Large Magellanic Cloud, NGC 20870 Tarantula Nebula area (east end of LMC). Taken March 19, 2007 from Coonabarabran, NSW, Australia. Taken with Canon 20Da and Astro-Physics 106mm apo refractor with telecompressor at f/4.5 and ISO 400 for stack of 1x 12 + 4 x 10 minute exposures under warm conditions.
A 4-panel mosaic of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way and visible only from the southern hemisphere. The field takes in most of the LMC and its numerous nebulas and clusters. Notable is the Tarantula Nebula, NGC 2070, the cyan-tinted nebula at far left, surrounded by many other NGC nebulas and clusters. At right is the second largest and brightest nebula complex in the LMC, NGC 1763, dubbed the LMC Lagoon. This is a 4-panel mosaic taken March 31, 2016 from the Tibuc Cottage, Coonabarabran, NSW, Australia. Each panel is a stack of 4 x 3 minute exposures with the Borg 77mm f/4 astrographic refractor and filter-modified Canon 5D MkII at ISO 1600. Stitched in Photoshop.
The rather obscure emission nebula catalogued as Sharpless 2-261, at top, but commonly known as Lower’s Nebula after the father and son team of amateur astronomers, Harold and Charles Lower, who in 1939 built an 8-inch Schmidt camera astrograph, one of the first, and used red sensitive plates and red filters to record these kinds of red nebulas. They noted this object on their plates, in northern Orion. They were certainly pioneers of this type of filtered astrophotography. At bottom is the small star cluster NGC 2169, also known as the X-Y Cluster or Number 37 Cluster as its two clumps of stars, just resolved here, resemble those letters or numbers with a little imagination at the eyepiece. At bottom left is the small emission nebula Sh2-269. The larger fainter patch above it is Sh2-267. The small nebula at the left edge might be Sh2-266 but charts are unclear and contradictory. This is a stack of 5 x 8-minute exposures unfiltered at ISO 800 with a stack of 6 x 10-minute exposures at ISO 1600 shot through an Optolong L-Enhance filter to bring out the nebulas, all with the old Hutech filter-modified Canon 5D MkII DSLR and the SharpStar HNT150 Hyperbolic Newtonian astrograph at f/2.8. What the Lowers would have given to have such technology in their day! Taken with some haze in the sky toward the end of the shoot for the unfiltered shots, adding the star glows. Taken from home February 22, 2020.
