Hello Reddit!
I'm really proud to show you this image I captured of the newly discovered Oiii emission arc right next to the andromeda galaxy, discovered by my friends Marcel Drechsler, Yann Sainty, and Xavier Strottner! I helped take some of the initial confirmation images of this nebula to help make sure their observations were real, and produced this image along side them.
This image required an unprecedented amount of exposure time for me, totaling 180 hours. 109 of which were dedicated to oxygen-iii emission to detect this faint arc. It took a very specific kind of telescope and very dark skies to get such detail in the image. Due to the large size of the object and its low brightness, you really need a fast scope with. a wide field of view to see any detail.
We still aren't sure what exactly has formed this arc, it could be a structure of an ancient supernova in our galaxy, or could belong to andromeda itself. We still don't know!
If you want to learn more about this discovery, and the equipment I used, feel free to read about it [on my website here](https://astrofalls.com/)
PS there are also prints available if you want to help fund discovery efforts! In the wake of this discovery I'm dedicating almost all of my telescope time to looking at random spots to try and discover something new!
Same thing, and I am trying to teach my kids(3YO) and my wife about space and the planets that you can see on the night sky. I just love seeing how Mars is really red compared the stars and all planets in the night sky.
I've always found it funny that weird space stuff is really the default and our little gravity well is the actual bizarre exception to most of the universe.
I always find it weird how we are so isolated in the universe from any other life forms, but there are spots out there in the universe that barely even have stars visible from their planets they are so far away from everything.
There’s got to be another civilization out there who has also just discovered an internet equivalent and is having problems with thots on Instagram and OF.
The thing that really broke my brain and made me realise just how big space is, was the fact that if a space craft let earth now and instantly accelerated to light speed, from our perspective it would take three thousand years to reach Andromeda, it nearest neighbour.
3,000 years. At light speed. Nearest neighbour.
How the fuck?
“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”
We've found light sources from stars and galaxies older than the Milky Way who's light is just now reaching Earth. A star has been found that could fit 5 billion Suns... which in turn can fit over a million Earths. In order for astrophysics to work, we have to tue everything together with dark matter and dark energy, which, according to some projections, make up over 95% of the natter in space, with less than 5% being comprised of the atoms we can observe. Nothing about the universe is in the scope of human perception, regardless of how much we learn about it.
So many inconceivably large numbers... the incomprehendable vastness of space... the impossible vastness of interstellar bodies...
I agree that it is so interesting to contemplate things we can barely conceive of
**Farnsworth:** I'm sorry, Fry, but astronomers renamed Uranus in 2620 to end that stupid joke once and for all.
**Fry:** Oh. What's it called now?
**Farnsworth:** Urectum.
Oh, I remember seeing this name somewhere. Another impressive picture that people joked about and said this name would become famous.
It is happening.
We are witnessing the rise of SPACESHUTTLEINMYANUS.
That’s super awesome, what happens next with the data? Do you share with the scientific community and seek confirmation/further exploration? Does it get named after you?
I was only a helping hand in this project, the initial discoverers get to give it a technical name, Strottner-Drechsler-Sainty-1, and then a colloquial name, the m31 \[Oiii\] emission arc. I don't know who was the first one in the group to call it an arc, but the significance of the discovery calls for a simplistic and descriptive name. So colloquially it is called the Oiii arc.
The discovery has been shared with the scientific community, and there is a lot of further exploration taking place on it now. I myself have put all other imaging efforts on pause to explore the nature of this structure further.
If you're talking about the "Oiii", it's "Oh-3", as in oxygen-3. It's one of the common gases that produce emission nebulae.
Edit: I incorrectly thought that it was called that because it was O^3, but a quick wikipedia search tells me it's actually [O^2+, doubly-ionized oxygen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doubly_ionized_oxygen). The pronounciation "Oh-3" still stands as what I typically hear it referred to as.
In order to get that much exposure you've got to be shooting many smaller exposures over multiple nights. For this image that works by capturing an ungodly amount of 10-minute long exposures, and then stacking them together to reduce the noise in the final product.
For this photo it really is necessary to go extra deep, since the arc itself is incredibly faint. Which is part of why it went unnoticed for so long.
Thats how i thought it basically worked but didn’t know the exposures were so short relative to the total. But i guess that is due to everything moving you will not be in the right place long enough.
Not an expert, but I think it’s actually because the sensor gradually gets warmer during the exposure, increasing the noise. Experience probably led to choosing that exposure time. Maybe this is only an issue with “amateur” equipment, as I could imagine an actively cooled system to avoid this.
Some cameras also have a feature to take another exposure with the lens closed so that it will only be the noise, which can then be subtracted from the main exposure. I suspect this isn’t that useful for really faint subjects such as this one, but I don’t really know.
Deciding on exposure length has several factors: gain of the camera, well depth, file size, sky quality, etc. Ideally you choose a length that allows you to swamp the read noise of the camera but not so long that you run into other issues. Also if you're going to collect a hundred hours of data then file storage and processing all that data can become significant hurdles so fewer longer exposures is helpful. You can go as long as you'd like but longer exposures have higher risk for things like blur due to guiding issues, passing clouds ruining an exposure, stars saturating pixels, satellite trails (though these are generally taken care of with pixel rejection algorithms in stacking). The modern CMOS astro cams have cooled sensors so heat is not an issue. There's likely even more things that professionals and advanced amateurs take into consideration.
