Took another trip to Cherry Springs, which is about 4-5 hours away.  This site is so dark that I cannot yet image deep enough to see light in the background of my subs.  I'm going to have to do longer exposures to try to get the faintest of faint light to show up on the camera.  Such a cool site to image.  The Milky way in the summer looks like a noisy wide field image with the naked eye!  This is by far my favorite imaging and viewing location. Here are a couple of images that I took there. This is the Trifid Nebula, M20 in Sagittarius.  This was done with on ..read more

The Needle Galaxy, a large barred spiral galaxy seen almost perfectly edge-on.  The name was given to its narrow profile.  This is a bright galaxy that Charles Messier missed.  William Herschel discovered this galaxy in 1785. NGC4565 is between 30 and 50 million light years away, and is about 100,000 light years across (One light year = about 6,000,000,000,000 miles) , and is located in the constellation Coma Berenices.  The small galaxy on the top right is NGC4562. This image is a composite stack of 10 - 5 minute exposures taken with a Canon T3 at ISO 400.  The te ..read more

Imaged two objects this evening, NGC2903 and Bode's Nebulae. NGC2903 is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Leo, the Lion.  It was discovered by William Herschel in 1784.  It is relatively bright, at 9.7 magnitude, and is a fairly large target, About 13 X 6 arc minutes.  It is about 31 million light years away. The other object imaged was Bode's Nebulae.  Also known as M81 and M82, these 2 galaxies were discovered by Johann Elert Bode in 1774, M81 is a grand spiral galaxy, and is a large, bright object, at 27 arcminutes across from our perspective.  I ..read more

This is an object that I've been wanting to get for a long time, but havent had the equipment to do such a wide field shot until relatively recently.  The Witch Head, IC2118 is a couple of degrees long, and is extremely dim. For this faint reflection nebula, I used an Astronomik CLS clip in Canon filter on the T3.  It consists of 25 - 5 minute exposures from my suburban sky.  I could not detect it at all with no filtering. I'm sure that from a darker site, I would be able to get more detail in the cloud formation, but I was able to get the basic shape ..read more

Some new images were taken last night.  We had a nice clear night, which we havent had lately.  I wanted to see if I could capture some of the faint dust around the Orion Nebula with some filters that I didnt have a year ago. I was able to get some of the dust, but with little detail in the dust.  However I was not even able to detect it before using the filter. This image was taken with the Astro-Tech AT72ED with the .8 field flattener. After imaging Orion, I thought I would go for the Rosette a little to the East of Orion in the constellation Monoceros.  I've imaged ..read more

What better way to start a new year than to wake up at 4AM to take a couple pictures of Jupiter.  I saw a post on Facebook from a prominent planetary imager talking about a newly discovered outbreak.  If I'm not mistaken, this first image captured it.  There is another one in the SEB too, but that one is facing away from this shot. Sorry the image is a bit soft.  I had problems attaining focus, but I believe he was referring to the bright white spot on the NTB near the CM. The next image was taken about an hour later, with somewhat improved focus.  Seeing appeared ..read more

Tried to get a din galaxy, something I havent tried to do in awhile.  These objects typically take a lot of exposures to get them to come out well.  This image however was taken using only 8 frames.  I had clouds move in which cut my session short. What you see here is a really large spiral galaxy, about twice the size of the Milky Way, but its about 130 million light years away. The light we are seeing left this galaxy during a time when early dinosaurs were roaming the Earth, when the first freshwater turtles appeared on Earth.  The distorted spiral arm was caused b ..read more

This post shows that you dont need to have dark skies in order to take decent astro photos.  The location this was taken, the 2nd magnitude star, Polaris was difficult to see.  Areas to the South were even worse, and most of these objects were taken fairly low to the south. The most southern object was the helix.  These were taken in white light, with a Astronomik Clip in CLS filter. Sure, its pretty dim, but with a few extra exposures, it can be had a little brighter. The next object I tried was the Horsehead.  It too was quite do-able from within city lights. The ..read more

A vast area of glowing hydrogen exists in Cygnus.  This image was taken using white light as well as a wideband hydrogen filter.  The small fairly bright nebula in the lower center part of the frame is the Crescent Nebula. This area of the sky is quite large.  It encompasses the area around the North America Nebula, Pelican Nebula and the Crescent, so this is actually only a small part of the cloud ..read more

The Astro-Tech focal reducer/field flattener that I'm using with my AT-72ED has threads to accept a 2" filter.  I was looking thru Amazon and found a very low cost light pollution filter (in the $35 range).  So I bought one.   It is just enough to get some rather deep images from my moderately light polluted sky. I have been having a great time taking wide field images, even of small objects that I would normally use a longer focal length.  Take for instance the Iris Nebula.  The bright part is only about 18 arc minutes in diameter, or about 1/3 the size of a full moo ..read more