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"
As I research and learn more about guiding, the equipment used for guiding compared to the equipment used for imaging seems to be awful important. I recall several anecdotes about how your guiding setup should scale to your imaging setup, with many arbitrary ratios and “golden rules” thrown about. My… Continue Reading... "Guiding scale and settings"
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"
The first new planet up this winter, I decided to try a simple wide-field shot of the unfortunately-named Uranus. The green color of it definitely came through! Although the planet itself got washed out a bit with the diffraction patterns of the two minute long exposures I took, I was… Continue Reading... "Uranus"
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"
During my last test with the new equatorial platform, I tried several dim targets, including the Triangulum galaxy. I took 35 one minute long exposures at 1600 ISO, and I was able to just barely capture it over the light pollution and extremely bright full moon that was out that… Continue Reading... "M33, the Triangulum"
As I begin to take much longer exposures, the need for good flat images has become apparent. Dust specks on the camera lens and vignetting make a noticeable appearance once I start stretching images of extremely dim deep sky objects. To try to improve my flats, I purchased a studio… Continue Reading... "Light softbox for taking flats"
During my second test of my new equatorial platform, I decided to try a new cluster, Caroline’s Rose. This is 17 exposures of one minute each. Continue Reading... "NGC 7789, “Caroline’s Rose”"
