Here are some sketches I've made of deep sky objects. I'll give you a little info on them to.:
M42 (The Great Orion Nebula)
^This is an emission nebula, and quite frankly one of the most fascinating things to study/view. Photographs will show this as a red, bird like figure and are truly beautiful. However, one usually asks themselves, how do they become red? It is through a simple process called ionization. As you can see in the sketch above, there are four stars grouped closely together, called the "trapezium" These are extremely young (I believe 100 million years old) and are emitting a lot of ultra violet rays. These rays are energizing the gas they are surrounded in so much, that each particle of gas is forced to shed a red photon, hence the red. Unfortunately, our eyes can not detect this red because it is so far away, so it corresponds to a greyish greenish blue for us. What's most fascinating about this object, is that we are observing solar systems forming in it.
M13 (The Great Hercules cluster)
M15 (The Great Pegasus cluster) (Jeez, these guys could've been more creative with their nicknames...)
M53
^These three are globular clusters and are some of the most mind-boggling things to learn about. Imagine an object only a few light years across (don't qoute me on that) with over 100,000 stars in it... These are the "failed" galaxies of the universe and are so densely packed, even hubble can't resolve them
M65 and M66
NGC 185
NGC 1023
NGC 7217
These are all galaxies… what more can I say? The first one (which is actually two) is much like the Milky Way's set up, in the sense that we are close to the galaxy M31 (Andromeda). Galaxies aren’t extremely interesting to view through telescopes, although when you imagine that you’re looking at something millions of light years (6 trillion miles) away, it becomes much more fun
M27 (The Dumbell Nebula)
M57 (The Ring Nebula)
NGC 2392 (The Eskimo Nebula)
These are all called planetary nebula, even though they have nothing to do with planets. They got their name from the astronomer William Herschel who, like us, was broke because of his infatuation with music. He named these objects “planetary nebula” because they looked oddly like Uranus. Now, what exactly are these objects? Well, they are like a supernova, except
waydowngraded. A planetary nebula occurs when a star that isn’t big enough to nova, dies. First, the star expands until it’s a red giant, then it expands its outer shell, leaving a white dwarf surrounded by all of it’s gas, which is what we see as a planetary nebula. This is most likely how our sun will die, but we will be enveloped by the red giant first.
M41
M45 (The Pleiades)
NGC 129
These are all open clusters, and they are just a loose grouping of stars, nothing more
P.S-
The “M” stands for Messier, who was a comet hunter. He found all these faint fuzzies and thought they were comets, but they were actually various deep sky objects, which pissed him off. He cataloged them so he wouldn't confuse them with comets, but was only famous for his "not-comet" catalog. NGC stands for New General Catalog, which was compiled in the 1800’s.
I also had to take all the smileys out because I was out of image space.
I like the Jefferson memorial the best. Hell, they're all amazing. If you ever stop taking photos I will yell at you.
