NGC 2403, a circumpolar galaxy a bit west of M81 and M82, has been an ongoing target. The first night I tried it, focus was not quite right, and the weather made everything else a struggle. I scrapped that data. I tried it again last night with much better focus,… Continue Reading... "NGC 2403"
Late at night, the M101 group was starting to circle around Polaris to a decent altitude. The APT autofocus seemed to work better this time, with a FWHM of around 5 for the stars. I began taking three minute exposures, and only got 67 frames deep before the meridian flip… Continue Reading... "M101 redux"
After figuring everything out with my new equipment, I set up for a real target, Bode’s galaxy and the Cigar galaxy. Just east of Polaris that day, I figured I could get a ton of images of it. I set up the scope to take five hours of exposures at… Continue Reading... "Bode’s and the Cigar galaxies"
My first target with the new scope and mount was a cluster of galaxies near the star 1 Ari. I mostly was just testing equipment and making sure all the software worked. I was only able to get 90 minutes of exposure on it, still giving a poor signal to… Continue Reading... "Cluster of galaxies near 1 Ari"
Conditions were pretty good tonight, but my guiding and tracking just did not want to agree with me. I was only able to get 15 decent subframes of two minutes each of NGC 672, a nifty double galaxy near the Triangulum. Continue Reading... "NGC 672"
Still experimenting with post-processing techniques, I made another attempt at the Triangulum. The subframes for this were extremely noisy, and the resulting stack was still quite noisy. The flats I took at the time were pretty poor and added some rotational gradients to the image. I decided to take a… Continue Reading... "Triangulum 2: Galactic Boogaloo"
Another beautiful spiral galaxy near the Triangulum, 14 exposures of five minutes each produced a very nice image. Also, I captured a few very distant galaxies in this image. I have highlighted them below: And here is an adorable little spiral galaxy that I found in the bottom left corner: Continue Reading... "NGC 925"
The second dimmest galaxy in the Messier catalogue, the Phantom galaxy turned out quite well for me. Guiding was mostly behaving pretty well, although I did get some bloat in the right ascension dimension in some of my images. It was too cold to mess around with things too much… Continue Reading... "M74, the Phantom"
The seeing was quite abysmal tonight, and guiding was suffering because of it. However, I needed a night out of the house, so I found a nifty little friend just east of Andromeda, NGC 7640. Quite dim at 11.6 magnitude, I rolled the dice and attempted five minute exposures, with… Continue Reading... "NGC 7640"
I was finally able to process, somewhat decently, the Deer Lick Group from my last outing. A very faint galaxy with many smaller, fainter galaxies abound, this was a challenging target. A collection of 18 two minute exposures still brought out little detail over the skyglow. Taking flats after the… Continue Reading... "NGC 7331 and friends"
