Posted on 08/16/2015 9:46:34 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Explanation: Have you ever seen the Andromeda galaxy? Although M31 appears as a faint and fuzzy blob to the unaided eye, the light you see will be over two million years old, making it likely the oldest light you ever will see directly. Now rising near a few hours after sunset from mid-latitude northern locations, Andromeda is rising earlier each night and will be visible to northerners all night long starting in September. The featured image captured Andromeda rising above the Italian Alps last month. As cool as it may be to see this neighboring galaxy to our Milky Way with your own eyes, long duration camera exposures can pick up many faint and breathtaking details. Recent data indicates that our Milky Way Galaxy will collide and coalesce with the slightly larger Andromeda galaxy in a few billion years.
(Excerpt) Read more at 129.164.179.22 ...
[Credit and Copyright: Matteo Dunchi]
>Recent data indicates that our Milky Way Galaxy will collide and coalesce with the slightly larger Andromeda galaxy in a few billion years.<
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Man the lifeboats — black lives matter.
After all the help I have gotten from FReepers, I still struggle to find this.
I have several apps on my iPhone that literally point at me what I want to see.
Apps are the only reason I keep that piece of crap.
:)
Beautiful image.
I have a wife that points at me and every thing else and I tell her to stop that, lot of good that does........
LOL
Sorry for the atrocious grammar up there.
Shoulda been “Points me at...etc”.
;D
I’d guess we’ll likely experience a substantial event from an asteroid or comet before that every happens. Possibly a species killer. And before all that happens, man will likely kill each other off.
It's really big in the sky, much larger than the moon from earth.
It's a very low light image and your not seeing all of it as our unaided human eye is not capable.
The picture above shows the crescent Moon in the sky, and superposed near it is the Andromeda galaxy, the nearest big spiral to our own Milky Way. This is approximately how big the Andromeda galaxy would actually look in our sky if it were brighter or our eyes were more sensitive to extreme low light.
From earth, we are only capable of seeing the bright central core of the galaxy.
Just...wow.
[Grin] Shouldn't it be "Black Matter lives?" You know, for the gravity of the situation!
Cool!
Look at that thing! It’s headed right at us!
BTTT
Tried the various programs and am still a joke at it. That and I have to wait for winter here to get clear skies.
By themselves smaller scopes are great from brighter objects like M42 Orion Nebula, lunar, globular star clusters and planetary objects etc.
Key to good images for low light stuff is to use a camera. It's sees far more than our eyes are capable of seeing. Not sure about your scope, but if you can adapt a digital camera to the scope, it opens up a whole new universe.
Another issue it seems you do not have an equatorial computerized mounted scope or go-to scope. They mount allows it to pinpoint, locate and track an the object across the sky as the earth moves under it using a key pad. They've come down in price considerably for the lower price scopes. I bought used stuff and designed my own mount using scrap from a salvage yard and built a small observatory around it.
Andromeda M31 is tough to image even with a higher end scopes. I have to take over 250+ separate images between 30 seconds and 2 minute exposures for low light objects. I then take the digital images into image processing programs and basically combine or stack all the images into one finished image. Hopefully it all comes together.☺
Also Andromeda is a wide field object, so I can use the camera with a 300mm lens and attached it to the top of the scope. Pigging backing while using the scopes tracking mount to find and track images by punching in coordinates/name of object on a keypad.
This brings out incredible details which would never been seen with our eyes though the eyepiece. In fact, anymore I very seldom ever look through an eyepiece and generally watch what the camera sees through the scope, on a computer monitor. My interest here are digital imaging.
Bottom line if your happy with brighter objects like I mentioned, stay with the smaller scope. Just do not expect to see M31 as it appears in #10, using the scope without a camera and proper mount.
My advise, unless you have a lot of interest in Astronomy/imaging, don't waste your money upgrading and just enjoy the night sky with your scope. Even a good pair of binoculars are fantastic in a dark sky venue, like the mountains, deserts or out in the country.
Btw, here's an image of my current scope, you can see the attached camera. All of which is sitting on it's junk yard custom mount and steel pier.☺ The pier goes down through the floor, and is sunk into about 1100 pounds of concrete for stability. Sorry about the long post..
I ebay’d the missing computer controller and some eyepieces for the Meade and the mount seems to work, but either I am screwing up the initialization or something else, but I have yet to have it “go to” anything accurately. At least hoping the drive will help keep it tracking once I get aimed at something.
My primary scope is old, and I’ve had to repair it multiple times, I smoked it once blowing capacitors in the keypad controller and control panel, which I replaced. The caps were underrated to begin with and was a known issue. Initial polar alignment is critical for precise go to function. Sometimes there are just simple issues in the alignment process which can cause issues. It can be frustrating.
Best of luck to you.
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