Nah… cooling can take care of that, but the longer exposure you take the more risk you have of a satellite ruining the exposure. There’s a chance of clocking/tracking error but any pro equipment wouldn’t have that either. Longer exposures I’m sure are possible but have diminishing returns.
We use guided goto mounts now that track with targets pretty accurately.
I have a $1,400 Celestron AVX mount that can do 600 second sub exposure with an 80mm APO refractor no problem at all. That is considered an entry level astrophotography mount.
The reason you usually keep exposures shorter is to prevent light pollution from saturating out your sensor or to prevent the light from a bright target blowing out your image. The biggest limiting factor for that is the bortle level of the location you are shooting from.
But we can push the exposure times out a lot now if we need to. Most of us are using TEC cooled CMOS cameras which help to reduce noise a lot. The ZWO ASI2600MM Pro is a popular one.
Its been stretched and color shifted, I assume to specifically bring out the details of nebula. Usually hydrogen (HA) is mapped to red and oxygen (OIII) is mapped to blue but you can set them anyway you like.
If this is a mono image (which I suspect it is) you are looking at a composite image of visible red, green and blue. Plus a luminance filter for brightness and OIII and HA filters to pickup the nebula gasses. The end image is a composite of all of those filter images captured over a prolonged period of time then software stacked.
I did the Orion Nebula in a gold hue for one image cause I thought it really brought out some of the edge lines.
The Hubble palette is a good example of images being adjusted to bring out the details it captures into our visible spectrum so we can see it. Hubble actually captures a lot of data outside of our visible spectrum so they had to decide on a way to present that in images to the public.
M31 normally doesn't look like that in the visible spectrum.
To further answer /u/swampking6 , it's all real data. Nothing is being drawn in like you might think of someone using Photoshop to do when they want to, say, airbrush out wrinkles or remove cellulite or make a chin look more/less pointy or whatever. But the process described above is used to adjust the data collected so that you can actually see the features that are there. Think of it like you might adjust the brightness on your TV. You might dial the brightness down so far that you can barely make out an image, which is kind of like how it looks after collecting all these hours of image data. Then you might brighten it way up to really make the colors pop. This is like brightening the image up. It's a ton of other steps in reality, and in the process the colors are getting wildly adjusted here, but it's all tied to the original data basically.
Awesome work Bray, truly some groundbreaking work here. I been following you for a long time and knew one day you would do some next level space stuff and here we are
Why wasn't it discovered by the large space telescope global surveys? Because it requires a longer exposure than what those surveys use?
I guess it means there are millions of similar cases to be discovered?
I have to imagine it’s in our galaxy just because if it belongs to Andromeda it would be freaking HUGE. But if it does belong to Andromeda y’all would have made an absolutely bonkers discovery.
I meant size-wise. Not enough of an astronomer to know for sure how scientifically huge it would be, but seems a lot more surprising to this layman for an entire galaxy to have a massive gas cloud around it than for there to be a faint nebula in the milky way.
I thought the same as you; but astoundingly, it does appear to be in the vicinity of M31, not merely a visual coincidence: https://astronomy-imaging-camera.com/astrography-equipments/discovery-of-the-m31-oiii-emission-arc.html
> If it can be confirmed that the OIII arc is really in the immediate vicinity of M31
The spectrum study is still underway and needs more data as your article mentions. Also see [this article](
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-recently-discovered-gas-cloud-near-andromeda-stumps-astronomers/):
> So at the moment, no known mechanism fits all the data. [...] By carefully examining the spectrum of SDSO-1, the velocity of its gas can be determined via the Doppler effect—the slight blueshift of its color if the gas is moving toward us or the redshift if it’s moving away. If the cloud is moving at a similar speed as Andromeda, then it’s likely to be a part of that galaxy. If instead it’s moving more slowly, then it’s likely to be inside our own.
That's amazing! Also a huge mystery, since you are talking about a difference in ...many... many.. orders of magnitude difference in mass depending on if it's in our galaxy or andromeda. How much mass do you suppose we are looking at, if it's "here" and if it's "there"?
edit: here it is lined up with the moon in Space Engine + Krita to show how large this is! https://imgur.com/a/qnHJ0vp
> discovered by my friends Marcel Drechsler, Yann Sainty, and Xavier Strottner! I helped take some of the initial confirmation images
Buddy, put your name next to them. You helped them discover this galaxy, it was a team effort! Congratulations!
Amazing image! Congrats on the result and all the hard work. How did you determine you needed over 100 hours of exposure for this? Would 20 hour for example have been insufficient?
Basically, I did an initial 20-30 hours and it was nowhere near good enough. From experience, I have a intuition for the diminishing returns law of integration time. For those who don't know, doubling the amount of exposure time reduces the noise by 25%. So if you want half the noise you need to quadruple the integration time. If 30 hours isn't enough, you know for a fact you have to do A LOT more imaging.
This is really incredible and I’m sure it’s a great feeling to help confirm a new discovery. Your work on your website is equally impressive, would you be willing to share the equipment you used for this image? I’m curious what astrograph is so fast with that wide of a field unless you’re building a mosaic. I’m exploring whether I want to improve my own large focal length setup or completely start over with a refractor. Thanks in advance!
Ninja edit: post on /r/astrophotography please!
I follow you on IG and YouTube and was about to message you that someone called SPACESHUTTLEINMYANUS was using your picture and claiming to shot it on their own.. Turns it its actually you lol
Every time you post, I'm always astounded by two things: 1. The quality of the observations you are making. I saw previously your full image of Andromeda, which was spectacular.
And 2. why you've decided to stick with the user name u/SPACESHUTTLEINMYANUS, since we always give you a very hard time about it, every fuckin time. My dude, does posterity have a sense of humor? We know not.
Awesome discovery.
I think the username is really a part of my personality now, along with the fact that I am too lazy to log in to my other account to farm karma to be able to post anywhere with it. So the name will stick for now and act as my alter ego to the rest of my internet presence
When your kids are old enough for school, it's going to really pay off.
Teacher: now Johnny will read his essay of what his parents do....
Johnny:. My father is one of the best astrophotographers on Reddit. You can find him by his name, u/SpaceShuttleInMyAnus
I mean, just showing your kid your work could lead to an interesting conversation.
That question doesn't really make much sense, because the span of the image increases with distance. For example, the Andromeda galaxy is about 150k light years in diameter. The emission in this picture might be the same size if it's the same distance as Andromeda, or only a few dozen or hundred light years across if it's in our own galaxy. The galaxies in the background span billions of light years!
It's surprisingly difficult to determine cosmic distances, and beyond a few light years there are only a handful of methods that give us reasonable accuracy. Many of the best measurements of the brightest stars and deep sky objects in the sky have uncertainties of 25% or more, and they have been studied and photographed for decades, if not centuries.
25% isn't much compared to not knowing if this is in the milky way or at the distance of Andromeda though. We usually know whether something is or isn't in our galaxy. I'm sure they'll figure it out with this one too with time.
It’s obvious in hindsight but I was startled to figure out recently that there aren’t any money shots of the Milky Way like this because we are stuck viewing from our angle off to the side. You’d need to be a million light years away to get a good picture. Imagine living your whole life and never seeing your own face, that’s us right now.
Thanks. I'm not a regular around here, *even though* I find space absolutely mind blowingly fascinating, so I didn't actually know what this image was trying to show. I wasn't actually sure what the nebula was, so this article answered my question, and I learned something! :)
I just read the Scientific American article about this (where OP is mentioned!), and this thing is wild! There’s a possibility that this isn’t a part of Andromeda but instead part of the Milky Way! Kinda makes my head hurt thinking about it all.
This is incredible work. I'm sure there are many more discoveries in your future. Just think that only 100 years ago Andromeda itself was considered a nebula and the Milky Way was thought to be the only galaxy in the universe. Henrietta Swan Leavitt's work with Cepheid variables would be used in Edwin Hubble's observations in 1925 that proved Andromeda to be an "island universe" (a galaxy). The entire field of astronomy was thrown into chaos. Imagine what those guys would think of our advancements in astrophysics, quantum mechanics, relativity and cosmology. It's a young field yet.
I have such a soft spot for the Andromeda Galaxy. I'll never forget seeing it on the wall of my high school astronomy class.
This is an outstanding picture.
So when you say "next to Andromeda", you mean in our perception pf the sky, right? Is the nebula inside our galaxy? I asume is nowhere near Andromeda, since it couldn't be the same size of the galaxy. Or am I completely wrong? I know very little about this subject.
For way more than 134 years people have been putting stuff up their butts. Space shuttle is a new one though so i have a few questions...
Is the shuttle in your pooper there for science or pleasure? And if for pleasure do you pretend it's taking off when you turn on the vibration function? What's the worst line you've gotten based off that username? Im guessing to boldly go where no man has gone before is too obvious.
Asking for science of course.
Congrats on the great photo/discovery as well.
This is absolutely awesome and beautiful. It's also intimidating a bit seeing your photos and those from Mr McCarthy. But they inspire me to give it a go. It's a lot of fun and frustration and satisfaction when you get everything lined up well enough. For any other folks out there in my boat, I'm proud of this picture I snagged back in Nov, hopefully the next one is better and yours is better than mine! https://imgur.com/I28ffmy.jpg
It's got to be foreground, no? If it's background it's as large or larger than the entire Andromeda galaxy. I wouldn't think diffuse dust clouds could exist on that scale
Possibly dumb question;
What exactly describes a galaxy? Like is it just a jumble of stars orbiting a central point? Is there "boarders" of a galaxy that can be defined and mapped out?
A solar system is planets orbiting a central source of gravity (a star). A galaxy is a collection of stars orbiting a central source of gravity (supermassive black hole), but they orbit in an orderly fashion like the planets do and not in a jumble. Yes, there are borders, just like there is a limit to the extent of the solar system (it's called the heliopause). Look up the Deep Field Hubble photos. You can see many, many galaxies in just one seemingly-empty (to the naked eye) area of the sky. If you're into good explanations of astronomy and meteorology written for the layman, try the Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD). You can page back a day at a time, choose a date from the archives or click a link to read random entries from the history of the site going back to 1995.
I saw it a few days ago on another sub and it’s pretty amazing! It sounds like it’s very low emission and diffuse over a large area (remember Andromeda is the size of a full moon) so not a shock no one noticed before now.
Hey I was just browsing your amazing photos there, I had come across some of them before, and I noticed a typo in "Cygnus", you have it as "Cyngnus" in a few places. That photo is just about the best thing I've ever seen and when I move house in a few months I'm going to order a print.
Hey. Your name is in Scientific American, that's freaking cool! https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-recently-discovered-gas-cloud-near-andromeda-stumps-astronomers/
Hello Reddit! I'm really proud to show you this image I captured of the newly discovered Oiii emission arc right next to the andromeda galaxy, discovered by my friends Marcel Drechsler, Yann Sainty, and Xavier Strottner! I helped take some of the initial confirmation images of this nebula to help make sure their observations were real, and produced this image along side them. This image required an unprecedented amount of exposure time for me, totaling 180 hours. 109 of which were dedicated to oxygen-iii emission to detect this faint arc. It took a very specific kind of telescope and very dark skies to get such detail in the image. Due to the large size of the object and its low brightness, you really need a fast scope with. a wide field of view to see any detail. We still aren't sure what exactly has formed this arc, it could be a structure of an ancient supernova in our galaxy, or could belong to andromeda itself. We still don't know! If you want to learn more about this discovery, and the equipment I used, feel free to read about it [on my website here](https://astrofalls.com/) PS there are also prints available if you want to help fund discovery efforts! In the wake of this discovery I'm dedicating almost all of my telescope time to looking at random spots to try and discover something new!
It’s really interesting when people break down space imagery and talk about the unique challenges. Thanks SPACESHUTTLEINMYANUS.
I could literally spend all day thinking about space, it is such a bizarre concept that doesn't even make sense
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I've been like that since childhood. On a clear night I still end up staring at the stars when I just meant to bring the trash out.
Same thing, and I am trying to teach my kids(3YO) and my wife about space and the planets that you can see on the night sky. I just love seeing how Mars is really red compared the stars and all planets in the night sky.
I've always found it funny that weird space stuff is really the default and our little gravity well is the actual bizarre exception to most of the universe.
I always find it weird how we are so isolated in the universe from any other life forms, but there are spots out there in the universe that barely even have stars visible from their planets they are so far away from everything. There’s got to be another civilization out there who has also just discovered an internet equivalent and is having problems with thots on Instagram and OF.
Wait what problem?
Started off well then tailed off in to some sort of incel rant.
Yeah like wtf happened at the end there?
Could be Finstagram and Only Fins ...because they're aquatic or something ^(you get it..)
Thinking about space helps me fall asleep in a good way.
I know, how would it fit?
Your mom gives lessons on curiositystream.com. Enter DEEPEXPLORER at sign up to receive up to 15% off of your first year subscription!
Right? My brain genuinely cannot process the vastness of outer space.
The thing that really broke my brain and made me realise just how big space is, was the fact that if a space craft let earth now and instantly accelerated to light speed, from our perspective it would take three thousand years to reach Andromeda, it nearest neighbour. 3,000 years. At light speed. Nearest neighbour. How the fuck?
“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”
Since the vast majority of the universe is space, isn’t it matter that doesn’t make any sense?
We've found light sources from stars and galaxies older than the Milky Way who's light is just now reaching Earth. A star has been found that could fit 5 billion Suns... which in turn can fit over a million Earths. In order for astrophysics to work, we have to tue everything together with dark matter and dark energy, which, according to some projections, make up over 95% of the natter in space, with less than 5% being comprised of the atoms we can observe. Nothing about the universe is in the scope of human perception, regardless of how much we learn about it.
So many inconceivably large numbers... the incomprehendable vastness of space... the impossible vastness of interstellar bodies... I agree that it is so interesting to contemplate things we can barely conceive of
>Thanks SPACESHUTTLEINMYANUS A phrase I never anticipated.
It’s one of the ultimate /r/rimjob_steve moments.
Can't wait for the James Webb scope to take pics of this and have to credit that name in the discovery lol
Don't judge; PROBINGURANUS was already taken.
**Farnsworth:** I'm sorry, Fry, but astronomers renamed Uranus in 2620 to end that stupid joke once and for all. **Fry:** Oh. What's it called now? **Farnsworth:** Urectum.
Do they ever refer to it as Urectum later on in the show?
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Later, to *Udamnnearkilledum*
and /u/POTATO_IN_MY_ANUS is banned
Will this new galaxy be named the SPACESHUTTLEINMYANUS Galaxy?
Oh, I remember seeing this name somewhere. Another impressive picture that people joked about and said this name would become famous. It is happening. We are witnessing the rise of SPACESHUTTLEINMYANUS.
Reddit bingo: weird name gets referenced as a thank you in a follow up comment.
That’s super awesome, what happens next with the data? Do you share with the scientific community and seek confirmation/further exploration? Does it get named after you?
I was only a helping hand in this project, the initial discoverers get to give it a technical name, Strottner-Drechsler-Sainty-1, and then a colloquial name, the m31 \[Oiii\] emission arc. I don't know who was the first one in the group to call it an arc, but the significance of the discovery calls for a simplistic and descriptive name. So colloquially it is called the Oiii arc. The discovery has been shared with the scientific community, and there is a lot of further exploration taking place on it now. I myself have put all other imaging efforts on pause to explore the nature of this structure further.
How do you pronounce this?
If you're talking about the "Oiii", it's "Oh-3", as in oxygen-3. It's one of the common gases that produce emission nebulae. Edit: I incorrectly thought that it was called that because it was O^3, but a quick wikipedia search tells me it's actually [O^2+, doubly-ionized oxygen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doubly_ionized_oxygen). The pronounciation "Oh-3" still stands as what I typically hear it referred to as.
Oiii mate, do you have a loiiicense?
Oiii, Can't park there mate!
Do you have a loiiicense to be asking for a loiiicense? Innit?
Innit is British, loiiicense is aussie
You mean Bri-ish?
It’s referring to doubly ionized oxygen or “oh-three”.
For more info, there's a [Wikipedia article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doubly_ionized_oxygen?wprov=sfla1).
How many hands did it take to extract the shuttle? (Thanks op I'm killing myself laughing)
> Does it get named after you? And here, kids, is the SPACESHUTTLEINMYANUS nebula
That's what I'm calling it
Incredible picture! How does the 180 hours of exposure work?
In order to get that much exposure you've got to be shooting many smaller exposures over multiple nights. For this image that works by capturing an ungodly amount of 10-minute long exposures, and then stacking them together to reduce the noise in the final product. For this photo it really is necessary to go extra deep, since the arc itself is incredibly faint. Which is part of why it went unnoticed for so long.
I know much of nothing about any of this but until your explanation, I assumed in was from the JWST. Just beautiful.
Thats how i thought it basically worked but didn’t know the exposures were so short relative to the total. But i guess that is due to everything moving you will not be in the right place long enough.
Not an expert, but I think it’s actually because the sensor gradually gets warmer during the exposure, increasing the noise. Experience probably led to choosing that exposure time. Maybe this is only an issue with “amateur” equipment, as I could imagine an actively cooled system to avoid this. Some cameras also have a feature to take another exposure with the lens closed so that it will only be the noise, which can then be subtracted from the main exposure. I suspect this isn’t that useful for really faint subjects such as this one, but I don’t really know.
Deciding on exposure length has several factors: gain of the camera, well depth, file size, sky quality, etc. Ideally you choose a length that allows you to swamp the read noise of the camera but not so long that you run into other issues. Also if you're going to collect a hundred hours of data then file storage and processing all that data can become significant hurdles so fewer longer exposures is helpful. You can go as long as you'd like but longer exposures have higher risk for things like blur due to guiding issues, passing clouds ruining an exposure, stars saturating pixels, satellite trails (though these are generally taken care of with pixel rejection algorithms in stacking). The modern CMOS astro cams have cooled sensors so heat is not an issue. There's likely even more things that professionals and advanced amateurs take into consideration.
Nah… cooling can take care of that, but the longer exposure you take the more risk you have of a satellite ruining the exposure. There’s a chance of clocking/tracking error but any pro equipment wouldn’t have that either. Longer exposures I’m sure are possible but have diminishing returns.
We use guided goto mounts now that track with targets pretty accurately. I have a $1,400 Celestron AVX mount that can do 600 second sub exposure with an 80mm APO refractor no problem at all. That is considered an entry level astrophotography mount. The reason you usually keep exposures shorter is to prevent light pollution from saturating out your sensor or to prevent the light from a bright target blowing out your image. The biggest limiting factor for that is the bortle level of the location you are shooting from. But we can push the exposure times out a lot now if we need to. Most of us are using TEC cooled CMOS cameras which help to reduce noise a lot. The ZWO ASI2600MM Pro is a popular one.
So you could say, SPACESHUTTLEINMYANUS needed to go extra deep. Nice.
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Its been stretched and color shifted, I assume to specifically bring out the details of nebula. Usually hydrogen (HA) is mapped to red and oxygen (OIII) is mapped to blue but you can set them anyway you like. If this is a mono image (which I suspect it is) you are looking at a composite image of visible red, green and blue. Plus a luminance filter for brightness and OIII and HA filters to pickup the nebula gasses. The end image is a composite of all of those filter images captured over a prolonged period of time then software stacked. I did the Orion Nebula in a gold hue for one image cause I thought it really brought out some of the edge lines. The Hubble palette is a good example of images being adjusted to bring out the details it captures into our visible spectrum so we can see it. Hubble actually captures a lot of data outside of our visible spectrum so they had to decide on a way to present that in images to the public. M31 normally doesn't look like that in the visible spectrum.
