The Ohio skies have been unforgiving so far this winter. There have been so few clear nights lately that I haven’t even bothered starting a new imaging project. Tonight was not forecast to be great, but it did end up giving me a few hours of clear skies to play… Continue Reading... "A relaxing night of EAA"
I took a little bit of data on Luna the other night when I finally had a break in the clouds. I went overboard with deconvolution, wavelets, and local contrast enhancement. I also decided to add some background stars and some of the planets that I tried imaging this year.… Continue Reading... "Moon and Friends"
I’ve discovered a fantastic new feature in Siril: you can now have it apply background extraction per frame in a sequence. Since the sky gradient can be quite different between sub frames in a project, especially when tracked all throughout the sky over multiple nights, stacking all of the frames… Continue Reading... "Background extraction per sub in Siril"
This was a tag along sequence after the Triangulum went over the trees. A couple nights of data were ruined from the moon, but I ended up with a little over 8 hours on M36. There are a couple of weird diffraction effects on the right side, no idea what… Continue Reading... "Pinwheel Cluster"
By far my most ambitious project yet, it took me three weeks to get 42 hours of data on the Triangulum Galaxy, our fourth closest neighbor after the Andromeda galaxy. The moon and clouds fought me the entire way, but it was worth it getting this much data on this… Continue Reading... "Triangulum Galaxy"
I always get tons of comments like, “what a nice clear night, and the moon is full!” Let me show you an example of why I really dislike the Moon. I’ve recently been working on imaging the Triangulum galaxy, which is a moderately faint target. The moon has been rising… Continue Reading... "Why the Moon sucks and I hate it"
The moon is still being a pain in my ass, so I again had to take a break from imaging the Triangulum galaxy after meridian. I wanted to do something a little farther north to see if I could get away from the moon, and I only had about 6… Continue Reading... "Jolly Roger Cluster"
I still don’t have the right equipment to do planetary properly yet. I’ve been watching patiently to see if I could get an ASI178MC and a Televue 4x Powermate, but they’ve been out of stock for a while. Maybe next year. However, I wanted to glance at Mars, as it… Continue Reading... "Tiny Mars"
The moon was out in full force and was really ruining some data on a current project. So I made lemonade by taking the best 20 of 100 images of it. I decided to go a little crazy with the color, sharpening, and contrast, as a treat. Continue Reading... "Saturated Moon"
I use the term “meridian flip” quite often without explaining it well, and the term isn’t exactly intuitive. The telescope follows the sky by running a motor on one of its axes, called the right ascension axis. If you have the mount aligned with the celestial pole properly, which is… Continue Reading... "What is a meridian flip?"
