The SEESTAR S50 has been a part of my telescope collection since July 2025. Compared to my 20-year-old Celestron C8 SCT, setting it up and starting to take pictures takes just a few minutes. The C8, of course, has the advantage of a larger aperture (20 cm vs. 5 cm), and the cooled sensor ensures less image noise.
The Fireworks Galaxy (NGC 6946; distance 25 million light-years) was seen last night. Its name comes from the fact that 10 supernova explosions have been observed here in the last hundred years. This puts the Fireworks Galaxy at the top of the list. The light from this galaxy must have penetrated a dense region of our Milky Way, filled with interstellar gas. Many of the Milky Way's stars can also be seen in the surrounding area. The exposure time was just under 3 hours. The still almost full moon slightly distorted the image.
On August 4, 1925, I imaged the Crescent Nebula NGC 6888. It is approximately 5,000 light-years away. WR 136 is a Wolf-Rayet star in the constellation Cygnus. It is located at the center of the Crescent Nebula. It is about 5 million years old. It is nearing the end of its life. Within a few hundred thousand years, it will explode as a supernova. The star is 600,000 times brighter than the Sun, 21 times more massive, and 5.1 times larger. Its spectrum shows that it has formed carbon and nitrogen. Its surface temperature is about 70,000 Kelvin. WR 136 shed a shell with a mass of about 5 solar masses when it became a red supergiant about 120,000–240,000 years ago. This shell is still expanding at 80 km/s. Currently, the fast stellar wind, ejected by the star at about 1,700 km/s, is catching up with the ejected material. Ultraviolet rays emanating from the hot surface of WR 136 cause the shell to glow as a crescent nebula.
The lower-left galaxy (NGC 7320) has a low redshift (790 km/s), while the other four have large redshifts (nearly 6,600 km/s). Because galactic redshift is proportional to distance, NGC 7320 is only a foreground projection and is approximately 39 million light-years from Earth. This makes it a possible member of the NGC 7331 group, compared to the 210–340 million light-years of the other four.
The Triangulum Galaxy (Messier 33 or M33) is the third largest galaxy in our Local Group, after the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) and the Milky Way. At just under 3 million light-years, it is only slightly farther away than Andromeda. The red spots in the spiral arms are regions of star formation. With a diameter of 60,000 light-years, M33 is only half the size of the Milky Way and M31. The mass of M33 is equivalent to 50 billion solar masses. Image taken September 28-29, 2025 - exposure time 3.5 hours.
Globular clusters are dense, spherical collections of hundreds of thousands to several million stars. They are strongly bound together by gravity and are among the oldest known objects in the universe. Of the 110 objects in the Messier catalog, 39 are globular clusters. I photographed these seven yesterday. They are between 14,000 and 56,000 light-years away.
The Veil Nebula, located approximately 2,500 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus, is the remnant of a supernova explosion that occurred about 8,000 years ago. The nebula is very extensive; we see only the western part here (NGC 6960). Oxygen gas glows blue-green, hydrogen red. Image taken September 18, 2025 – 30-minute exposure.
