I finally had a run of clear skies on a new Moon! I took advantage by imaging NGC 5566 at the beginning of each of the six mostly clear nights. This galaxy is the prominent one in the middle of the image, and it lies about 65 million light years… Continue Reading... "NGC 5566 and friends"
I recently learned about this rarely imaged target just a few weeks ago. In addition to the Magellanic Clouds, two dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way visible only from the southern hemisphere, there are many other satellite galaxies of the Milky Way. One of these is an elliptical dwarf that… Continue Reading... "Ursa Minor Dwarf Galaxy"
With the beautiful clear weather this week, I have been able to leave my telescope at the ready for several days in a row. I decided to plop on my aperture mask that has a 50mm offset aperture with Baader solar film taped to it. I’d really like to get… Continue Reading... "Sunspots"
When I started processing astronomical images, I went with the common open source tools Siril and GIMP. Siril worked very well for calibration, registration, integration, and some basic post-processing. I would use GIMP to finish images as best as I could figure out. This combination couldn’t give me everything that… Continue Reading... "New PixInsight Tools"
With my scope back together after major surgery, I wanted to give it a thorough test. But the moon was high, and rain was expected early morning, so I settled on a bit of lunar imaging. This is also my first try at using a small CCTV camera lens on… Continue Reading... "Lunar imaging at two scales"
I had a few hours of clear, moonless sky last night before the moon rose around midnight. I decided to take a short tour of galaxies around Ursa Major, Virgo, Leo, and Coma Berenices. I used SharpCap to live stack ten to fifteen minutes on each target. A little post… Continue Reading... "A tour of the Virgo cluster"
I attempted to capture the ISS once a while ago, but I missed it completely. It was going to pass very low in the north tonight, so I decided to try to capture it. It went through my field of view in about a second, and I only captured 5… Continue Reading... "ISS"
With the nice spring weather, I’ve finally got around to installing an allsky camera that I’ve pieced together over the last month. The camera consists of a Raspberry Pi 4 and ZWO ASI120MC-S in a waterproof case. I am also using a PoE converter to power the Pi only through… Continue Reading... "Allsky Camera"
