compared to
where a lot of other people are but I've got some pretty decent photos going so far and I
was out the other night taking some images and I will show you some of those but it was mostly in
the Ursa Major area because that's where there's some galaxies and I was looking if you look right
here where Alcor Mizar are you can follow this from Alioth through Mizar and then there's this
little Trail of stars kind of go this way and Lead You right to Messier 101 which is known as the
Pinwheel Galaxy so if you zoom in on that you can see that's a pretty interesting Galaxy there's a
lot of star forming stuff happening there there's a lot of good spiral structure it's not terribly
bright necessarily visually but if you're under some dark skies and have some larger aperture it
is something that you can find and see it's well placed right now so it's a great object to try
and look for but as I was taking my image and I will click over to that give me just a moment
so this was my image that I was using a dedicated Astro camera with and using the software SharpCap
doing a live stack so basically it was taking 10 second exposures at a specific gain which
was relatively low and every 10 seconds it would add another image add another image add another
image I could play with the histogram a little bit you can see that this image is not perfect
it's a little bluish there's I didn't have any darks or flats if you've watched some stuff about
astrophotography with other people you'll know kind of what those are but basically those help to
make the image better long story short they reduce noise from the camera and dust on the image sensor
and things like that they also get rid of the vignetting that you can see here because I was not
using a reducer when I took this but overall this is not too bad I'm pretty happy with it because
it was only 90 minutes worth of data so that was pretty exciting that I was able to get that and if
you zoom in you can see oh there's a decent amount of structure there there's some nice curls to the
spiral of the Galaxy and that was pretty cool so I was looking at it and I kept seeing like
this thing and I'm going what is that like why is that showing up I didn't know if it was something
on my sensor I didn't know if it was a light because I had a neighbor that had an upstairs
light on I didn't know if it was a reflection or something like that it was just kind of like this
little annoying thing that I kept looking at and if we Zoom way in there you can see that's
kind of what it is it looks sort of like maybe a teardrop there's a bright spot and some fuzziness
around it I was like well what is that well when I went into stellarium and started looking
I realized that oh that's a Galaxy what do you know and that was pretty exciting
because I was not capturing a lot of time on this now granted this particular Galaxy is
about 11th magnitude the surface brightness is not all that bright actually close to
13 which is fairly starting to get into that pretty dim category especially for something
visually at least but I didn't expect to get a lot out of a 90 minute image so
when you crop that down and take a look at it you can see that's pretty close so if I zoom in
here like that's that's not bad let me Center that there's some a couple Dots here there's
that bright star there there's a dust Lane and sure enough there's that bright star over here
there's a dust Lane there's these little dots and I got all those on the corner of an image
that I wasn't even trying to get which I I think it's really important that when we are
doing astronomy whether you're doing visual astronomy or astrophotography of any kind
whether it's electronically assisted or you're stacking things that we Embrace when something
serendipitous happens and to me this was kind of Serendipity because I looked at this particular
object and I went what is that and then when I started researching it I realized that oh hey
this is actually considered a companion Galaxy of Messier 101 and Messier 101 is
large enough that it's exerting a gravitational influence on this object which is NGC 5474.
and that was pretty cool to me because when you look at what this object is
doing and actually let me show you a Hubble image
this is Hubble's image of it which is obviously better than mine but still all the same things
are there there's the star there's that dust Lane here's some of those bright spots all of which I
caught obviously Hubble has much better detail but it's still the same things and what's happening
with this particular half spiral dwarf peculiar peculiar Galaxy is that it's being gravitationally
ripped by Messier 101 and I found that amazing and fascinating and really really awesome that
I had this thing on my image way down in the corner that I wasn't trying to get and it caused
me to learn something about this object which now I think is great because I'm excited that
I looked at what was there and realized that what I had captured was what should be there
in 90 minutes in my driveway when the telescope that's only 72 millimeters in aperture
granted I have some darker Skies granted I was using a dedicated Astro camera but I got that and
that to me is just amazing so when you're using your telescope and you are looking around and
you happen to find something that you don't know what it is see if you can figure out what it is if
you're using binoculars same thing binoculars are a great way to do this just scanning through see
what you can find and if you locate something go what is that and I would encourage you to
investigate what those things are because I think that's one of the best parts about this is just
stumbling upon something that you have not seen before don't know what it is and then learning
about it and being amazed and I was personally Amazed by this particular object I thought it
was wonderful and I was excited I will show you a little bit more some of my astrophotography
so that's kind of my finished image of Messier 101 and there's an image I got of Messier 51 also in
Ursa Major which I can show you where that's at we zoom out Messier 51 is over here so they're
both kind of on opposite sides of Alkaid and what's even cooler is that even though I was
fascinated by that particular object over here there's a couple other things over in this image
that also showed up on my Messier 101 so this NGC 5477 that showed up NGC 5473 that showed up
and there's the one and there's the other right there this was the interesting one just because it
was larger and caught my eye more but when you are out go take a look enjoy the universe it's amazing
it's awesome there's lots of great stuff up there and keep your eyes on the sky your outdoor
lights aim down so we can all see what's up I'm David Fuller wishing you clear and Dark Skies