Ad Astra Observatory

With no polar alignment or setup required this evening, this was my first “full” night with Pumpkin.

I started around dusk with some exposure bracketing on Rho Ophiucus, a nebular area of sky that I’ve never been able to come close to trying from the “light bowl” of my back yard.
Once the sky was dark enough, I ran off an hour of images on this area.

Then I decided to get some full-color imagery on a famous object that I’ve only been able to shoot well in Ha, The Veil Nebula.

By this point, the autumn constellations were well-up, so I put in an hour on M33, The Triangulum Galaxy. This turns out to be an object that’s a little small for Pumpkin, but I haven’t really played with it often, so it’s good to get some photons.

I finished off the night on IC1848, The Soul Nebula, as a counterpoint to the Heart Nebula image I’d captured last night. I will see whether they can be put together as a mosaic. I ended up with 2 hours of usable data before sunup. I was in bed around 2:30 again, and saw The Pleiades rise over the eastern horizon before turning in.

Man, I love this sky.