40D - DSO's

[RB (Andrew)]

Originally Posted by ballaratdragons

Do you remember how far from Andromeda you were looking?

About 2.5 million light-years Ken !

[Dennis]

Originally Posted by ballaratdragons

Ingo,
I did some investigation and have discovered that your image cannot be Frosty Leo Planetary Nebula.

At 9pm (2100hrs) from Albany, New York on 29th Jan 08, the whole constellation of Leo was way below the horizon.

The Andromeda Galaxy was at Zenith at that time on that date. Do you remember how far from Andromeda you were looking?

Ken

You are a cosmic detective!

Cheers

Dennis

[ballaratdragons (Ken)]

Originally Posted by Dennis

Ken

You are a cosmic detective!

Cheers

Dennis

I simply put the location, time and date into one of my Star chart programs.

Even so, there's a lot of objects around near Zenith at that time of night. Gonna be hard to determine what the 2 objects are until we know exactly where near Zenith Ingo was looking

[bojan]

Ok...
being from Northern Hemisphere I was somewhat intrigued by your post...
My guess was that you did dot use tracking, and that you stacked a number of shots (the resulting smear of picture edges from this is quite visible on the left side of it), which helped me to deduce the orientation of your picture...

Here it goes:

On your photo, the bright object in the lower right is Mars.
A bit above and to the right of Mars you will find beta Tauri. Your camera was aimed at constellation Auriga (which was in the zenith at the time of your shot)
The objects you indicated on a small picture are: upper one is M36, the lower one is M37.

I apologise for not reacting quicker, I just have not seen your post earlier....
I attached the CdC screen shot, it is roughly orientated (its aim is somewhat to the right and lower, compared to your photo) but the scale and orientation is close (your photo shows more on the upper side) ... I hope it will help you to identify even more stuff on your photo, which by the way, is very good, considering the equipment you have used :-)
Bojan

[bojan]

This CdC screen shot is more to scale and direction than the previous one....

[Ingo]

Originally Posted by bojan

This CdC screen shot is more to scale and direction than the previous one....

Thank you for your help! Only the top one looks like M36 though. Bottom doesn't look like either.

[bojan]

Originally Posted by Ingo

Thank you for your help! Only the top one looks like M36 though. Bottom doesn't look like either.

Yes, the labels on the screen are somewhat clogged... You have to trust me on that, though

[bojan]

BTW, CdC is free, and very easy to use....
you can find it here: http://www.stargazing.net/astropc/
The package contains a number of catalogues and data bases, and it is easily configurable to show more or less stars and other objects.
I am (as many others do) using it all the time for identification like this one.
I even have the masks (eyepiece) for all my lenses and their fields of view to help me in that...

[glenc (Glen)]

It is much easier to identify once you know the time and direction.
M36 (top) and M37 is correct.