Ad Astra Observatory

My wife said she wanted to get me some of my photos printed and framed for me. So it was an opportunity for me to cull out some of my “greatest hits” from the astrophoto collection. These are the ones I came up with as my best work so far:

20080303 M42, the second of two nights where I shot the same object back to back, once guided and once unguided, to test the new Gemini mount. M42 (need to apply dark frame)

20070616 M16 a night where I stayed up way too late and caught one of the Sagittarius nebulae between the palm tree and the roof.

20080113 B33 My first really successful shot of The Horsehead Nebula. This might be a little too dim to print, and it needs a dark frame.

20080112 M51 A Spring favorite, M51 is a little too small for me to blow up to 16×20. The shot from 20070511 is also nice

20070122 M45 Ah, The Pleiades. So gorgeous, so huge, and all those hints of nebulosity.

20070508 M13 This object is nice and easy to shoot from suburban skies, and it’s one of the few objects that I can starhop to from memory, so it gets a lot of camera time. The 20060817 and 20070824 shots are also nice.

Since I know these are at different crop sizes, I figure I’ll only get certain size output images out of them. So, for M42 and B33 (which are both full-frame images), I would like to get 16×20s made.

For M51 and M13, which are center-crops of 1500×1000, I would like to get an 8×10 (or maybe smaller).

For M16 and M45 which are not full-frame but are still quite large, I would like 16×20 if possible.