June 2021 Stargazing Photos

I finally found a good place to stargaze near my home. It is in an overflow parking lot in Marymoor Park, Redmond, WA.

It has good views to the East, South, and Northwest. The rest of the directions are ok too if the object you want to see is high enough.

Check out these photos!

Galaxies

The Pinwheel Galaxy is the best example of a spiral galaxy that I know of. My evScope telescope needs around 20 minutes to get a great picture of this galaxy. Unfortunately, I was only able to keep the telescope locked onto the galaxy for 8 minutes. The picture is still pretty good.

The Pinwheel Galaxy is in the constellation of Ursa Major (also known as the Big Dipper). It is about 70 percent larger than our own Milky Way Galaxy, with a diameter of about 170,000 light years, and sits at a distance of 21 million light years from Earth. This means that the light we're seeing in this image left the Pinwheel Galaxy about 21 million years ago - many millions of years before humans ever walked the Earth.

NGC 6946, sometimes referred to as the Fireworks Galaxy, is a face-on intermediate spiral galaxy with a small bright nucleus, whose location in the sky straddles the boundary between the northern constellations of Cepheus and Cygnus. Its distance from Earth is about 25.2 million light-years or 7.72 megaparsecs. It is known to be among the dozen bright spiral galaxies near the Milky Way but beyond the confines of the Local Group. NGC 6946 lies within the Virgo Supercluster. In the past century, eight supernovas have been observed to explode in the arms of this galaxy.

Nebulae

The Ring Nebula (also catalogued as Messier 57, M57 or NGC 6720) is a planetary nebula in the mildly northern constellation of Lyra. Such a nebula is formed when a star, during the last stages of its evolution before becoming a white dwarf, expels a vast luminous envelope of ionized gas into the surrounding interstellar space.

The Dumbbell Nebula (also known as the Apple Core Nebula, Messier 27, and NGC 6853) is a planetary nebula (nebulosity surrounding a white dwarf) in the constellation Vulpecula, at a distance of about 1360 light-years. It was the first such nebula to be discovered, by Charles Messier in 1764. At its brightness of visual magnitude 7.5 and diameter of about 8 arcminutes, it is easily visible in binoculars and is a popular observing target in amateur telescopes.

Stars

Here are pictures of a couple of stars that I took. You will see that most of the color in the stars is washed out. They look mostly white. This is because I haven’t yet figured out how best to configure my telescope to show the stars’ true colors. Be that as it may, if you look around the outer edge of each star, you can see some of the star’s color.

Vega is the brightest star in the northern constellation of Lyra. This star is relatively close at only 25 light-years (7.7 parsecs) from the Sun, and, together with Arcturus and Sirius, one of the most luminous stars in the Sun's neighborhood. It is the fifth-brightest star in the night sky, and the second-brightest star in the northern celestial hemisphere, after Arcturus. Fun Fact: Vega played a prominent role in the movie Contact starring Jodie Foster.

Vega has been extensively studied by astronomers, leading it to be termed "arguably the next most important star in the sky after the Sun". Vega is only about a tenth of the age of the Sun, but since it is 2.1 times as massive, its expected lifetime is also one tenth of that of the Sun; both stars are at present approaching the midpoint of their life expectancies. Vega is a blue white star.

Arcturus is the brightest star in the northern constellation of Boötes, the fourth-brightest in the night sky, and the brightest in the northern celestial hemisphere. When viewed from Earth, it appears to be positioned almost at the north galactic pole of the Milky Way.

Located relatively close at 36.7 light-years from the Sun, Arcturus is a single red giant—an aging star around 7.1 billion years old that has used up its core hydrogen. It is about the same mass as the Sun, but has expanded to 25 times its size and is around 170 times as luminous. Its diameter is 35 million kilometers.

The Moon

Well, what can I say about the moon that you don’t already know?!? Here goes the old college try…

The Moon is Earth's only natural satellite. At about one-quarter the diameter of Earth (comparable to the width of Australia), it is the largest natural satellite in the Solar System relative to the size of its planet, the fifth largest satellite in the Solar System overall, and is larger than any known dwarf planet; eg, Pluto.

I think this is a pretty good picture of the full moon. It is so bright that it often obscures parts of the sky around it. That became a problem for me in some of my later stargazing sessions.