Finale Got Around To Processing The Photos Of M33 I Had Taken At The End Of August. M33 Is A Spiral Galaxy

A quick and (very) dirty mosaic of the H alpha photos I had already taken for the three major components of the Cygnus loop.

I wanted to have an idea of what a future mosaic of this target could look like (probably won't be able to do better than that before the end of the year or next summer unfortunately)

Thought I could post it here while I finish processing newer photos.

Photo of NGC 7000 / the North American nebula (southern part), the bright star on the top left corner is ξ Cygni. Might rework it later since this one still has a bit too much gradient/haze due to the full moon when I took the photos. In most cases, emission nebula are the result of gas clouds being ionised by the high energy UV radiation coming from very Hot (and often massive) stars/star cluster. In the case of NGC 7000 the star(s) responsible for most of the ionisation was an unknown for quite a long time, it is only in 2004 that the star responsible for the ionisation was located. This star (actually a binary system according to later publication) known as J205551.3+435225 is located behind the dark region of the nebula (bottom right corner of the photo) which explains why it was only recently identified.

(My best guess of the position of J205551.3+435225 in my picture according to what I can find in the original publication and in the SIMBAD database)

One last thing, that star was later nicknamed Bajamar Star, which comes from the original Spanish name for the Bahamas island.

oh yeah speaking of grass.

i can't think of any epiphytic grasses and I can't understand why they wouldn't exist. it seems like the perfect niche for a grass.

Skip Google for Research

As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse.  It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms 

As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable.  As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.

Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.

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Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free

Here's another black and white picture taken in H-alpha, this time of the Pacman nebula (NGC 281). I don't have a lot to say about this one, it's a hydrogen gas cloud similar to the gas cloud around Sadr that I previously photographed. An interesting thing about it thought, is its position, it's about 6 500 light years from us and about 1000 light years above the galactic plane, making it a prominent target to study star formation. The cluster of stars at the center of the nebulas is a good example of those newly borne stars as it is only about 3.5 million years old.

sometimes astronomy camera companies will post about their horrible attempts to fix hardware problems with software. normally these are unremarkable.

and then sometimes they contain a beautiful single sentence that will live in your brain forever

II took another photo of M51 / the whirlpool galaxy, same camera and same processing of the data, but I used a different (bigger) telescope. Here, using a bigger telescope has two major effects, firstly the image is more ''zoomed in'' since the focal length is longer. Secondly, since the diameter is bigger the maximal (angular) resolution of the image can be increased. This increase in resolution is due to the way the waves of light are diffracted by the aperture of the optical instrument (in short bigger aperture = better resolution). This increase in resolution is one of the reasons professional telescopes have gigantic mirrors and/or use telescope arrays combined with interferometry to increase their maximal angular resolution.

Those do not look like much, but they are, to the best of my knowledge, Herbig-Haro object (to left: HH 94, top right: HH 249 and bottom: HH 95) Herbig-Haro object are ionised gas clouds formed when the jet of hot plasma ejected at the poles of newly born stars interacts with Interstellar gas, they are thus more common in star forming regions. I first noticed one of them (HH 94) after I shared the image with a friend. The What's in my image PixInsight scrip from SetiAstro was very useful in finding out what that was. I couldn't find a lot of information on those objects specifically (and very few pictures), but a few publications did have images to compare with (orientation differs):

(original publication ref for HH 94 & HH 95; additional publication ref for HH294 aka NGC 2023 HH 3) (better images of other Herbig-Haro object taken by Hubble : 1, 2 & 3) Position of the three objects in the original image (another might be present but I wasn't confident they were visible):

Photo of the NGC 2237, the Rosette nebula and the star cluster inside it, NGC 2244.

The star cluster, which is estimated to be about 5 million years old, is responsible for the ionisation of the surrounding gas. The mass of the nebula is estimated to be about 10 000 times the mass of our sun, which is relatively massive for a diffuse nebula.

This image uses a SHO palette, I quite like the colours I manage to get, both as the normal and starless images.

I also tried using the Foraxx palette, I think it's a bit less interesting visually, but the dark dust structures seam a bit more visible.

(Image taken using a CarbonStar 150/600 newtonian telescope with a 0.95 coma corrector, ZWO ASI294 monochrome camera ZWO LRGB filters and Baader 6.5nm SHO filter. 5x120s image for each colour filter (RGB), 15x300s for the Ha filter 20x300s for the SII filter and 18x300s for the OIII filter, total imaging time 4h 25min, stacking and processing done in PixInsight.)

So I just saw a post by a random personal blog that said “don’t follow me if we never even had a conversation before” and?????? Not to be rude but literally what the fuck??????????

I’ve had people (non-pornbots) try to strike conversation out of nowhere in my DMs recently, and now I’m wondering if they were doing that because they wanted to follow me and thought they needed to interact first. I feel compelled to say, just in case, that it’s totally okay to follow this blog (or my side blog, for that matter) even if we’ve never talked before.

Also, I’m legit confused. Is this how follow culture works right now? It was worded like it’s common sense but is that really a thing?