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Astrophotography

Waning Moon for December

The full moon is waning to the new moon on December 14. I have had three nights with enough dark sky for a few hours of astrophotography. Of course, now is when the clouds decide to roll in. For the next three days, it is forecast to be mostly cloudy, but the good news is, there is a good chance of some rain on Wednesday. It has been cold at night, down around freezing. Now with the clouds moving in the night temperatures won’t drop much below 50 F.

The Sculptor Galaxy. I have done this galaxy before with the 500 f4 lens, this is the first time with the C8. This is a large and bright galaxy. Even at this latitude, it never rises more than about 35 degrees above the southern horizon, so it is less than ideal for photography. I put about 3 hours into this and think it came out pretty good. It is a starburst galaxy with a high rate of star formation. This leads to lots of young stars, very bright and blue, giving the outer rings a strong blue color. Older stars in the center are more yellow.
NGC 1232, a very faint galaxy that is over 60,000,000 light years from earth. Before I imaged this I had read that it was faint and low surface brightness, making it difficult to photograph, so I was surprised that this came out so well. Like the Sculptor Galaxy, it is low to the horizon.
Another of the low-hanging galaxies of the south, this is NGC 1300. Like both of the galaxies above, it is in the constellation Eridanus. It is about the size of our galaxy, and about 60 million light years out there.
NGC 1055. I posted this one last week, but now I have added more photos to it. I really like this galaxy. Of all these galaxies that I have posted recently, I suppose it all adds up to 4 or 5 trillion stars in total, maybe more. I wonder if there is someone or something else out there photographing the Milky Way? it seems quite likely.
I found this in Stellarium and decided to try it just because of the name. Darth Vader’s Starfighter Galaxy, NGC 936. The view through a telescope doesn’t show the fainter part of this galaxy, just the bright core and outer bars, so I can see how it got the name. I decided to watch Star Wars that same night.
I used a 200mm f2.8 lens for this, the California Nebula, and captured the dust clouds seen on the left too.
A composite image of the moon rising over the Batamote Mountains, east of my campsite.

As always, right click on an image and open in a new tab to see a larger image.

2 replies on “Waning Moon for December”

We all think Darth Vader’s Starfighter Galaxy is really cool! We’re seeing NGC 1055 from the edge, right? Very nice images, we enjoy seeing them. And I agree, I wonder if someone out there is looking at us here. Why not?

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