The Moon, Jupiter and deep sky

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Moon and Jupiter with some of its moons: During the start of my imaging session I slewed the scope to the Moon and Jupiter for some brief views and focusing adjustments. The montage shows a single sub of 0.5s for the Moon and 0.05s for Jupiter

M95/M96/M105: I shot just under two hours of LRGB/Ha data of this appealing group of galaxies in Leo which are 33, 31 and 37 million light years distant respectively. I submitted the image through Astrometry.net to annotate the objects names.

M96: This was one of the objects I observed at Fairwood at the members viewing and imaging night when I looked at it through a fellow member's giant binoculars, so I thought I'd try combining a similar amount of data I took with previous data to see what I could resolve with a small refractor. For such a faint and distant galaxy, its small size required upscaling the galaxy x2 with Adobe Firefly to show the double barred spiral shape and some structure of the galaxy, but further data; ideally with a larger instrument will be needed to bring out more detail. 

M13: 1 hour and 40 minutes of LRGB/Ha, data was combined with a similar amount of data taken last year, giving a total of 3.25 hours integration. The peculiar dark "propeller" feature was able to be resolved centrally through careful processing.

IC4592: This reflection nebula in Scorpio is known as the "Blue Horsehead nebula" being reflected by the light of the star nu Scorpio named "Jabbah". The object is very low in our skies, so I only managed 1.5 hours of LRGB data which required extending the session into nautical twilight, unfortunately also capturing several satellite trails which are becoming more of problem now that over 10,000 Starlink satellites are now in Earth orbit. Much more data will be needed to further define this object.

Chris Bowden