Images from Monday Night

March 28, 2011

 Dick Steinberg

Monday night was one of the clearest and steadiest in quite a while. Here are three of the images obtained:

Cone and Foxfur Nebulae - increased total exposure to 165 minutes over 3 nights. Considerably more detail is visible than in the first 30-minute image.

3C273, the brightest (optical magnitude 12.9) and one of the nearest quasars. Located in Virgo near the exact center of this image, its redshift of  0.158 corresponds to a luminosity distance of 2.4 Gly. A cropped view  shows a linear feature extending for about 24 arc-sec to the SW from 3C273. This object is the quasar's 20th magnitude jet, a beam of relativistic particles escaping along the quasar's magnetic axis. The quasar's host galaxy (a tough object even for the HST)  is not visible. 140 minute exposure.

55-minute exposure of the Hercules Galaxy cluster, centered on NGC6047. One of the members of the cluster, IC1182, has a jet with visible bright knots extending to its east (left).

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Hyperion 317mm f/8 corrected Cassegrain - Paramount ME - Apogee U16M - 4096x4096 nine-micron pixels binned 2x2 - 0.73 arc-sec/unbinned pixel - uncropped field-of-view 50 arc-min square - image acquisition and processing with MaxIm DL 5.14 - calibration (sky-flat/dark/bias) - system automation: CCD Commander 1.6.33 - piggy-back guider Orion 80mm f/11.4 + SBIG ST8 camera - 5-minute subexposures -  Blue Mountain Vista Observatory.