Astronomy photos from the Dwarf 3 telescope

The skies stayed clear at 11 PM last night and I grabbed 300 thirty second images of the Monkey Head Nebula. The NGC 2174 nebula has a very particular shape and has been nicknamed "monkey head" precisely because it shows the vague appearance of a monkey's head seen in profile. In reality this celestial object, which is located about 6400 light years from us, is an area of star formation, a cloud of gas - mainly hydrogen - and dust within which there are some young, very bright stars. It is precisely their ultraviolet radiation that illuminates the nebula, ionizing the hydrogen of which it is composed and thus giving it that typical reddish color.

From my driveway, with every neighbor's exterior lighting on at 5 AM this morning. Not bad. I was concerned as to whether or not the comet was high enough but the Dwarf's Atlas said it was 35 degrees above the horizon, so all trees were easily cleared. Below Comet Lemmon and on the right side, is NGC 3180, The Small Pinwheel Galaxy.

NGC 7789 or Caroline's Rose is an open cluster in Cassiopeia that was discovered by Caroline Herschel in 1783. Her brother William Herschel included it in his catalog as H VI.30. This cluster is also known as the "White Rose" Cluster or "Caroline's Rose" Cluster because when seen visually, the loops of stars and dark lanes look like the swirling pattern of rose petals as seen from above.

Some sunspots visible today.

Pushing the edge of what I can do with this telescope. I don't know if the edge is determined by my post processing skills or the telescope itself. For the first time, I am including images from the Internet to show what I was trying to capture last night. These images are of Stephan's Quintet. Stephan's Quintet is a visual grouping of five galaxies of which four form the first compact galaxy group ever discovered. The group, visible in the constellation Pegasus, was discovered by Édouard Stephan in 1877 at the Marseille Observatory. There is, in addition, another galaxy visible above and slightly to the left of center. This galaxy is also part of a group of another galaxies called The Deer Lick Group. Stephans Quintet is directly in the center of the image and is so small as to demand enlargement. Four of the five galaxies in Stephan's Quintet form a physical association, a true galaxy group, Hickson Compact Group 92, and will likely merge with each other. Radio ob...

The Elephant's Trunk Nebula (IC 1396A) is a concentration of interstellar gas and dust within the much larger ionized gas region IC 1396 located in the constellation Cepheus about 2,400 light years away from Earth. The nebula is a dark, dense globule that gets its name from its appearance at visible light wavelengths, where there is a dark patch with a bright, sinuous rim. The bright rim is the surface of the dense cloud that is being illuminated and ionized by a very bright, massive multiple star (HD 206267) that is just to the east of the Elephant's Trunk Nebula . The entire IC 1396 region is ionized by the massive star, except for dense globules that can protect themselves from the star's harsh ultraviolet rays. (The Index Catalogue (IC) —also known as the Index Catalogue of Nebulae, the Index Catalogue of Nebulae and Clusters of Stars, is a catalogue of galaxies, nebulae and star clusters that serves as a supplement to the New General Catalogue. It was first published ...