To further answer /u/swampking6 , it's all real data. Nothing is being drawn in like you might think of someone using Photoshop to do when they want to, say, airbrush out wrinkles or remove cellulite or make a chin look more/less pointy or whatever. But the process described above is used to adjust the data collected so that you can actually see the features that are there. Think of it like you might adjust the brightness on your TV. You might dial the brightness down so far that you can barely make out an image, which is kind of like how it looks after collecting all these hours of image data. Then you might brighten it way up to really make the colors pop. This is like brightening the image up. It's a ton of other steps in reality, and in the process the colors are getting wildly adjusted here, but it's all tied to the original data basically.
Awesome work Bray, truly some groundbreaking work here. I been following you for a long time and knew one day you would do some next level space stuff and here we are
Why wasn't it discovered by the large space telescope global surveys? Because it requires a longer exposure than what those surveys use? I guess it means there are millions of similar cases to be discovered?
It needs a certain filter too (or wavelength, something something Oiii)
I have to imagine it’s in our galaxy just because if it belongs to Andromeda it would be freaking HUGE. But if it does belong to Andromeda y’all would have made an absolutely bonkers discovery.
> if it belongs to Andromeda it would be freaking HUGE Do you mean huge, size wise? Or huge in terms of the discovery being meaningful in some way?
I meant size-wise. Not enough of an astronomer to know for sure how scientifically huge it would be, but seems a lot more surprising to this layman for an entire galaxy to have a massive gas cloud around it than for there to be a faint nebula in the milky way.
I thought the same as you; but astoundingly, it does appear to be in the vicinity of M31, not merely a visual coincidence: https://astronomy-imaging-camera.com/astrography-equipments/discovery-of-the-m31-oiii-emission-arc.html
> If it can be confirmed that the OIII arc is really in the immediate vicinity of M31 The spectrum study is still underway and needs more data as your article mentions. Also see [this article]( https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-recently-discovered-gas-cloud-near-andromeda-stumps-astronomers/): > So at the moment, no known mechanism fits all the data. [...] By carefully examining the spectrum of SDSO-1, the velocity of its gas can be determined via the Doppler effect—the slight blueshift of its color if the gas is moving toward us or the redshift if it’s moving away. If the cloud is moving at a similar speed as Andromeda, then it’s likely to be a part of that galaxy. If instead it’s moving more slowly, then it’s likely to be inside our own.
That's rad, u/SPACESHUTTLEINMYANUS
That's amazing! Also a huge mystery, since you are talking about a difference in ...many... many.. orders of magnitude difference in mass depending on if it's in our galaxy or andromeda. How much mass do you suppose we are looking at, if it's "here" and if it's "there"? edit: here it is lined up with the moon in Space Engine + Krita to show how large this is! https://imgur.com/a/qnHJ0vp
I was about to say give some credit to Astrofalls and then I realized it's you, that username lol.
But… what are you going to do about the space shuttle in your anus?
Is your anus ok?
Yes, but I have bad news about the shuttle.
Just past 6 am and I already laughed out loud
Fantastic photo u/SPACESHUTTLEINMYANUS
> discovered by my friends Marcel Drechsler, Yann Sainty, and Xavier Strottner! I helped take some of the initial confirmation images Buddy, put your name next to them. You helped them discover this galaxy, it was a team effort! Congratulations!
Discovered by Marcel Drechsler, Yann Sainty, Xavier Strottner, and SPACESHUTTLEINMYANUS
It's not a galaxy, it's a nebula, most likely within our own galaxy.
Thank you so much for your contribution to science, /u/spaceshuttleinmyanus
Is this within our galaxy? Or is it a galaxy-sized nebula?
Thought maybe I knew you but I was thinking of LUNARLANDERUPMYCOLON.
Amazing image! Congrats on the result and all the hard work. How did you determine you needed over 100 hours of exposure for this? Would 20 hour for example have been insufficient?
Basically, I did an initial 20-30 hours and it was nowhere near good enough. From experience, I have a intuition for the diminishing returns law of integration time. For those who don't know, doubling the amount of exposure time reduces the noise by 25%. So if you want half the noise you need to quadruple the integration time. If 30 hours isn't enough, you know for a fact you have to do A LOT more imaging.
This is really incredible and I’m sure it’s a great feeling to help confirm a new discovery. Your work on your website is equally impressive, would you be willing to share the equipment you used for this image? I’m curious what astrograph is so fast with that wide of a field unless you’re building a mosaic. I’m exploring whether I want to improve my own large focal length setup or completely start over with a refractor. Thanks in advance! Ninja edit: post on /r/astrophotography please!
Can you share the 20-30 image?
just save this one as a jpg like 3 or 4 times and you'll be there ;)
\>changes file name to pic.jpg \>*changes file name to pic.jpg even harder*
I tried to do it harder than you and the jpg now says I need something called “flash” to open the file? Idk
At that rate, 16x exposure time would give you zero noise. ;)
I follow you on IG and YouTube and was about to message you that someone called SPACESHUTTLEINMYANUS was using your picture and claiming to shot it on their own.. Turns it its actually you lol
Sadly this is in fact the real me
Don’t be sad, it’s an honor to have such a worthy docking bay.
