Category: Sierra Remote Observatories
These images were taken at Sierra Remote Observatories in Auberry, California. The site is in the mountains and has great seeing and is darker than 22 on the sky quality meter.
Messier 13
Messier 13 is one of the jewels of the northern sky. It’s a globular cluster in Hercules and if you are an amateur astronomer who has access to that part of the sky, it’s one of the first deep sky objects you saw through a telescope if that happened in the late spring through summer….
Messier 5
No, this isn’t a repeat of M92. We’ve shifted 87 down the Messier catalog to another globular, This time we’re in the constellation of Serpens, near the celestial equator so much farther south than M92. This cluster is about 24,500 light years away ind is about ⅔ the diameter of the full moon. It is…
Messier 99
Messier 99 is a grand design spiral galaxy in Coma Berenices. Unlike our Milky Way, it does not have a bar structure across the center. It is about 45 million light years away and is part of the large Virgo Cluster of galaxies Its apparent size is fairly small, only around 5 arc minutes in…
Antennae Galaxies
The Antennae Galaxies (NGC 4038 & 4039) are merging galaxies in Corvus. This is one of the places in the universe where you can see the steps in the gravitational dance all celestial bodies are performing. Granted we can only see this one step and it’s not likely we’ll see any visible change in our…
Messier 37
It’s hard to believe that this is the first image from the California telescope in four months. The weather there has been so bad that the team was beginning to wonder if we would ever get to image in 2023. However, we finally got a couple of good nights though they were, of course, near…
Linda's Astronomy Adventures 