Month: April 2017

M63 Sunflower Galaxy

Another captured galaxy this spring. Sunflower Galaxy located in constellation Canes Venatici (hunting dogs) just like M106 or M51 galaxies. M63 has nicely visible spiral arms, it’s 27 million light-years far from us and it’s so called active galaxy, which means that the center of the galaxy is significantly brighter due to presence of supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy.

For this picture I used new astro-camera ZWO 1600 MC, which is one-shot color camera. This means no filter wheel is needed and camera is much lighter than my old Moravian Instruments G2 8300M. The disadvantage of this camera is that it’s not possible to use narrow band filters. However, for RGB the performance is quite comparable.


NGC4565 Needle Galaxy

Needle Galaxy is located constellation Coma Berenices The light from there traveled 40 million years, because the galaxy is approximately 40 million light years from Earth. Actually, what we are looking at is 40 million years old picture. The needle shape is caused by its orientation towards our Milky Way Galaxy (the plane of the galactic disk is perpendicular in our view).


Worldwide coma correction exercise

Introduction

What is coma and why needs to be corrected. Coma is a special type of an optical aberration. It’s mainly visible in the astrophotography – the stars are deformed into comet-like shapes:

Fast Newtonian telescopes suffer from comatic aberration, mainly in the corners of the photos. These telescopes are nowadays very popular between amateur astrophotographers just like me, because they offer the best price/aperture ratio. There is easy way how to suppress the comatic aberration – coma correctors. There are many coma correctors on the market, but there are just a few published reviews or comparisons between them. Therefore I decided to perform the comparison myself. Quite big collection of coma correctors has assembled in my drawer ready to be tested: