Waxing Crescent Moon

Waxing Crescent Moon (26/6/23)

The Sun's Active Regions (22/6/23)

The Solstice Moon and Venus

 

M27 - The Dumbbell or Apple Core Nebula

Here's another go at imaging a DSO (Deep Sky Object) with my Celestron C6SE SCT on an EQ6-R Pro equatorial mount rather than the scope's own NexStar alt/az mount.  This time it's M27 planetary nebula also known as the Dumbbell or Apple Core Nebula (I prefer the latter). Once again I've not used a focal reducer in order to make the image as large as possible and I don't think that the image suffers too much because of it.

I've seen this large planetary nebula portrayed in several different colours so here's a version which has been processed slightly differently:

Waning Gibbous Moon

Waning Gibbous Moon (9/6/23)

M51 - The Whirlpool Galaxy - C6se with No Reducer.

 

Various Deep Sky Object Test Shots

Here are a few test shots using my Celestron C6se SCT telescope without a focal reducer.  Although this gives me a focal length of 1500mm, it is not generally recommended as the scope works natively at f/10 and a reducer takes this down to f/7 - so not using a reducer means that a lot less light is gathered for the same exposure time. My reducer also flattens the field of view making stars better shapes on the edges of the image.  However, as I am still cropping all these galaxies to some extent, I can remove poor stars at the edges in the process.  I think that these images show that it is possible to work at f/10 but that a lot more data is needed, and this is something will try as the dark nights get longer.

The Needle Galaxy

The Sunflower Galaxy

M106 - 'The Galaxy with No Name'

M106 annotated by Astrometry.net

More Sunspots

 

Strawberry Moonscape

I went out tonight looking for a good location to photograph the full 'Strawberry' Moon.  Unfortunately  my ideas for locations didn't work out as I had hoped and so I had to settle for this image taken from the guided busway in Tyldesley looking south over Tyldesley, Astley and towards the mosses. The moon really was this colour due to being so low on the horizon and perhaps exacerbated by smoke from the wildfires currently burning in the US.

This was shot hand held and wasn't intentional, but I quite like it!

 

Antares and the Moon

 

Nearly Full Moon

 

M82 - The Cigar Galaxy

 

Moon Mosaic - It's a Stitchup!

This was an unexpected experiment which I just thought of the spur of the moment.  I'd taken four different stacked segments of the moon with my planetary camera and C6se telescope whilst I was waiting for the skies to clear. I didn't try to get full coverage, just focusing on interesting parts of the moon.  But as the segments came out quite well, I thought I'd try making a mosaic by stitching them together in Photoshop using the PhotoMerge feature. I had no idea that it would be so easy and come out so good.  

When I saw this result I was sorry that I hadn't tried for full coverage, and so I decided just to crop the biggest complete area I could.

Next time I'll be looking for full coverage!