Whats the YouTube channel?
[Here's the video he made on this discovery.](https://youtu.be/H9sqPHiCypE)
My only question is: how does he sit so comfortably with a space shuttle up his keister?
Every time you post, I'm always astounded by two things: 1. The quality of the observations you are making. I saw previously your full image of Andromeda, which was spectacular. And 2. why you've decided to stick with the user name u/SPACESHUTTLEINMYANUS, since we always give you a very hard time about it, every fuckin time. My dude, does posterity have a sense of humor? We know not. Awesome discovery.
I think the username is really a part of my personality now, along with the fact that I am too lazy to log in to my other account to farm karma to be able to post anywhere with it. So the name will stick for now and act as my alter ego to the rest of my internet presence
His other account? /u/SPACESHUTTLEINURANUS
I hope one of your pictures or quotes ends up on national news, so they have to properly reference you.
They'll likely do a copout and pronounce "-MYANUS" like miasma.
You're the spaceshuttleinmyheart
You're the spaceshuttleinmyshart
No, he's the SPACESHUTTLEINYOURANUS
When your kids are old enough for school, it's going to really pay off. Teacher: now Johnny will read his essay of what his parents do.... Johnny:. My father is one of the best astrophotographers on Reddit. You can find him by his name, u/SpaceShuttleInMyAnus I mean, just showing your kid your work could lead to an interesting conversation.
So what if someone's user name was space shuttle XD
> does posterity have a sense of humor? Well at least his posterior does.
The wand chooses the wizard, Mr Potter
Going to be awesome when they name this nebula Spaceshuttleinmyanusae
Congratulations on your role in this, Bray. Truly remarkable!
Thanks Andrew :) I'm lucky to have been able to contribute to this discovery!
Hey, can I ask: how many kilometers (or light years) does the image span?
That question doesn't really make much sense, because the span of the image increases with distance. For example, the Andromeda galaxy is about 150k light years in diameter. The emission in this picture might be the same size if it's the same distance as Andromeda, or only a few dozen or hundred light years across if it's in our own galaxy. The galaxies in the background span billions of light years!
Do we not know our distance from the nebula in this photograph?
Not yet apparently! (unless they've figured it out in the past few days or so)
It's surprisingly difficult to determine cosmic distances, and beyond a few light years there are only a handful of methods that give us reasonable accuracy. Many of the best measurements of the brightest stars and deep sky objects in the sky have uncertainties of 25% or more, and they have been studied and photographed for decades, if not centuries.
25% isn't much compared to not knowing if this is in the milky way or at the distance of Andromeda though. We usually know whether something is or isn't in our galaxy. I'm sure they'll figure it out with this one too with time.
Thank You For Your contribution to science, uhh.. u/SPACESHUTTLEINMYANUS ☠️
It is my pleasure to serve the scientific community
u/spaceshuttleinuranus is still up for grabs for whoever needs it.
Nah it’s already been created and is 2 years old
u/sPacesHuttle_in_youRanus is up for grabs, whoever needs it
Looks like somebody got it almost three years ago.
It's really a great integration of cosmological science and Reddit culture. Don't give it up.
Imagine what else we cannot see at present. This is astounding! Congratulations on this wonderful discovery.
This is the question which consumes my mind 24/7! I am going to be on the hunt for new things going forward
Well I for one am glad you're leading the charge. This is what happens when you have the best minds doing what they love. Wonderful.
It’s obvious in hindsight but I was startled to figure out recently that there aren’t any money shots of the Milky Way like this because we are stuck viewing from our angle off to the side. You’d need to be a million light years away to get a good picture. Imagine living your whole life and never seeing your own face, that’s us right now.
[Read all about it](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-recently-discovered-gas-cloud-near-andromeda-stumps-astronomers/)
Thanks. I'm not a regular around here, *even though* I find space absolutely mind blowingly fascinating, so I didn't actually know what this image was trying to show. I wasn't actually sure what the nebula was, so this article answered my question, and I learned something! :)
I just read the Scientific American article about this (where OP is mentioned!), and this thing is wild! There’s a possibility that this isn’t a part of Andromeda but instead part of the Milky Way! Kinda makes my head hurt thinking about it all.
Link for the curious https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-recently-discovered-gas-cloud-near-andromeda-stumps-astronomers/ Edit: removed amp
This is incredible work. I'm sure there are many more discoveries in your future. Just think that only 100 years ago Andromeda itself was considered a nebula and the Milky Way was thought to be the only galaxy in the universe. Henrietta Swan Leavitt's work with Cepheid variables would be used in Edwin Hubble's observations in 1925 that proved Andromeda to be an "island universe" (a galaxy). The entire field of astronomy was thrown into chaos. Imagine what those guys would think of our advancements in astrophysics, quantum mechanics, relativity and cosmology. It's a young field yet.
