FSQ106 First Light - The Jellyfish and some Clusters (Timothy Martin)

FSQ106 First Light - The Jellyfish and some Clusters

At long last, after more than a year of designing, procuring, and building out this telescope, I have an image to show for it. I took this at home in my Bortle 8 light-pollution zone eight miles away from the second-busiest airport in the world. Not exactly an astronomy-friendly environment. So the image leaves a lot to be desired. Still, I regard it as a very successful test of the rig and am ready to package it up to take it out to its permanent home on a remote mesa near Santa Fe.

The list of people I should thank for getting it this far is long, but none is more important than my long-suffering wife and best friend, Christi. She's put up with daily arrivals of packages, parts spread out all over the place, lugging heavy stuff everywhere, and countless hours of me sequestering myself at the computer.

So here's an image of IC 443, the Jellyfish nebula, and Sh2-249 in the lower-left quadrant of the frame. The Jellyfish is a supernova remnant--the remains of a star that blowed up real good some 8,000 years ago. It's about 5,000 light years away in Gemini. Sh2-249 is a nearby emission nebula about 200 light years more distant.

But wait, there's more. In the upper right, you can see Messier 35, a nearby open star cluster also called the Shoe-Buckle Cluster. Containing as many as 4,300 stars, M35 is roughly 3,000 light years away, also in Gemini, and is very young at 175 million years old. The orange blob next to it appears to be a distant globular cluster of gravitationally bound stars. But it's not. It's the much older open cluster NGC 2158, which is about 9,000 light years away and is around 2 billion years old. Part of its red-orange appearance can be attributed to the red hydrogen gas, some of which is visible in this image, between here and there.

Final
Original
B

B

Title: Ready for Deep Sky West

Description: The FSQ being field tested in my back yard.

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	9297611
PixInsight job	2X4GA7LCNOF5UJS511GNDBTFDFSKW0YP
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	06h15m10s.14
RA (top/left)	06h26m06s.65
RA (top/right)	06h02m56s.68
RA (bottom/right)	06h04m32s.47
RA (bottom/left)	06h27m08s.47

Dec (center)	+23°16′47″.3
Dec (top/left)	+25°13′43″.0
Dec (top/right)	+24°45′39″.0
Dec (bottom/right)	+21°17′13″.10
Dec (bottom/left)	+21°44′18″.6

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