AAPOD2 Image Archives

2020 Monthly Winners, 2020 Jason Matter 2020 Monthly Winners, 2020 Jason Matter

ISS over Santiago -Chile

Both images were captured after sunset from videos recorded, while manually guiding through the Telrad finder of my 11" f/5 dobsonian telescope. I reviewed the videos and extracted the useful frames with PIPP, then I stacked the 10 to 15 best frames in Autostakkert 3. Finally I used Registax 6 to sharpen a bit the stacked image.
For the second image I used a 2x barlow for a better image scale. The same processing procedure was applied to get the final image.

Copyright: Rodrigo Carvajal Aravena

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2020 Charles Lillo 2020 Charles Lillo

 Touch of Venus

 I share you a picture who represents for me the link between humans on the ground and stars in the sky. Indeed, I'm located at one of the best sky of the world to practice astronomy.
We can see my figure touching a star. Well, this is not a star but the planet Venus.

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2020 Charles Lillo 2020 Charles Lillo

The galaxy NGC 3621

NGC 3621 is a spiral galaxy located 22 Mly away in the constellation of Hydra. It is very bright and can be well seen in moderate-sized telescopes. The galaxy is around 93,000 ly across and is at an angle of 25° from being viewed edge on.

It shines with a luminosity equal to 13 billion times that of the our Sun. This galaxy has an active nucleus that matches a Seyfert 2 optical spectrum, suggesting that a low mass supermassive black hole is present at the core. Based upon the motion of stars in the nucleus, this object may have a mass of up to three million times the mass of the Sun.

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2020 Charles Lillo 2020 Charles Lillo

NGC 4725

NGC 4725 is a barred spiral, galaxy in Coma Berenices. It has also been classified as a Seyfert galaxy and a ringed galaxy. It is 41 million light years distant. NGC 4712 is the smaller spiral galaxy in the field.

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2020 Charles Lillo 2020 Charles Lillo

IO’s transit

Io (/ˈaɪ.oʊ/; Ancient Greek: Ἰώ [iːɔ̌ː]) was, in Greek mythology, one of the mortal lovers of Zeus. An Argive princess, she was an ancestor of many kings and heroes such as Perseus, Cadmus, Heracles, Minos, Lynceus, Cepheus, and Danaus. The astronomer Simon Marius named a moon of Jupiter after Io in 1614. Here we a short animation of the transit of IO and its shadow across the Jupiter.

A lost a few frames because of the clouds. 2020/04/29 - 2h25m (start 05h58m, end 08h23m UT) 124 frames, 13fps, AVI Format. Newton 275mm f/5,3 + ASI290MC + PMTV 5x.

Copyright: Jose Luis Pereira

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2020 Charles Lillo 2020 Charles Lillo

North American Nebula

The North American Nebula, aka NGC 7000, is a ionized-hydrogen region in the constellation Cygnus. The nebula is a cloud of interstellar gas ionized from within by young, hot stars. Interstellar dust particles in part of this cloud absorb the light emitted by recombining atoms. The shape of the nebula roughly resembles that of North America, with the dusty region being shaped like the Gulf of Mexico. The North American Nebula is approximately 520 parsecs from the Sun. It has a diameter of about 30 parsecs and a total mass equal to about 4,000 solar masses.

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2020 Charles Lillo 2020 Charles Lillo

NGC 4236 Barred Spiral Galaxy

NGC 4236 is a galaxy in a group of galaxies deep space objects not located in our Solar System. It can be located in the constellation of Draco. It is referred to as NGC 4236 in the New General Catalog. This is a list of deep space objects that was compiled by John Louis Emil Dreyer in 1888 in an update to John Herschel earlier catalog.

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2020 Charles Lillo 2020 Charles Lillo

Bubble Nebula - ngc7635 - Ha-rvb

A unique celestial object, a soap bubble-shaped nebula called ngc7635, discovered in 1787 by William Herschel, an English astronomer. The nebula is located in the constellation of Cassiopeia (between Cassiopeia and Cepheus in fact) and its diameter is about 10 light years. This bubble shape is designed thanks to the stellar wind created by the star SAO 20575, just next to it, a little off-centered, very dense and warm. This star is expected to explode as a supernovae in a few tens of millions of years.

This image results from the composition of photos taken with different color filters and in H-Alpha for fine details.

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2020 Charles Lillo 2020 Charles Lillo

 Flowers blooming in the summer

A solar eruptive prominence as captured on April 28, 2020 with Earth superimposed for a sense of scale.

A solar prominence (also known as a filament when viewed against the solar disk) is a large, bright feature extending outward from the Sun's surface.

Prominences are anchored to the Sun's surface in the photosphere, and extend outwards into the Sun's hot outer atmosphere, called the corona. A prominence forms over timescales of about a day, and stable prominences may persist in the corona for several months, looping hundreds of thousands of miles into space. Scientists are still researching how and why prominences are formed.

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2020 Charles Lillo 2020 Charles Lillo

NGC 2170

NGC 2170 is a dusty reflection nebula and stellar nursery that formed about 6 to 10 million years ago, located at the edge of the elliptically shaped, giant star-forming molecular cloud Monoceros, some 2,700 light-years away in the constellation of Monoceros.

