Astro Gallery

Harley is a student in Phys3006 Observatory 2. She worked with the images collected on September 24. This is her report:

The astronomical object Messier 31 is also known as the Andromeda Galaxy, which is the closest major galaxy to Earth at about 2.5 million light-years away. Thus, its appearance in these images is relatively detailed, as we can see the galaxy’s galactic core and dust lanes fairly clearly. I tried to accentuate the dust lanes specifically when color grading, which meant making sure that there was enough red being factored into the weighted image alignment process. The images of the galaxy that I found on the internet also depicted these dust lanes as a shade of deep red, so that felt essential to include, as they’re much more visible when the image is processed in color. This excited me a lot. I struggled a bit with highlighting the yellowness of the galactic core without over-exposing the image and drawing attention away from the dust lanes, so I ultimately decided that the dust lanes would take priority in my images until I can get better at finding the right balance between colors to highlight both key parts.

In my research, I also learned that the Andromeda Galaxy is much larger than the Milky Way, which also probably contributes to its level of visibility. I also learned that in the next 10 billion years, there’s a 50% chance that the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy will collide with each other and form a larger galaxy as a result. As someone who is not very familiar with astronomy, this was quite interesting to learn and also mildly terrifying to think about. Nonetheless, I think that researching M31 was quite helpful for color grading, as I originally had to guess which colors would make the image look best.

Oct 2025, HH

Harley Hannahs and Sylke Boyd, later joined by Caden Brown, collected stacked images of the Andromeda Galaxy. Both, Harley and Caden, are currently students in the Phys3006 Observatory 2 course in astrophotography. I am sharing the monochrome stack of 45 images, as well as a first rendering of a color image of the same region. 16-inch LX200. QHY268M with filterwheel. Bahtinov mask used to focus.

SB, 9-29-2025

16-inch LX200. QHY268M with filterwheel. Bahtinov mask used to focus.

On the night of February 27, Sb spent three hours in the observatory to photograph the Orion Nebula. This is a region about 1300-1500 light years away, filled with gas and dust. New stars are forming there, inducing light emission in the surrounding hydrogen gas. We see it as the middle part of Orion's sword , with bare eye. Visually, through the telescope, the Orion Nebula is spectacular. Our camera is a monochrome camera (QHY268M), spectral ranges are selected with filters. We use SharpCap as the control software, and have still a long learning curve ahead.

There are challenges in photographing the sun. Of course, the big solar filter is mounted on the front of the telescope to tune down intensity. This huge sunspot group was located at the eastern limb of the solar disk, just turning into view since two days earlier. The images are oriented with East upward.