It’s been a very cloudy summer so far. I haven’t been able to image since June! I was also having a lot of problems with the stock focuser on my SkyWatcher imaging Newtonian, and I wanted to wait until my new Starlight 2″ focuser arrived before I started another big… Continue Reading... "Iris Nebula"
I just got in a new widefield setup that I was able to try last night. I’ll write more about it in another post, but this is the first light for it. It has over three times the field of view of my Newtonian, so it is much better for… Continue Reading... "Eagle Nebula"
Can you believe it? I got almost an entire clear night to actually image this winter. Well, it dipped down to 9°F last night, and I broke off a little piece of my dome while freezing my fingers off closing up. But I was able to get a little over… Continue Reading... "One night on M42"
Still on a kick revisiting the popular targets that I tried last year, I did a few nights on the Wizard Nebula. These were three of the most humid nights of the summer so far, but my new dew heaters seemed to work pretty well. The third night was half… Continue Reading... "The Wizard, again"
My next target was another that I did last summer, the Bubble Nebula. I imaged it for four nights, but clouds and dew ruined a bit of the data. Overall, I got about 24 hours worth of data. I muddled about considering more nights, but I didn’t think it would… Continue Reading... "The Bubble Nebula"
What a week! The skies graced me with five clear nights in a row. I decided to go “deep” on a single target, choosing the Tulip‘s neighbor, the Crescent Nebula. I captured over 25 hours of data on this target, mostly during a bright moon. The Baader UHC filter makes… Continue Reading... "The Crescent"
Pretty much everyone has seen the famous Hubble image of the towers of gas within the Eagle nebula. With great results with my last nebula project, I definitely wanted to do another nebula, and Messier 16 was at the perfect part of the sky. A little work was required first,… Continue Reading... "Pillars of Creation"
Well, it’s finally nebula season! My first nebula with the new telescope and mount is the Tulip. This isn’t a super bright nebula, but with 15 hours of exposures over three nights, I was able to bring out some incredible detail. I used my Baader UHC filter to kill the… Continue Reading... "The Tulip"
Nothing went right for me this time. My dew heater pad on the primary cell apparently doesn’t work very well. After just a few hours, the secondary was coated in frost, and the primary was getting there. Also, my guide scope decided to stop working during the meridian flip, so… Continue Reading... "A double whammy, the Surfboard galaxy and the Owl nebula"
With the new denoise scheme and other skills under my belt, I’ve been redoing the post-processing of many of my older images, with much better results. As another example, here is the Crescent nebula: Steps taken to process this were the following: Levels adjustment to remove most of the background.… Continue Reading... "Retouching the Crescent"
