The Sky

Lost In The Sea Of Night

My Own Eclipse

I missed the total lunar eclipse yesterday, so I went and found my own partial one today. (One of these days this shot will get onto Explore!)

Departing Luna

Flight to Tycho

Technically a partial eclipse

M31&33

Latest astro adventure. An image I've been wanting to get for quite a while, M31 and M33 together in one frame. Finally my schedule aligned with the weather and moon phase so I could go out and try it. The time of year put them a little closer to the horizon than I would prefer, but it came out ok. Looks like the focus was slightly off, but that might just be wind or sensor noise...I would like to get more detail resolved in both objects in a future shot, but I'm not sure how much better I can really do with a fixed mount. This is 159 frames at 50 mm, 5 s, f/2.0, 6400 ISO, stacked with DeesSkyStacker, for a total of 13 min 15 sec exposure.

Full Orion Nebula (3x Drizzle)

Took the same image data I used for the full Orion's Sword image and reprocessed it with an AOI around the Orion Nebula, applying a 3x drizzle. Came out pretty well I think! The star trailing is more apparent at this zoom level, but still tolerable. The drizzle algorithm also successfully enhanced edge detail compared to just zooming in a bunch on the larger image. The main difference of processing it this way was being able to more finely tune the luminance curve and color treatment for this object/region in particular, as not only did I not have to worry about the other regions of the image, but I could also see the fine detail much better! Interestingly, this image is not particularly inferior to the one I got through a telescope recently. It is much better in some ways in fact!

Orion Portrait

A full portrait of Orion (or at least the main asterism of it). I've done this shot before, but not stacked. This is 51 frames of 6 seconds each (f/2.8, ISO 6400) at 40 mm, which makes this the longest effective exposure I've stacked to date, at 5 minutes, 6 seconds. You can *just about* see Barnard's Loop on the left, but man is it faint. I'm not sure how much better I can get this without much better transparency, darker skies, and ages more exposure time. I've got many more things to try to captures so I probably won't attempt it again soon...(stacked with DeepSkyStacker)

Orion's Sword

One of the advantages to shooting the sky with a camera rather than a telescope is you can get medium length shots like this. This is the Orion and Horsehead Nebulas in one frame at 170 mm, from the belt down the length of the sword in the constellation. Shot at 3200 ISO rather than 6400 as my others of the night were done, so the image came out a little cleaner, although I might have like to have more exposure in the horsehead region. Overall quite pleased with it. Stacked with DeepSkyStacker: 113 exposures x 1.6 sec, f/2.8, 3200 ISO (3 min total)

Andromeda (Jan 12, 2021)

Finally an M31 image that isn't total garbage! This is 159 frames x 1.6 s, f/2.8, 6400 ISO (4 minutes 14 seconds total exposure). Shot at 125 mm, but should have been all the way at 200...I ended up applying a 2x drizzle in the processing. Not quite poster-worthy, but I'm improving.

Orion Nebula

First decent stacked telescope image. Orion Nebula (M42). Focus and/or seeing could be better, but I am still learning. 21 frames x 6 second per frame (2 min, 6 sec) at 6400 ISO. 1350 mm at f/13 on a Celestron 4SE (no barlow). Stacked with DeepSkyStacker.

Luna

Starting to learn about telescope & lunar photography. Won't be doing this a whole lot in the near future since this isn't my scope, but packing knowledge away for later. This is the moon (of course) through a Celestron 4SE with 2x Barlow, for 2700 mm at f/18. Definitely a big challenge to achieve sharpness through atmospheric turbulence.