Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Taurus (Tau)  ·  Contains:  52 Tau)  ·  52 phi Tau  ·  59 Tau)  ·  59 chi Tau  ·  B10  ·  B211  ·  B213  ·  B214  ·  B216  ·  B7  ·  LBN 782  ·  LBN 785  ·  LDN 1495  ·  LDN 1497  ·  NGC 1539  ·  PGC 14853  ·  PGC 14986  ·  PGC 165392  ·  PGC 165395  ·  PGC 1788883  ·  PGC 1795973  ·  PGC 1796474  ·  PGC 1796800  ·  PGC 1803566  ·  PGC 1836911  ·  PGC 1842496  ·  PGC 1849767  ·  PGC 1849884  ·  PGC 1851106  ·  PGC 1851769  ·  And 12 more.
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Dark Nebula Surprise, James R Potts
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Dark Nebula Surprise

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
Dark Nebula Surprise, James R Potts
Powered byPixInsight

Dark Nebula Surprise

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Description

The other night I was waiting for the Horse Nebula to rise up so I used the ASIAir Sky Atlas to find a random area of Dark Nebula in the constellation of Taurus and this is what  I captured.  I was pleasantly surprised to get a fairly attractive image with lots of various objects.

In the center of this image is Phi Tauri, a 4th magnitude double star about 321 light years away.  It is an orange giant spectral type K1III with a surface temperature around 4,525 Kelvins, which is 22% cooler than our sun but 18.9 times its diameter.

There is a variety of other objects that I tried to research, but could not find much other than from @Gary Imm 's Deep Sky Comendiium and of course he has already imaged most of these and had some good descriptions.  The most noticeable parts of the image are the various dark nebula (Barnard Objects 7, 10, 211, 213, 214, 216).

The bluish nebula is Cederblad 30 a reflection nebula and VdB27 lower to the left is another Reflection Nebula.  

The are several PGC galaxies, but you can actually see some detail two side on galaxies ( to the far right PGC 14853 which is 139 million LY aways & top center PGC 89977 252 million LY away).  Two other noticeable galaxies:  PGC 1796474 (right of B10) is 763 million LY away and below Phi Tauri is PGC 14986 which is 248 million LY away.  

Gary could and probably has added a lot more detail about many of these objects.

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