Thread by @CosmicRami

Ok everyone, I'M REALLY SORRY but you're going to have to put up with a few tweets of my excitement right now ... as I have just come down from star-gazing and guess what ... I GOT MY SECOND GALAXY!

I've been after this one for about a year, so i've got tingly fingers et al.!

So let me first do the standard disclaimers ... still learning, still not processing images properly (i.e. not doing darks, flats etc.), still only taking a few shots (30 exposures X ~0.5 secs each) .... so they are not the best, and kinda grainy ... but I'm totally ok with that!

But here it is! The Centaurus A Galaxy! (NGC 5128).

This Galaxy was discovered in 1826 by James Dunlop in Parramatta, NSW.

It contains a supermassive black hole as massive as 55 million Suns!

And besides it’s visible structure, it has a HUGE radio signature!

Here's what the same galaxy looks like photographed from the Hubble Space Telescope.

Obvs a quadrillion times better ... but, i've been searching God damn high and low for that galaxy for a year now - and the fact I got it, rising over the Sydney CBD is givin me warm'n'fuzzies!

Though, that wasn’t my only target tonight - I actually got a big range of stars and objects.

Here’s the closest star forming nursery to Earth, the Orion Nebula.

Think im starting to get better at photographing this one.

Jumped over to the Carina Nebula, and caught this - though I think my image from a month ago showed some more nebulosity.

That bright star, Eta Carina, is one of the biggest we know about - it’s ~100 times the Sun’s mass.

I wish it would just explode (not facing us)

Now look at this beast. It’s the Tarantula Nebula. It doesn’t look as fancy as the Orion Nebula until you remember it’s all the way in another friggen Galaxy (LMC) and we can still see it!

This region of excited gas is literally glowing across intergalactic space!

Here’s another beast for you - the biggest one of these that circles our galaxy - the Omega Centauri globular cluster. It’s a city of about 10 million stars and is thought to be the remnant core of an ancient galaxy that our Milky Way gobbled up!

All those Suns ....

And lastly for tonight, an open star cluster (the Pearl Cluster I think) .... with a bunch of big, high temp, blue stars and a couple of distinct red giants.

Ok, that's the end of the photos - will process the stars and other clusters tomorrow night and share them then.

All pics taken tonight, on Celestron Nextstar Evo. 8" SCT and using ZWOAS1224 colour CCD. Stacked on AstroImageJ and processed in PS.

30 exposures x 0.5 secs each.

Thanks for putting up with my excited tweets - this geek needs to go have a Camomile Tea to calm oneself down ....

carry on ....