September 2021 Stargazing Photos

I took my telescope out on Sep 23. This was not my most successful night of stargazing. I went to the top floor of a park-n-ride. There were too many lights up there. On the plus side, I did remember to refocus as the night got colder. I had to do that a couple of times.

When you view the pictures, zoom in and out to see more features. I think the pictures look best on a computer screen that is larger than your phone screen.

PS – You will notice that I have included less information about each object. Do you prefer this briefer format or would you like me to include more details like I did in my first two posts?

PPS – Does anyone know of a good place to go stargazing in the Bellevue, WA area that has a great view of the western horizon?

Nebulae

There was too much light pollution to get good shots of nebulae. The best one I got is below.

NGC 1491 (also designated SH2-206 and LBN 704) is sometimes called the "Fossil Footprint" nebula. It is an emission nebula located at a distance of about 10,700 lys in Perseus. As with most nebula of this type, the majority of emissions comes from Hydrogen, but this object includes large regions of weak ionized oxygen signals.

Planets

I have now seen all of the outer planets but not any of the inner planets because they are in the western sky. Still no good viewing spot for the western sky.

Both Uranus and Neptune are blue planets. You can see a little of that in the picture of Uranus, but it was too close to the moon and its glare to see much of the planet's color. You can see some of the moon's glow on the right side of the Uranus picture.

[Update] I don’t think the telescope was configured correctly to show the planets’ true colors. The telescope is supposed to configure itself automatically to view planets but it does not appear to have done so this time.

Uranus is the seventh planet from the Sun, and has the third-largest diameter in our solar system. It was the first planet found with the aid of a telescope, Uranus was discovered in 1781 by astronomer William Herschel, although he originally thought it was either a comet or a star.

Neptune is the second brightest object in this picture. Neptune is beneath the bright star at the center of the picture. Neptune is almost as large as Uranus but appears smaller because it is so much farther away.

Neptune is dark, cold, and very windy. It's the last of the planets in our solar system. It's more than 30 times as far from the Sun as Earth is. Neptune is very similar to Uranus. It's made of a thick soup of water, ammonia, and methane over an Earth-sized solid center. Its atmosphere is made of hydrogen, helium, and methane.

Star Clusters

These two pictures show you how different star clusters can look.

Also known as the Seven Sisters and M45, the Pleiades lies about 400 light years away toward the constellation of the Bull (Taurus). A common legend with a modern twist is that one of the brighter stars faded since the cluster was named, leaving only six stars visible to the unaided eye.

Like shiny flakes sparkling in a snow globe, over 100,000 stars whirl within the globular cluster Hercules (M13), one of the brightest star clusters visible from the Northern Hemisphere. Located 25,000 light-years from Earth with an apparent magnitude of 5.8, this glittering metropolis of stars in the constellation Hercules can be spotted with a pair of binoculars most easily in July.

Galaxies

Most of the stars in M32 are clustered around the center of the galaxy. This may be because of a super massive black hole at its center.

M32 is a satellite galaxy of the large Andromeda Galaxy (M31). It was discovered by Guillaume Le Gentil in 1749. M32 measures 6.5 ± 0.2 thousand light-years in diameter at the widest point. The galaxy is a compact elliptical galaxy type. Compact ellipticals are rather rare. Half the stars are inside an effective radius of only 100 parsecs.

Messier 81 (also known as NGC 3031 or Bode's Galaxy) is a grand design spiral galaxy about 12 million light-years away, with a diameter of 90,000 light years, in the constellation Ursa Major. Due to its proximity to our galaxy, large size, and active galactic nucleus (which harbors a 70 million M? supermassive black hole), Messier 81 has been studied extensively by professional astronomers. The galaxy's large size and relatively high brightness also makes it a popular target for amateur astronomers.

Messier 102’s (M102 or The Spindle Galaxy) dust lane is slightly warped compared to the disk of starlight. This warp indicates that the galaxy might have experienced gravitational tidal disturbances in the distant past. These disturbances were likely caused by an interaction with a nearby galaxy, as M102 is the largest member of a small cluster of galaxies.