Supermoon Coming

One day to go for full moon and it will be a Supermoon. Full moon of february will have the closest distance Earth-Moon this year 2019, 356 761 km.

Moon Febrruay 17, UT20h

Jupiter Venus and Saturn in the morning sky

All three planets can be seen in the morning sky. Venus and Saturn are "close" above the eastern horizon, Jupiter almost loacted in the South.

Sun in H-Alpha

No sunspots today and only small prominences on the Sun. On the other hand one big filament on the disk. The picture was taken with Nikon D7500 on SolarMax 70/400  DS BS15 and editing using CS4. The get the picture sharpened, it is set as black/white.

Galaxy NGC 2903

Beautiful galaxy NGC 2903. Only 180s exposure and spiralarms are already seen.

NGC3115 Spindle Galaxy and Millenium Galaxy Catalogue MGC

When looking at my astropicture of NGC3115, the Spindle Galaxy, I saw a blur south of the galaxy. At first I was thinking of a camera fault but when uploading the picture in Astronometry it showed aswell a blur as a result. Interesting in fact, astronometry did not put any reference. So I started searching around and found the NGC3115 galaxy to be associated with two galaxies of which one is MGC-1-26-21, located exactly on the same spot as on my picture. 

What is MGC : this is the Millennium Galaxy Catalogue. 

Astropictures DeepSky Objects

The idea was to photograph comet C/2018 Y1 Iwamoto but I could trace the comet at all. Probably due to the Moon (81%) which was outshining the comet and the fact the comet is already very faint.
So I decided to talk some pictures of some Deep Sky object. They are not perfect due to the Moon. Pictures are taken with TAL200K f/8.5 and Nikon D7500. No darks were taken and pictures are stacked with DeepSkyStacker (format DNG). CS4 was used for final editing.

Observation list

- Messier M46 : Open Star Cluster with Planetary Nebula NGC 2438
- Messier M48 : Open Star Cluster
- Messier M81 : Galaxy
- Messier M65 and M66 : Galaxy
- Messier M67 : Open Star Cluster
- NGC 1545: Open Star Cluster
- Messier M42 :Orion Nebula
- NGC 2903 : Galaxy
- NGC 3115 : Galaxy, with a black hole of 2 billion Sunmasses!

Regulus

 Alpha Leonis or Regulus is a star located about 79 light years from our Sun. The picture was taken with a Bathinov Mask in prepartion of deep sky photography.