Ad Astra Observatory

After 10 days of fighting Veronica, I’d had enough. Tonight, I swapped the camera back to Pumpkin, rebalanced, and tried my luck at two targets.

With Cassiopeia showing above the house, I decided that I wanted to try for IC 1805 and IC 1848, The “Heart” and “Soul” Nebulae that lie between Cassiopeia and Perseus. Note that it’s July, not October. But, since Pumpkin seems to do pretty well (owing in no small part to the 5”/px and huge FOV and huge guidescope), and since I like to avoid running the scope into the pier, I find that I choose objects that are “a little low” and let them rise all night.

But these guys were still below my “horizon” (read: The wall of the observatory 🙂 ) yet, so I needed to shoot something else for an hour or so, until Cassiopeia rose a little bit.

So, I decided to continue my widefield survey of Cygnus/Cepheus, and did an hour (back to 20m subframes — I love that li’l orange scope!) on Sh2-119.

The Sharpless nebulae are opening whole new vistas in my target list, and I’m *really* enjoying going after these objects in full knowledge that I’d probably get nothing but noise and pain if I tried this without the Ha filter.

Sh2-119 in Cygnus

I like Cygnus. It’s really good to have Pumpkin back. I have nothing more to say about this object.

Now it was late enough that I could start getting some time on Cassiopeia. Some clouds threatened to roll in, ate my guidestar for awhile, etc. Pumpkin just powered through all that. I only lost one frame out of 13 (to clouds). Since IC 1805 was laid in “horizontally”, I missed the nearby IC 1848. That’s for tomorrow night. This is a full 4 hours of Ha from Pumpkin on an object that I have no right to be shooting for another few months.

IC 1805 The Heart Nebula in Cassiopeia

In a word, Wow. I’m back on track again. I am having fun with my widefield shots in a way that I haven’t been having fun for awhile now. I want to buy an OIII filter and go back and shoot all this stuff again. I am giddy when I see the cool stuff show up in each subframe.

The guiding is a little rough. But the results speak for themselves. I am ready to shoot my way through the rest of the month. Yay!