The Milky Way through the region of the tail of Scorpius and up into Sagittarius, photographed with it high in the sky from Australia. At bottom are the red nebulas of NGC 6334, the Cat’s Paw, and NGC 6357 (sometimes called the Lobster Nebula, for a “Paws and Claws” pairing). The clusters Messier 6 and Messier 7 are at left, below centre, with M7 lost in the star clouds of the Milky Way. The Galactic Centre lies at left centre. The Lagoon and Trifid Nebulas, M8 and M20, are at top left. Saturn is the bright star at top centre. The Dark Horse region of dark dust is at right, with the darkest part below being the Pipe Nebula, B78. This is a stack of 5 x 2-minute exposures at f/2.8 with the Rokinon 85mm lens, and filter-modified Canon 5D MkII at ISO 2500. Taken from Tibuc Gardens Cottage near Coonabarabran, Australia. The image could be turned 90° CCW to better resemble its orientation in the sky in which it was photographed in the southern hemisphere, This orientation matches the view in the northern hemisphere.
The long-period variable star, Mira, in Cetus, here at right about a month after maximum brightness, when it was about magnitude 3. The star spends most of its roughly 330-day period too faint to see with the unaided eye. Mira is also Omicron Ceti. It was named Mire, Latin for “wonderful” by Johannes Hevelius in his Historiola Mirae Stellae (1662). The blue star at left is Delta Ceti. I shot this Nov. 25, 2019, about a month after Mira’s predicted peak on Oct. 24, 2019. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mira for more information about Mira. This is a stack of 6 exposures, each 2 minutes with the Canon 200mm lens at f/2.8 and Canon 6D MkII at ISO 1600, tracked with the LighTrack II tracker. An additional exposure through the Kenko Softon A filter and layered in adds the star glows.
This is a portrait of the main glowing nebulas amid star clusters in central Auriga, the Charioteer. The main nebula at right is the Flaming Star Nebula, aka IC 405. But in this long exposure its mass blends into the central roundish nebula, IC 410. At top left is the pair of Sharpless nebulas, Sh 2-232 and the small Sh 2-235. The fingerlike nebula at top centre is Sh 2-230. The star cluster just to its left is Messier 38, with the small cluster NGC 1907 just below M38. The star cluster at left centre is Messier 36. At centre frame is the nebula IC 417 around the cluster Stock 8. The line of colourful stars at lower right between IC 405 and IC 410 is the Little FIsh or Flying Minnow asterism, aka Mel 11. This is a stack of 11 x 12-minute exposures at ISO 3200 through an Optolong L-Enhance dual-band nebula filter, blended with a stack of 12 x 8-minute exposures without a filter (for more natural star colors and the blue reflection nebula in IC 405) at ISO 800. All with the Canon EOS Ra camera through the f/5 51mm William Optics RedCat astrograph with a Starizona filter drawer. Autoguiding was with the Lacerta MGEN3 autoguider which applied a dithering shift between each frame to help cancel out thermal noise when stacking. No darks or LENR were used here on this mild winter night at -5° C or so. All stacking, alignment and blending was in Adobe Photoshop 2021. Luminosity masks (DM2, D and M) applied with Lumenzia helped bring out the faint nebulosity.
