Night Thirty - The Small Sagittarius Star Cloud M24

-
This is not an actual object, but instead a highly concentrated area of stars. The Sagittarius Star Cloud can be seen at any time that the Milky Way itself is visible. In good conditions, the star cloud’s size and brightness make it easy to find without binoculars. M24 is unique among Messier objects, which are mostly single, well-defined deep sky objects – star clusters, nebulae and galaxies – while the star cloud is not really a deep sky object but a collection of millions of stars found along the plane of the Milky Way and seen through a gap in the galaxy’s dust lanes. Without the obscuring dust and gas, the entire Milky Way would appear as bright as M24.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The new Dwarf 3 telescope has arrived

-
Image
 After a 6 month wait the new "smart telescope" has arrived.  There is no eyepiece to view the celestial objects. Instead, the telescope is linked to your phone or tablet for viewing and images are downloaded when you connect the scope to your desktop. Dwarf 3 telescope First night's images: The Andromeda Galaxy This galaxy is approximately 2.5 million light years from Earth.  Thought to be about the same size as the Milky Way Galaxy and it's headed our way. Should arrive in 4 to 5 billion years. Few actual collisions are expected as the stars are so widely distributed with the final result being one much larger galaxy. This is the only object visible to our naked eye that lies outside of the Milky Way. Everything else we see at night, lies within our own galaxy.  Here is the same image as it comes off the telscope with zero processing.  Here is one more image with the number of background stars reduced through processing. 
Read more