December: Test shots with new scopes/mounts
Dec 21: TMB 80/480 Arrives!
Dec 3: AP1200 Arrives!
Nov 30: TMB 152/1200 Arrives!
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This is NGC 6822, aka Barnard's Galaxy, an irregular (as opposed to spiral or elliptical) galaxy in the constellation of Sagittarius. NGC 6822, a member of the Local Group, is a relatively close neighbor of our own Milky Way galaxy, along with M31 (Andromeda) and others.
This image was collected over three nights: two very dewy nights worth of RGB exposures, and a third night of Hα exposures. The Hα exposures really helped to bring out the star-formation regions at the top (North) of NGC 6822. Yes, that's correct, those emission nebulae are in NGC 6822, not in our own Milky Way!
Mousing-over the image will show the Hubble designations of those regions, and will switch the displayed image to the processed Hα-only image, shown in grayscale (which, trust me, is easier on the eyes than a redscale image). One of these regions, IC 1308 (aka “[H25] X” or “Hubble X”), is rougly 11 times the size of M42 in our own Milky Way.
This image is a do-over of this this old version. (By the way, I have no idea why that old version came out so green—the color in the current version is likely to be far more accurate.) A higher-resolution image is also available. North is up.