NGC 2170 is specifically, the blue nebula in the bottom right quadrant of this image, this region ia approximately 15 light-years across and displays a mix of nebula types. The bluish section are reflection nebulae. The dust particle size in these areas reflects blue light. The reddish areas are emission nebulae, ultraviolet light from nearby stars lights the hydrogen and other gases in the nebula, which then emit light of their own in specific colors. Finally, what looks a bit like black ink spilled across the image are dark absorption nebulae, and are only seen because of the light that they block. In other words, the dark nebula is seen in silhouette.

Copyright: Albert Barr

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2020 Charles Lillo 2020 Charles Lillo

IC 5068

When Nature makes watercolor painting, IC 5068, an emission nebula in Cygnus.

A rare look at IC 5068 in the constellation Cygnus. This often over looked nebula’s closest neighbors are the North American and Pelican nebulae. With banded wisps of dark dust falling across this cloud of ionized hydrogen makes this a very interesting target to capture.

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2020 Charles Lillo 2020 Charles Lillo

Large Magellanic Cloud

The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. At a distance of 163,000 light-years, the LMC is the third-closest galaxy to the Milky Way, after the Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal and the putative Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy, lying close to the Galactic Center. The LMC has a diameter of about 14,000 light-years based on readily visible stars and a mass of approximately 10 billion solar masses, making it roughly 1/100 as massive as the Milky Way.

With a declination of about −70°, the LMC is visible as a faint "cloud" only in the Southern Celestial Hemisphere and from latitudes south of 20° N, straddling the border between the constellations of Dorado and Mensa, and appears longer than 20 times the Moon's diameter (about 10° across) from dark sites away from light pollution.

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2020 Charles Lillo 2020 Charles Lillo

IC 405, IC 410 & IC417 - Nebulas in Auriga

One of the most beautiful paintings that our sky allows us to admire in photography.
In this image we can see IC405, a nebula that can only be admired well in photos, placed at 1630 light years from us and illuminated by a variable star, AE Aurigae. This star ionizes the gases of the nebula giving it the red color.

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2020 Charles Lillo 2020 Charles Lillo

ISS transit over the Moon

(ISS) International Space Station transiting the Moon

Captured: April 3rd, 2020: 9.06 pm (GMT+2)

Tecnosky APO Triplet 80/480 FPL53

f/4.8

ZWO ASI294MC Pro @45fps

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2020 Charles Lillo 2020 Charles Lillo

 M63 The sunflower

The Sunflower galaxy was discovered in 1779 by the French astronomer Pierre Méchain and was the first of 24 objects that Méchain would contribute to Charles Messier’s catalog. The galaxy is located roughly 27 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Canes Venatici. It has an apparent magnitude of 9.3 and appears as a faint patch of light in small telescopes. The best time to observe M63 is during May. 

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2020 Charles Lillo 2020 Charles Lillo

M13 (Messier 13 )

Messier 13, a globular cluster of hundreds of thousands of stars, in the constellation Hercules. It is around 24,000 light years from earth, and approximately 145 light years in diameter.
Imaged during a full moon.
Astrodon Blue: 12x300"
Astrodon Green: 15x300"
Astrodon Red: 15x300"
Astrodon Luminance: 71x300"
Total Integration: 9.4 hours
Captured on my dual rig in Spain.
Scopes: APM TMB LZOS 152 (6" aperture 1200mm focal length)

Copyright: Peter Goodhew

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2020 Charles Lillo 2020 Charles Lillo

NGC 2419

NGC 2419 is a globular cluster located in the constellation Lynx, being about 300,000 light-years from the solar system, it is also called the intergalactic wanderer, because in the past it was not considered as an object in orbit around our galaxy. 

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2020 Charles Lillo 2020 Charles Lillo

Soul Nebula [IC 1848]

Located about 6,000 light-years from Earth, the Heart and Soul nebulae form a vast star-forming complex that makes up part of the Perseus spiral arm of our Milky Way galaxy. The Soul nebula is also known as the Embryo nebula, IC 1848 or W5.

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2020 Charles Lillo 2020 Charles Lillo

NGC 2024 [The Flame Nebula]

The Flame Nebula, designated as NGC 2024 and Sh2-277, is an emission nebula in the constellation Orion. It is about 900 to 1,500 light-years away.

Much of the glow results when the electrons and ionized hydrogen recombine. Additional dark gas and dust lies in front of the bright part of the nebula and this is what causes the dark network that appears in the center of the glowing gas.
Taken with the Astroqueyras RC500 and Apogee Alta U16000

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2020 Charles Lillo 2020 Charles Lillo

Moonset under the Milky Way

The Observatory of Saint-Veran (French: Observatoire de Saint-Véran) is a French astronomical observatory located on the Pic de Château Renard in the municipality of Saint-Véran in the department of Hautes-Alpes in the French Alpes. At 2,930 meter altitude, it is one of the highest observatories in Europe.

The Observatory is managed by the French amateur astronomy association and was built in 1974 as a branch of the Paris Observatory.

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