„Lift up your eyes to heaven and see. Who has created these things?
It is the One who brings out their army by number; He calls them all by name.
Because of his vast dynamic energy and his awe-inspiring power, Not one of them is missing (…)”

Middle Eastern poem about the stars, 8th century BCE

Our recent pictures

Sun

Sol

Some fun: from 13 measurments on the raw images we get 1244.23 pixels as the Sun’s diamater. The pixel size is 4.06μm in this sensor so the size of the Sun’s image on the sensor is 5051.57μm (5.052mm). The focal length of telescope is 550mm. The Sun was 151,801,908km away when this image was taken. To get the diamater of the Sun: 5.052mm x 151,801,908km / 550mm = 1,394,369km (which is only 1% off of the best available measurements).

Vesta

(4) Vesta

Vesta is one of the largest asteroids in our solar system; about 9% of the total mass of the asteroid belt is concentrated in this object. Its diamater is around 525 km.

Orion Nebula

M42, M43 and The Running Man Nebula

A spiral galaxy like our Milky Way contains a diffuse interstellar medium of gas, dust, and trace amounts of heavier elements produced by old, dying stars. Sometimes these clouds collapse under their own weight, triggering star formation. In Orion there are about 700 stars in different stages of formation.

Beehive Cluster

M44 / NGC 2632 / Cr 189

The Beehive Cluster is one of nearest open star clusters to Earth. Along with many main sequence stars it contains red giants and white dwarfs (which are much older stars). They are about 560 light-years away from Earth and on avarage 600 million years old.

C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE)

Comet C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE)

In this no-so-great-picture the comet is about 104 million km away, speeding at 54.000 km/h. The core is about 5 km in diamater, the tail is over 87.000 km long.

Star trails

Around the Polaris region

66 minutes of the Earth rotating around its axis.

Articles

Etcetera

Assorted throwaway pancakes

More often than not astrophotos don’t come out the way you planned them to. There are about 200 steps involved in taking a picture, and they all have to be right. Also, often we need to experiment, finetune equipment or the sky is not good enough for long enough to finish a project. These are some examples of failures and experiments.