Astrophotography by Philipp Salzgeber

 

 

Philipp
Salzgeber
Wolfurt / Austria

A heart in Andromeda
During an observing session at a club member's observatory, while the others were observing the Blue Snowball nebula with the 300mm Cassegrain and the 127mm refractor, I tried to observe the planetary nebula with my vintage 15x50 binoculars. While I was able to locate the planetary, 15x magnification is of course not enough to see structure in the nebula. Doing that, I came across a pattern of stars, that to me looked like an upside-down heart. Move the mouse pointer across the image below to see an annotated version of the image. What do you think?

A heart shaped asterism in Andromeda

The field of view of this image is: 3.28 x 2.20 degrees. The brighter stars were blurred, to approximate what the human eye perceives.

View this image in Microsoft Worldwide Telescope. Alternatively, you can download this XXL image to your computer and open it in WWT, it should be placed at the correct location on the sky.

Telescope:
 60mm f/6.9 achromatic refractor
Camera
 Nikon D200
Exposure:
 6x60s, ISO 800
Date:
 26th, November 2008
Processing:
 Preprocessing (Dark, Flat & Bias correction), Alignment & stacking in IRIS, histogram adjustment curves, color correction in Photoshop.

 

 


All images © Philipp Salzgeber

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.