what are you doing ?

[Mike H]

Wow!

[Max N]

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Hercules cluster, single 30s exposure - bit out of focus, sorry.

[Daniel Quinn]

Those sausages look well nice . Enjoy

[Max N]

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Known as the Whirlpool Galaxy, this is actually a pair of galaxies interacting.
I said a while ago that Andromeda was an easy target (basically it's big and bright). Well, this is a more difficult one (it's a long way away, 23.5 million lightyears, and therefore apparent size and brightness are both low).
This image is stacked from data captured over 5 sessions spread over 3 years, back in the days when I sat outside nursing the system the whole time freezing my nuts off. It also required more post-processing to bring out the structure.
This was shot at about 2m focal length and this is heavily cropped, probably about 10% of the original images, to give you an idea of how small it would appear if you could see it with the naked eye. It is apparently visible in a pair of binoculars.

What we see is of course just a snapshot in time, but I love that you can 'see' the interaction, how the smaller galaxy (M51b) has created tidal structures in the larger one (M51a)
This pair are a favourite subject of galaxy interaction models. These simulations suggest that M51b passed through the larger galaxy 'from behind' about 550 million years ago, and then passed back through again about 50 to 100 million years ago, creating the two long plumes. The plume at the top right in my image doesn't appear in simulations with only a single crossing event.

[andrew Ivimey]

Max stpppit please! My astonishment is giving way to something even more er...astonishing - profound!

[simon]

Amazing Max. Do keep posting though!

[jack]

Super stuff. Really lovely

[Max N]

Cheers guys. I have a plan for the next image but I need some clear nights!
If the weather doesn’t cooperate I will dig out some old data to re-process.

[jack]

Damn! Thinking about getting a ZWO Seestar S50… all Max’s fault! Ages since I’ve owned a telescope… decades…

Reviews are insanely good

[Max N]

Sorry Nick
See star seems like a good package.
Looks like it even includes an OIII / hydrogen alpha filter. You will find this even allows imaging in light polluted skies or with a bright moon.

[Max N]

You probably know this, but Seestar’s short focal length means it is best suited to large, wide field targets, but there are plenty of those

[Max N]

Astrophotography update
I had been hoping to take some wide field shots of the constellation Orion, to provide a bit of context for an image of the Orion Nebula I have been working on. But the weather has not co-operated, so the first two pictures below have been lifted from Wikipedia - I hope that's OK?
This is Orion roughly as it looks to the naked eye (with lines drawn on):

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Always worth a look on a clear night, not least because his because his left shoulder, Betelgeuse, is a massive red supergiant and one of the easiest stars to detect as orange in colour with the naked eye.

This is the wide field image I was hoping to take but couldn't, so this is also from Wikipedia. This is how I imagine Orion might look to an animal with better night vision than us humans - maybe a night owl in Kielder forest?

340px-Orion_3008_huge.jpg (109.13 KiB) Viewed 973 times

Hopefully you can see that the middle 'star' in Orion's sword is actually something 'nebulous'?

I pointed my 2m focal length scope at this region and took about 40 minutes of data, and I got this, known quite rightly as 'The Great Orion Nebula':

orion_02_small.jpg (81.89 KiB) Viewed 973 times

A while ago I said that the Andromeda Galaxy was an 'easy' target - well the Orion Nebula is the other 'easy' one! Apart from these two, pretty much everything else requires a lot more data. So if any of you fancy a dabble in astrophotography, try these two targets first!

[Ray P]

This is the team I manage.

https://www.admiralty.co.uk/access-data ... mical-data

[Max N]

This is the team I manage.

https://www.admiralty.co.uk/access-data ... mical-data

Looks like a really interesting job

[jack]

So, every week the BirdNET-Pi setup in my office sends us a recap showing the changes week-by-week in what's been heard - for week 11 (last week):

Total Detections: 8645 (-5%)
Unique Species Detected: 50 (-2%)

= Top 10 Species =
European Robin - 2297 (+38%)
Eurasian Blackbird - 1750 (+83%)
Great Tit - 1078 (+21%)
Eurasian Blue Tit - 585 (-35%)
Eurasian Jackdaw - 424 (-19%)
Eurasian Wren - 342 (-43%)
Dunnock - 326 (-63%)
Coal Tit - 259 (-38%)
Redwing - 250 (+443%)
Common Chaffinch - 222 (+9%)
Compare this with week 8's report from 26th Feb:
Total Detections: 6297 (-3%)
Unique Species Detected: 46 (+2%)

= Top 10 Species =
European Robin - 1600 (+1%)
Great Tit - 897 (+13%)
Coal Tit - 443 (-10%)
Eurasian Jackdaw - 394 (+32%)
Eurasian Blue Tit - 392 (-52%)
Goldcrest - 391 (+33%)
Long-tailed Tit - 310 (+15%)
Eurasian Blackbird - 251 (-14%)
Eurasian Wren - 223 (-15%)
Dunnock - 220 (-22%)

But as of today, the chaffinches are on top and the poor robins, who have dominated the winter recordings, are relegated to 8th place. No long-tailed tits in the top 10 now either...:

You can see the real-time recordings at: https://birdnet.desmith.io/
I built & installed BirdNET at home in June '23 - since then we have over 220,000 recordings of wild birds in the garden..

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