Been a while, hasn’t it? My wide-field setup consisting of an EQM-35 and Evostar 72ED has been nothing but trouble. While I am very pleased with the telescope itself, which seems quite well corrected for being so cheap, the mount has been a nightmare. I finally dismantled the entire thing,… Continue Reading... "The Double Cluster"
I came back to my image of the Deer Lick Group and Stephan’s Quintet from last year due to the JWST reveal. While my original take on the image was not terrible for the tools and knowledge I had available at the time, I wanted to give the original integration… Continue Reading... "Reprocessing the Deer Lick and Stephan’s Quintet"
A low full moon made the other night a great night to do some EAA. I used SharpCap live stacking and 25 second calibrated exposures to create these images. They were post-processed in PixInsight using photometric color calibration, downsampling, arcsinh and histogram stretches, NoiseXTerminator, and some multiscale median transform for… Continue Reading... "A plethora of short stacks"
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 Summer Beehive Cluster, IC 4665, is a coarse open star cluster in the constellation Ophiuchus that was discovered in 1745. It only started forming around 40 million years ago. It lies about 1,400 light years from us and is approaching us at about 12 km/s. This is only about… Continue Reading... "Summer Beehive Cluster"
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"
I finally had a run of clear skies on a new Moon! I took advantage by imaging NGC 5566 at the beginning of each of the six mostly clear nights. This galaxy is the prominent one in the middle of the image, and it lies about 65 million light years… Continue Reading... "NGC 5566 and friends"
I recently learned about this rarely imaged target just a few weeks ago. In addition to the Magellanic Clouds, two dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way visible only from the southern hemisphere, there are many other satellite galaxies of the Milky Way. One of these is an elliptical dwarf that… Continue Reading... "Ursa Minor Dwarf Galaxy"
I had a few hours of clear, moonless sky last night before the moon rose around midnight. I decided to take a short tour of galaxies around Ursa Major, Virgo, Leo, and Coma Berenices. I used SharpCap to live stack ten to fifteen minutes on each target. A little post… Continue Reading... "A tour of the Virgo cluster"
With the imaging rig fixed up and back in service, I spent a few nights taking data on the small galaxy cluster Holmberg 124. The first night had some terrible seeing, so I had to toss a lot of that data. Overall, the equipment ran well for me, and I… Continue Reading... "Holmberg 124"
