Deep Sky / Long Exposure Photography

The Veil Nebula in Cygnus

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The Veil Nebula is a stark test of your optical system. There is a huge brightness range among the various pieces. The size of the object is pretty staggering, too. And there’s […]

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Deep Sky / Long Exposure Photography

IC1396, Emission Nebula in Cepheus

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Sometimes you luck out when you’re “just testing”. I am still shaking out the kinks in my 350D workflow. I put the Ha filter back on the 350D last night. Focusing with […]

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Deep Sky / Long Exposure Photography

NGC7000, The North America Nebula in Cygnus

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This is my first HaRGB shot. It’s a combination of grayscale luminance data that I captured while camping at Coyote Lake, CA over the weekend, and color data that I captured from […]

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Deep Sky / Long Exposure Photography

NGC7000, The North America Nebula, from Coyote Lake, CA

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This is my deepest image yet of NGC7000, 5 full hours (15x20m). This is with my normal Levels-and-Curves treatment in Photoshop, but it’s the full FOV. This was first light for my […]

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Deep Sky / Long Exposure Photography

NGC281, The PacMan Nebula in Casseiopeia

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This is my first shot of NGC281. I attempted it a couple of years back, but came up essentially empty. Normally, the Casseiopeia Milky Way is not available until autumn, but I […]

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Deep Sky / Long Exposure Photography

NGC 6888, The Crescent Nebula in Cygnus, from Coyote Lake, CA

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In retrospect, I probably should have shot RGB from the dark sky site and left Ha for the backyard. In addition, it was very windy, so I probably should have dumped Cassie […]

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Deep Sky / Long Exposure Photography

Imperfection

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Another long clear night. Since the webcam was already installed and focused, I started the evening working WCS to refine my polar alignment. Azimuth was essentially perfect. Elevation started around 200 and […]

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Deep Sky / General / Long Exposure Photography / Maintenance / Observatory / Observing Reports

Five hours of Guided images

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…with zero dropped subframes. I spent a little time refining the polar alignment last night. I am still getting some drift while running unguided; I calculated it to be about 6′ from […]

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Deep Sky / Gear / Long Exposure Photography / Mount / Telescope

Veronica gets a shot at the NJP

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Buoyed with the success of the NJP with Pumpkin, I decided to start upping the ante. Pumpkin was mounted offset to one side, but I decided that Veronica should be balanced over […]

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Deep Sky / Gear / General / Long Exposure Photography / Observing Reports

NGC2244, The Rosette Nebula in Monoceros

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With the newly-tuned mount, I decided to try Pumpkin on some more unguided imaging. After the “baseline” from the previous night, I now wanted to see what this MFWB could really do. […]

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Techniques

Polar Alignment Calculations

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Here’s a page that derives Polar Alignment Calculations. (update 5/2020: the original site is gone, so I found the text on Wayback and am inserting it below. This is by the original […]

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Gear / Observatory / Telescope

Special Guest Star takes the mount at Hilltop O

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The Astro Jedi needed somewhere to store his light sab—- I mean, bucket, and I was only too happy to accommodate him. I have decided that I need to come to a […]

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General / Maintenance / Observatory

Dome shutter is motorized again!

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I finally decided to bite the bullet and fix the shutter motor. Things went sideways last winter, and I’ve been opening the shutter manually (and tying it shut with rope, so we […]

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ATM

Trixie 2017 – tube mods

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I finally got around to cutting the MTA-UTA tubes to length; the only eyepiece that would come to focus with the focuser spacer in place is the Televue 55mm Plossl. If I […]

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