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!
 

This Bode's Well!

 

Waxing Gibbous Moon (29/5/23)

Waxing Gibbous Moon (28/5/23)

 

First Quarter Moon (27/5/23)

 

Active Regions on the Sun (25/5/23)

International Space Station Pass Over

 

Supernova in M101 - The Pinwheel Galaxy

M101, the Pinwheel Galaxy incorrectly labeled as the Whirlpool Galaxy.

 

Crescent Moon (21/5/23)

 

M51 - The Whirlpool Galaxy - Guided C6se with Focal Reducer

 

A Swift Session at the Rosette and Heart!

I popped out to the Rosette and Heart for a swift session last night!  It's been so long since I've done any deep sky imaging (due to the appalling night time UK weather) that I've forgotten almost everything about how to do it! I also thought I'd use the session to reacquaint myself with guiding as I haven't used it that often and up to a point it was a successful trial

So here's a couple of narrowband images from last night to help ease myself back into the game. I started with the Rosette Nebula (Sh2-275 or Caldwell 49), the centre of which contains the open star cluster NGC 2244 or Caldwell 50.  It's an H II region located near one end of a giant molecular cloud in the Monoceros region of the Milky Way. The open star cluster is closely associated with the nebulosity, the stars of the cluster having been formed from the nebula's matter.

The Rosette Nebula has been said to resemble a human skull, and is sometimes referred to as the 'Skull Nebula' although in this image the skull has been rotated 90 degrees to 'look' upwards.

My second target was the Heart Nebula (IC 1805 or Sh2-190) in the constellation of Cassiopeia which is another emission nebula, and was discovered by William Herschel on 3 November 1787. It displays glowing ionized hydrogen gas and darker dust lanes.

The brightest part of the nebula (a knot at its western edge) is separately classified as NGC 896, because it was the first part of the nebula to be discovered. The nebula's intense red output and its morphology are driven by the radiation emanating from a small group of stars near the nebula's center. This open cluster of stars, known as Collinder 26 or Melotte 15, contains a few bright stars nearly 50 times the mass of the Sun, and many more dim stars that are only a fraction of the Sun's mass.

The Heart Nebula is also made up of ionised oxygen and sulphur gasses, responsible for the rich blue and orange colours seen in some narrowband images. The shape of the nebula is driven by stellar winds from the hot stars in its core. The nebula also spans almost 2 degrees in the sky, covering an area four times that of the diameter of the full moon.

Acquisition Details

• William Optics WhiteCar 51 (kindly lent by Mark Hellaby)
• Sky-Watcher EQ6-R Pro equatorial mount
• Altair Astro 294C Pro Tec cooled colour camera
• Optolong L-eNhance narrowband filter
• Partly guided by PHD2 using a ZWO 224mc on a Sky-Watcher finder scope
• Captured in Astro Photography Tool
• Stacked and light pollution removal in Astro Pixel Processor
• Processed in Adobe PhotoShop with Topaz AI Denoise, Sharpen and AstroFlat plugins and Astronomy Tools actions

She's Got It ... Venus!

Not the best photo in the world but hey, it's Venus in a waxing gibbous phase.  I've been watching it slowly rise higher in the western sky since just after Christmas and I've seen it in close proximity to Jupiter and the Moon.  Hopefully I'll manage a better shot when it's higher still.

Waxing Crescent Moon

Unfortunately the weather has been very poor in recent weeks and this is the first time I've seen the moon in ages. The cloud cover meant that I couldn't see the thin sliver of moon which appears after a new moon and so I'll just have to be content with this crescent which is a few days old now.

Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here - Dante's Inferno!

Well, may be not quite, but when I process an Ha-rich image of the Orion Nebula like the one above, it always makes me think of it.  This is a starless version, which some people prefer to images which are covered in stars, often overpowering the delicate features of the nebula. Personally, I like some stars in an image as without them I think it seems a little artificial.  So I'll often do a bit of star reduction to make them as little less dominant and distracting. Here's a version with some stars and :

And here's a much wider version showing the Running Man Nebula a little better: