Last night was an interesting one for astrophotography. According to the forecasts, we were to expect about 2 hours of clear skies, and right on schedule, a mass of cloud came in from the North-West. Unexpectedly, it then slid off to the South-West, and vanished. We then spent the rest night nervously picking new targets and waiting for the cloud to return. Which it did at about 4AM.
So this was one night where having the ability to schedule our shoots was utterly useless to us.
That said, we are in Bortle 2/3 skies here, and with a new moon we had a chance to go for some things that lose a lot of detail in the suburbs, even with a smart telescope.
One of those for me was the Tarantula Nebula, aka 30 Doradus in the Large Magellanic Cloud.
This is a truly massive star forming region - don't forget that the LMC is a companion galaxy to ours - so it is really far away compared to other similar objects we can discern. As it is, it is 2/3 degree by 1/2 degree in size for us, making it a massive 200-570 parsecs across at the estimated distance of 49 Kpc .
It is also insanely bright - if it was the same distance as the Orion Nebula, it would be as bright as a full moon!
Anyways, I got 83 minutes with the Ha/OIII filter on the Dwarf3, post processed in Stellar Studio and Snapseed.
#Astrophotography #Astronomy #Astrodon #LMC #TarantulaNebula #Dwarf3 #SmartTelescope #Snapseed #NGC2052
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Daniel Pomarède
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El Mundo
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