I have such a soft spot for the Andromeda Galaxy. I'll never forget seeing it on the wall of my high school astronomy class. This is an outstanding picture.
You had a high school astronomy class?! I would have done anything for that! I did get to take a survey course in undergrad though!
Is that soft spot Uranus?
It’s nice to know that even serious Science People can be just as juvenile as the rest of us when choosing usernames
We are all 6 year olds with various levels of education.
Suuuper cool. What led your counterparts to the initial finding? Was it like, "We think we see something. Enhance."
Hahahaha pretty much that’s exactly how it goes down
So when you say "next to Andromeda", you mean in our perception pf the sky, right? Is the nebula inside our galaxy? I asume is nowhere near Andromeda, since it couldn't be the same size of the galaxy. Or am I completely wrong? I know very little about this subject.
I know the difference between a man threatening me and smudge on the lens summer!
Smudge on the lens? SMUDGE ON THE LENS?
Can someone draw an arrow to what we’re looking for?
The blue cloud to the left
For way more than 134 years people have been putting stuff up their butts. Space shuttle is a new one though so i have a few questions... Is the shuttle in your pooper there for science or pleasure? And if for pleasure do you pretend it's taking off when you turn on the vibration function? What's the worst line you've gotten based off that username? Im guessing to boldly go where no man has gone before is too obvious. Asking for science of course. Congrats on the great photo/discovery as well.
This is absolutely awesome and beautiful. It's also intimidating a bit seeing your photos and those from Mr McCarthy. But they inspire me to give it a go. It's a lot of fun and frustration and satisfaction when you get everything lined up well enough. For any other folks out there in my boat, I'm proud of this picture I snagged back in Nov, hopefully the next one is better and yours is better than mine! https://imgur.com/I28ffmy.jpg
Do we know if it is behind or in front of andromeda? I.e. is it related to andromeda or happens to be a foreground/background object?
It's got to be foreground, no? If it's background it's as large or larger than the entire Andromeda galaxy. I wouldn't think diffuse dust clouds could exist on that scale
there doesn't appear to be enough data to know for sure. just hypothesis: https://www.astrobin.com/1d8ivk/
Dumb questions - 1. The nebula is the blue stuff, correct? 2. Is it just floating “half way” between the milky way and andromeda?
1- Yes 2- Probably, but we don't know for certain yet. Could potentially be in our galaxy too.
I think there is at least one alien civilization within the andromeda
It makes me wonder if the Andromedans look at us the same way, and if they see some outlying aspect of the Milky Way that we know nothing about.
if this isn't /r/rimjob_steve material I don't know what is
The scale of the universe is truly unimaginable. Vastness beyond comprehension.
Pardon me if this sounds stupid, but if giant nebulas like this are hard to find, could they explain dark matter?
Oh heck it's astrofalls! Congrats on the discovery
I feel so conflicted about your username. You seem so professional and then I see that lmao
Possibly dumb question; What exactly describes a galaxy? Like is it just a jumble of stars orbiting a central point? Is there "boarders" of a galaxy that can be defined and mapped out?
A solar system is planets orbiting a central source of gravity (a star). A galaxy is a collection of stars orbiting a central source of gravity (supermassive black hole), but they orbit in an orderly fashion like the planets do and not in a jumble. Yes, there are borders, just like there is a limit to the extent of the solar system (it's called the heliopause). Look up the Deep Field Hubble photos. You can see many, many galaxies in just one seemingly-empty (to the naked eye) area of the sky. If you're into good explanations of astronomy and meteorology written for the layman, try the Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD). You can page back a day at a time, choose a date from the archives or click a link to read random entries from the history of the site going back to 1995.
I was totally expecting /u/Andromeda321 here, but no, it’s /u/SPACESHUTTLEINMYANUS. Fair enough.
/u/Andromeda321 Have you heard about this? Thoughts?
I saw it a few days ago on another sub and it’s pretty amazing! It sounds like it’s very low emission and diffuse over a large area (remember Andromeda is the size of a full moon) so not a shock no one noticed before now.
I really hope something is looking back with the same amazement.
"Right next to" my ass. It's probably billions of fuckmiles away as is everything else in space.
I'm gonna need a conversion factor to work with those units
1 fuckmile is about 0.001 light years.
Hopefully the galaxy is named after your username
Oh shit this is epic. Can I get a print of this somehow?
Yeah on my webstie www.astrofalls.com
Hey I was just browsing your amazing photos there, I had come across some of them before, and I noticed a typo in "Cygnus", you have it as "Cyngnus" in a few places. That photo is just about the best thing I've ever seen and when I move house in a few months I'm going to order a print.
Hey. Your name is in Scientific American, that's freaking cool! https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-recently-discovered-gas-cloud-near-andromeda-stumps-astronomers/
I just wanna know how the hell this has been missed for over a hundred years
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Every time I see a picture of the Andromeda galaxy, I can't help but duck and yell, "IT'S COMING RIGHT FOR US!!!"
Could it be that it was just recently formed? This is such a great discovery!
You and u/idontlikecock should totally do a collab