Winter Highlights with a fast 50mm lens

 

The Constellation Auriga the charioteer widefield.

                       

The Constellation Gemini the twins widefield.

                          

Part of the Constellation Gemini the twins featuring
the bright stars Castor and Pollux

The Constellation Orion the hunter.

Images credit: Pip Stakkert. Two Canon DSLRs were used one astro-modded and with an integral clip in Altair Astro Triband filter. Canon F1.4 and f=50mm fixed lens. All mounted on a Star Adventurer EQ mount. Stack of 2 minute exposures each image about 1 hour in total. Processed primarily using Affinity Photo2

"The winter sky is full of interesting astronomical features and awash with glowing red hydrogen gas and clouds of dark cold dust. The weather finally improved in Lowestoft and we enjoyed the benefit of two consecutive moonlight free and cloud free nights on the 9-10th and 10-11th of January 2024.

The above images were taken with two Canon DSLR cameras, a fast F1.4 f=50mm lens and an Altair Astro Triband filter. The cameras were mounted on a Star Adventurer equatorial mount which enabled exposures of 2 minutes in length which ensured stars were captured as points of light without any apparent trailing due to the Earth's rotation. The Earth spins about its north south axis 15 degrees every hour, which when you think about it is quite extraordinary!

 The eagle eyed of our readers will note the Flaming Star Nebula in the image of Auriga and a number of nebulae  in Orion including; Barnards Loop, the Great Orion Molecular Cloud, The Flame Nebula, the Running Man Nebula, the Horsehead Nebula and the Witch Head Nebula.

The Jodrell Plank Observatory is slowly recovering from the electrical outage caused by storm damage in the latter part of 2023. The LVST (the Lowestoft Very Small software defined radio telescope is still out of action awaiting reprogramming by Jolene McSquint Fleming, the Observatory instrumentation engineer. Sadly and just like the NASA Pioneer space craft, the the software used to originally programme the LVST is now antique and few but the very old are fluent in the language used. Jolene has messaged our sponsor George Roberts who is sufficiently ancient to be of some limited assistance". - Kurt Thrust current Director of the Jodrell Plank Observatory.

Messier35 or NGC2168 in the Constellation Gemini

 

Messier35 is a rather splendid binocular open star cluster in the constellation Gemini the twins. Widefield image taken with the Canon 600d DSLR and zoom lens at f=50mm. A stack of RAW lights at ISO1600.Infra-red data was added to the base image from the WISE space telescope Image credit: Pip Stakkert, NASA and Astrometry.net

" The majority of data used in creating this image was collected at the Jodrell Plank Observatory. Sadly the atmosphere ,which keeps us all alive, is largely opaque to mid infra-red radiation, which originates from hot interstellar gas and dust. The NASA's WISE space telescope sits above the atmosphere in low earth orbit and collects radiation at this wavelength. Pip Stakkert has used his image processing skills to add this data to ours and create this interesting combined image with a high dynamic range.

The cluster is 2900 light years distant and thought to include over 1600 stars distributed over part of the sky with an apparent size equivalent to the full Moon. Within a central volume of  approximate diameter equivalent to thirty arc seconds, there are over 400 stars 64 of which are binary pairs. There are a number of variable stars within the cluster and one star's spectrum shows emission lines. Messier 35 is 175 million years old, a relative youngster in the night sky. Another star cluster, but much further away (line of sight proximity only) NGC2158, is just south and west of M35". - Kurt Thrust current Director of the Jodrell Plank Observatory.

This is the Jodrell Plank data without the added infra-red WISE data. By comparison you can see how the infra-red adds to the dynamic range of the image! 

Location map showing the footprint of our image. You can see that M35 sits at the feet of Gemini and between Auriga, Orion and Taurus.

WISE space telescope (NASA)