Astronomy photos from the Dwarf 3 telescope

I returned to the Andromdea Galaxy last night, it is such a rewarding target due to its large size. No enlarging necessary as it fills the screen because of its closeness to our Milky Way Galaxy. This image was 200 60 second exposures stacked . Here is the same image with the stars removed.

This is an image of the Bubble Nebula (NGC 7635). The "bubble" is created by the stellar wind from a massive hot young central star. The nebula is near a giant molecular cloud which contains the expansion of the bubble nebula while itself being excited by the hot central star, causing it to glow. It was discovered in November 1787 by William Herschel. The nebula is visible as an extremely faint and large shell around the star. Post processing allowed me to just barely bring out the dim circular ring of the expanding shell. Here is the original image from the telescope that shows the ridiculous number of stars in the area of the Bubble Nebula. One of the post processing steps, removes the stars from the image. Just above the Bubble (dead center) and to the left is Messier 52 an open cluster of stars thought to be 7,000 light years away from us.

After repeated failures, I was able to capture a chunk of the Milky Way. A tree partially snuck into the photo, but it is the first bit of success I've had with our own galaxy.

NGC 7380 is a young open cluster of stars in the northern circumpolar constellation of Cepheus, discovered by Caroline Herschel in 1787. The surrounding emission nebulosity is known colloquially as the Wizard Nebula.

I returned to the Sombrero Galaxy to see if there had been any improvement of skills since it was last visited. this galaxy has a prominent dust lane in its outer disk, which from Earth is viewed almost edge-on. The dark dust lane and the bulge give it the appearance of a sombrero hat (thus the name). Here is the image from last night 4/25/25: Enlarged version:

This is a string of galaxies in the constellation Virgo. M84, M86, and M87 are the largest galaxies of the group, cataloged by Charles Messier. The galaxies may appear small, but each of them contains more than 400 billion stars or more. Messier was a comet hunter who lived in the 1700's. If you are the first to discover a new comet, you get to name it. Messier would name the latest comet after the King's newest girlfriend and would then in exchange recieve a nice gold token from the King. Today we look at those fuzzy objects that Messier discovered and realize that they are a mix of nebulae and galaxies that we can resolve with our more powerful modern telescopes.