This is been a long cloudy winter so far, not a single clear night since a spurt I had at the beginning of November. I decided to just go ahead and start processing what I have. I was working on three targets at once, beginning with taking data on NGC… Continue Reading... "The Pacman"
The early Ohio winter actually gave me five clear nights this week during a new Moon, can you believe it? I finally got to image a target I’ve been wanting to do for years, and my widefield refractor was the perfect equipment to image it with. Messier 45, also known… Continue Reading... "Pleiades"
The Cocoon Nebula, Caldwell 19, is a bright emission and reflection nebula in Cygnus. It is around 2,500 light years away. In addition to the Hydrogen emission and other reflections, there is a beautiful cloud of dark interstellar dust surrounding the object. This is an active star forming region. Here… Continue Reading... "Cocoon Nebula"
The Cat’s Eye Nebula, formally known as Caldwell 6 and NGC 6543, is a planetary nebula in Draco. Planetary nebula is a confusing term that has nothing to do with planets and everything to do with the life cycle of intermediate mass stars. These are stars that are not massive… Continue Reading... "Cat’s Eye Nebula"
The second target of my last imaging sequence is the Cygnus Wall, a prominent feature of NGC 7000, the North America Nebula. This is a very bright nebula at magnitude 4. It’s around 2,600 light years away in Cygnus. The “wall” of gas is about 20 light years long. I… Continue Reading... "Cygnus Wall"
A long while ago, I had purchased a 50mm lens for the Nikon D5300 to attempt to do some Milky Way shots. I’ve finally got around to trying it on the EQM-35 mount in star tracker configuration. I was able to polar align decently using the built in polar scope.… Continue Reading... "First lens wide-field"
I was really displeased with how I processed the Western Veil the other day. This field is especially difficult because of all the stars in it obscuring the target. PixInsight’s StarAlignment reported over 50,000 stars, though I imagine the real count is at least double that. I became very overwhelmed… Continue Reading... "Retouching the Veil"
The next project for my little 72mm rig was the Veil Nebula. I have not managed to fix my field curvature issues, I need to get some shims or something and play around with the backfocus one night. Also, I’m not super great at processing “bi-color” images. Although the Baader… Continue Reading... "Western Veil"
The Bubble nebula is a real favorite of mine, and I was really unhappy with the way I did it last year. With more patience, as well as a steadier hand in PixInsight, I am very pleased with the results this year. I decided to frame it to include its… Continue Reading... "The Bubble, with a little Salt and Pepper"
While imaging the Iris Nebula this week, I also had my new widefield rig imaging Caldwell 20, the North America nebula. It mostly worked out well, and I got two nights of images totaling about 13 hours of exposure. There seems to be a bit of a bug in the… Continue Reading... "North America nebula"
