December has been kind of disappointing for astrophotography. The weather varied from cloudy and cold to cold and clear, but more clouds than I would expect. It seems to me that there are more cloudy nights the last couple of years than I experienced in my first winters in the Sonoran Desert. Only one rain event in December and that was .15 inches in Ajo. Birding has really slowed down.
I spent far more time on this than I should have. M45, the Pleiades, but I used my Canon 6D, a full frame camera and not modded for H-alpha. This gives me a much wider field of view and that is what I wanted, to show the dust clouds surrounding this bright reflection nebula. I have never tried to image the Witch Head Nebula (IC 2118)with the 500 f4. I used the 6D for this too, for the wider view. IC 2118 is an extremely faint reflection nebula. It is a cloud of gas and dust illuminated by nearby supergiant star Rigel in the constellation of Orion. It is about 900 light-years from Earth.For this I used the H-alpha camera to capture the red light emitted by the ionizing hydrogen in this emission nebula, the California Nebula. At 500mm it completely fills the frame. Lots of galaxies in this image. Located in the constellation of Cetus, this group of galaxies makes a good area to image. At the top right is spiral galaxy NGC 1042 and in the lower left is NGC 1052. There are at least 8 galaxies visible. Right click and open in a new tab to see a larger image. NGC 1398, located in the Fornax constellation. It is about 65 million light years away. It has an interesting double ring structure at the center. This is one I’d like to spend a lot more time on but it is so low in the south that I can only get about an hour on it per night. To see a really good image of this galaxy, check this LINK. Saturn and Jupiter approaching an historic conjunction. It has been about 800 years since they have been seen this close together. December 21 is the date that the two are at their closest and Saturn will be within the area of the Jupiter’s Galilean Moons. Jupiter and Saturn are actually 456 million miles apart. Saturn is nearly twice as far away from Earth as Jupiter.
I took this last night with the C8. I had to really overexpose to get some of Saturn’s moons and then combine images for this composite. The largest moon, above Saturn, is Titan. I think the other three are Rhea, Tethys, and Dione. Saturn has lots of moons but most are far too small to see from Earth. Only 13 have diameters greater than 30 miles. Titan is larger than the planet Mercury. The four Galilean moons of Jupiter are much easier to photograph. Going out from Jupiter, they are Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto.
