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"
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"
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"
After learning some tricks and a bit more about image processing in general, I decided to take a stab at post-processing the Pacman nebula again. I attempted some better stacking techniques, and was able to reduce noise a bit from the start. The background extraction also went much better in… Continue Reading... "Retouching the Pacman"
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"
For complete ridiculousness, I recently purchased a small Newtonian telescope to try to use as a guide scope. My hope is that the longer focal length will better match the imaging scope, and it will give more accurate guiding. With a finally decent, clear sky, I first picked an easy… Continue Reading... "NGC 663, the Lawnmower Man"
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"
