M33 revisited

About one year ago we discovered that our 0.5m Cassegrain rooftop telescope can be used in prime focus mode, but until now I had little time to revisit a wonderful galaxy, M33. 

   There are many star forming regions visible in the Hydrogen alpha image (red in the image below), king of all being NGC 604, a nebula far larger than our familiar Orion Nebula. 

Prime focus, 4 nights of imaging, RVBHa, about 2.5h per filter.

And the old, Cassegrain focus version, about 12h of exposure time in total, LRVBHa:

Comet ISON (IV)

Comet ISON (C/2012 S1) is back, but not with a bang. It looks like the comet could not keep up the brightening rate and now the predictions for the maximum luminosity have dropped quite a lot (check out Seiichi Yoshida's awesome graphs and information about comet ISON). It can still surprise us, especially as it will pass so close to the Sun, but for the moment the hopes are not that high any more. 

The comet was still in twilight when I photographed it for the first time after passing through the conjunction with the Sun. Images taken on the 3rd and 5th of September. 

Image taken with the 50 cm telescope on top of the Argelander Institute for Astronomy. 

SN 2013EV

A very faint supernova in a galaxy that we've all seen so many times: IC 1296. Not a very impressive galaxy, but got it's fame for being very close (4 arcminutes) to a night sky celebrity: M 57, the Ring Nebula. While IC 1296 lies at a distance of about 221 million light years, the nearby Ring is only 2300 light years away.

   An image I took about a week ago:

Larger versions on Flickr.