#constellation delphinus

[doingitfortheexposure]

Photo by Xer S. Rowan, Creative Commons Attribution license

My first processed starfield! I'm usually awake for several hours in the middle of the night, but getting myself to go out of the house and use my brain during that time? But... I did it. I took some shots and made some mistakes to learn from and made this image out of one of the photos. It took a lot of processing.

Here's the original RAW file (or rather, the screenshot of how it appeared on my tablet—RAW files contain more data than can be shown), and the camera EXIF data. I'm very pleased at the end result, and it was quite interesting seeing the various levels of detail I could get out of the Milky Way (the magenta cloudlike background is a very small section of the MW, and it looked like a strange webbing before I got the sky to a blackish color).

I need to try with a wider angle lens, which will increase my exposure time without star trails. Also want to eventually use my star tracker for even longer exposures, but that might require a short drive to get away from the worst of the light pollution, so I can see Polaris and align the tracker axis to it.

[spaceplasma]

A Spectrum of Nova Delphini

When a new star appeared in the constellation Delphinus late last week, astronomers found its spectrum hinted at the apparition's true nature. Now known as Nova Delphini, its visible light spectrum near maximum brightness is centered in this image of the nearby star field captured with prism and telescope on the night of August 16/17 at the Sternwarte Bülach, Switzerland. Strong absorption lines due to hydrogen atoms are seen as the darkest bands in the nova's spectrum, but the strong absorption lines are bordered along their redward edge by bright bands of emission. That pattern is the spectral signature of material blasted from a catalysmic binary system known as a classical nova. Other stars in field are fainter, identified by their Hipparcus catalog numbers, brightness in magnitudes, and spectral types. By chance, the faint emission line from planetary nebula NGC 6905 was also included, indicated at the lower right.

Credit & Copyright: Jürg Alean