There has not been a lick of clear skies for me since Thanksgiving week, and I have become mighty bored. One of my favorite images seemed like a good candidate to rework since I have new tools and new knowledge. I originally took 25 hours of data on Messier 51… Continue Reading... "M51 Redux"
Well, it took me three years, but I finally got enough clear winter nights to image the famous Horsehead nebula! Barnard 33, commonly called the Horsehead nebula, might be the most famous nebula, M42 notwithstanding. Relatively speaking, this is a dim nebula in Orion’s belt, just south of the eastmost… Continue Reading... "The Horsehead"
This is been a long cloudy winter so far, not a single clear night since a spurt I had at the beginning of November. I decided to just go ahead and start processing what I have. I was working on three targets at once, beginning with taking data on NGC… Continue Reading... "The Pacman"
The early Ohio winter actually gave me five clear nights this week during a new Moon, can you believe it? I finally got to image a target I’ve been wanting to do for years, and my widefield refractor was the perfect equipment to image it with. Messier 45, also known… Continue Reading... "Pleiades"
I was going to check out my allsky camera yesterday and found it unresponsive. Turns out the SD card didn’t weather the last half year too well. I was able to recover the config files and start fresh with a new SD card and updated software. Everything mostly seemed to… Continue Reading... "22° Moon halo"
Messier 103 is an open star cluster in Cassiopeia. It contains a few hundred stars that are around 10,000 light years away. This image is composed of 413 four-minute exposures, giving almost 28 hours of total exposure. There are 46,441 stars in this image. There is also some interstellar dust… Continue Reading... "M103"
After finishing two long imaging projects, a 60% moon made a good night to do some minor planet hunting. 3 Juno is a large asteroid in the asteroid belt. It is about the size of Indiana, and weighs as much 3,300 Mount Everests. It was pretty low in the sky… Continue Reading... "3 Juno"
The Cocoon Nebula, Caldwell 19, is a bright emission and reflection nebula in Cygnus. It is around 2,500 light years away. In addition to the Hydrogen emission and other reflections, there is a beautiful cloud of dark interstellar dust surrounding the object. This is an active star forming region. Here… Continue Reading... "Cocoon Nebula"
I was browsing through the archives of my allsky camera and noticed something strange in one of the star trails images, Airplanes are the dotted lines throughout the image, and satellites are the very thin solid lines. The wide object in the upper right is Saturn. The very wide and… Continue Reading... "Bright meteor spotted"
