Gallery: LYRA's very own APOD

Here you can find some of the wonderful pictures of sky objects taken by our members, ranging from atmospheric effects down here on Earth to the farthest reaches of deep space - and everything in between! Pictures are displayed at random, and members (members only - one benefit of joining LYRA!) are now able to upload their own pictures from the members only page - please read the instructions there, because we can accept only .jpg images for reasons of space (sorry!) To see a different picture, just reload the page! (F5 on most browsers)

Alwyn Davies: NGC 7331 With Type 1a Supernova



Galaxy NGC 7331 and Supernova 2025rbs - discovered 14 July 2025 - located just left of the Galactic Centre, was photographed on 6th September 2025, from my back garden in Gorleston through its Bortle 6 sky. A total of 126 x 30sec. subs at 300 gain, were logged from an Altair 26C cooled colour camera and Baader Contrast Booster Filter. The telescope was an AVX mounted Celestron 8 inch SCT, guided with PHD2 software linked to a ASI224 on a small guide scope. SharpCap was used to control the recording sequence and PixInsight for the stacking and processing stages. The low gain and short exposure solved the problem of an earlier failed attempt where higher settings had saturated the galaxy's central area and obliterated the supernova. I understand that the light from this exploding white dwarf star took some 45 million years to reach my back garden - so we're basically seeing a 63 minute image of the event as it happened during the Earth's warmer Eocene Epoch.