Category: Maurertown, VA
These images are from my home in Maurertown, Virginia. The sky ranges from 22.1 to 22.5 on moonless nights depending on the transparency.
Sh2-112
As the northern hemisphere moves into late spring, the Milky Way comes into view before midnight. And that means all those wonderful nebulae are now ready for their closeups! This one is Sharpless 112 (Sh2-112), an emission nebula in Cygnus. Specifically it’s the bright, circular region near the center. But, it’s clear that this is…
Messier 10
There are a lot of globular clusters out there and this one looks a lot like the typical globular. But, they make good “filler” targets because they don’t need much total time and they are still interesting. In this case, I was spending most of the night on Sharpless 112 but it didn’t get high…
SN2023ixf in Messier 101
On May 20th, a supernova was detected in M100 and on the night of the 21st it was clear in Virginia though wildfire smoke had a major negative effect on transparency. I didn’t think it would be a good night for trying to do detailed, faint imaging but when someone suggested the supernova I thought…
Coma Cluster
The Coma Cluster is a very large cluster of galaxies in Coma Bereneces. The center of the cluster contains two supergiant eliptical galaxies, NGC 4874 and NGC 4889 but the entire cluster consists of over 1,000 galaxies. The average distance of the galaxies in the cluster is 321 million light years though being a huge…
Needle Galaxy
The Needle Galaxy (NGC 4565) is an edge-on spiral galaxy in Coma Berenices. According to Wikipedia it is 30 to 50 million light years away The smaller galaxy to the upper left might be a satellite galaxy or just a more distant background galaxy. It isn’t obvious from the image and the reference material I…
Aurora In Virginia on 23/24 April 2023
On the night of April 23rd, the northern hemisphere experienced an aurora that reached all the way down to at least Virginia. That doesn’t happen very often. I’ve been lucky enough to see them twice before (sadly it was cloudy for the one that happened just a couple of weeks ago). In both of those…
Linda's Astronomy Adventures 