Glittering Lights

NGC 6520 & Barnard 86 Area

Did you ever have a day when it felt like a dark cloud was following you around? For the open cluster of stars NGC 6520, every day is like this. On the left of the above picture are many of NGC 6520's bright blue stars. They formed only millions of years ago - much more recently than our ancient Sun which formed billions of years ago. On the right is an absorption nebula, molecular cloud Barnard 86, from which the stars of NGC 6520 surely formed. This nebula contains much opaque dust that blocks light from the many stars that would have been visible in the background. Surrounding NGC 6520 is part of the tremendously dense starscape in the bulge of our Milky Way Galaxy, the extended halo of stars that surrounds the center of our Galaxy. NGC 6520 spans about 10 light years and lies about 5500 light years away toward the direction of Sagittarius. (Text adapted from APOD). Apo TEC140 (140/f7.2) - FLI Proline 16803 - L (240m) R (90m) G (90m) B (90m) - Warrumbungle Observatory, Coonabarabran, NSW, Australia

M41 (aka Little Beehive) in Canis Major

Messier 41 is an open cluster in the Canis Major constellation, first discovered by Giovanni Batista Hodierna in 1654 even if was perhaps known to Aristotle already in 320 BC. It lies about four degrees south of Sirius, covering an area around the size of the full Moon while its actual diameter is estimated to be between 25 and 26 light years. Easy spotted with naked eyes under rural skies, it is a beautiful object in binoculars, with about 25 bright stars and many fainter ones scattered in a field as large as the full Moon, including several red giants, the brightest having an apparent magnitude of 6.3 near the cluster's center. Much less known to most is that the milky way surrounding M41 is rich of faint HII emission that I was able to capture in the image above thanks to a quite long CCD integration through a Ha filter. Apo TEC140 (140/f7.2) - FLI Proline 16803 - Ha (360m) R (90m) G (80m) B (90m) - Warrumbungle Observatory, Coonabarabran, NSW, Australia

Cometary Globule CG1 & BE135 in Puppis

Apo TEC140 (140/f7.2) - FLI Proline 16803 - Ha (270m) L (300m) R (110m) G (120m) B (120m) - Warrumbungle Observatory, Coonabarabran, NSW, Australia