STARRY'S ASTRONOMY PICTURE OF THE DAY
The pictures posted are taken by myself from my Observatory in Coonabarabran using a digital SLR camera. I am happy to post astro pictures from others if they wish. Leave your email address in my guestbook.
This picture was taken on the weekend on a full moon night!
The telescope was converted to a F/6.3 instead of the usual F/10 using a focal reducer. This increases the field of view but you lose some resolution. It is like using a lower power telescope but collecting the same amount of light as the 14�� telescope normally does. Picture 2 shows it without the focal reducer, giving a smaller field of view. I�m not surey there is less blue colour in this one.
Eta carina nebula contains a 100 solar mass star (this is as big as you get and are rare). It is the size of our solar system! This was the 2nd brightest star in the sky in the 1800s. It is now dim as it is shrouded with dust that it expelled. It cannot be seen with the naked eye even though it is a 4 million times brighter than pour sun. This star is about to go supernova and will be seen easily during the daytime. Luckily it is 8000 light years away, so we will not get a lethal dose of radiation. Massive stars like this only live for a million years compared to our sun which has a life time of 10 billion years.