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"
I finally figured it out! I was having the damnedest time over the last year trying to take proper flats with my f/5 Dobsonian and my f/4 imaging Newtonian. The biggest issue was my Nikon DSLR that I was using. It added an awful chromatic rotational gradient that was very… Continue Reading... "Taking flats with a large Newtonian"
I’ve been having quite the time figuring out how to properly calibrate the images from my big ass Newtonian. I think I might be getting somewhere! The first key was taking proper flats, which I will do a separate post on soon. Along with flats, you also need bias frames.… Continue Reading... "Preprocessing with Siril"
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"
While imaging the last couple nights, I noticed that the images were a little wonky. Upon initial inspection, I suspected guiding just wasn’t being great, as the stars had that elongated shape to them as though the guiding was oscillating a few arcseconds. When I began to study the images… Continue Reading... "Bad Collimation"
I had a couple hours to waste before a nebula came up over the trees, so I took a few exposures of the nearby star Arcturus. I had my Baader UHC filter on, which mostly lets some red wavelengths through as well as a band in the cyan wavelengths. The… Continue Reading... "Arcturus"
I wanted to try a single bright star for a couple hours, since I really love the diffraction spikes of my Newtonian. This is a little over 2.5 hours on Deneb, a very bright star in Cygnus. Continue Reading... "Deneb"
Over two nights, I decided to go hard on M92, mostly since the moon was out each night. The first night didn’t last long before clouds filled the sky. I got about six hours on it. Continue Reading... "M92"
