You know it couldn’t be spring without revisiting my favorite galaxy, Messier 51. As I’ve learned, I was patient with this project, taking three weeks to collect 25 hours throughout the cloudy nights and storms. The patience paid off by revealing the dim halo around these colliding galaxies. I’d think… Continue Reading... "M51"
While I’m working on collecting data for M51, I decided to take the last couple hours of the morning on each night to also get some data of Vega. I occasionally like doing a bright star. This really shows the defects of a Newtonian telescope, but I kinda like the… Continue Reading... "Vega"
I’d like to thank Astrospheric, my go-to astronomy forecast site, for recently awarding me astrophotograph of the month for my reprocess of my M81 and M82 data this spring. If you want to know when your skies are clear, give the site or phone apps a try! Also, I have… Continue Reading... "APOM"
I was browsing Cloudy Nights, as I do, and someone mentioned a quasar that they had discovered in their image of M51. I took a few hours of data on M51 last weekend, and I’ve been playing around with it in PixInsight while waiting for clear nights to get more… Continue Reading... "The farthest object I’ve found yet"
Here is a quick capture of 100 frames of the Moon. I enhanced the color to show the varying minerals on the surface. The brown areas are richer in iron, while the blue areas contain more titanium. The colors are greatly enhanced from their natural look. I also added dynamic… Continue Reading... "Mineral Moon"
Well, I finally did it. I impulse bought PixInsight. Everyone says that this is the ultimate astrophotography processing software. I got it because I’m mostly interested in improving my backgrounds and noise reduction. It’s much more flexible and powerful than Siril or GIMP. I really liked those programs, but I… Continue Reading... "M81 and M82: PixInsight Boogalo"
The “Little Pinwheel Galaxy” was the first major galaxy to come up for me this year after M81 and M82. This project was more of an experimentation with different tweaks on the scope. I was able to get guiding to improve overall, and I flocked the inside of my coma… Continue Reading... "NGC 3184"
M5 is a pretty large globular cluster near the equator that contains from 100,000 to 500,000 stars. It was a second sequence in my recent imaging project. I got about seven hours of data on it. Continue Reading... "M5"
