Category: Deep Sky

Wednesday night was a good night at the River Ridge Observatory. Not too cold and practically no wind and no dew. I decided to image NGC 7000, the North America Nebula, with my Hyperstar enabled C11 and an IDAS NBZ UHS dual narrowband filter and my ZWO ASI 294 MC Pro camera. I got three hours of data at f/1.9.

I decided to go all fake-Hubble Palette on this. If you are not aware, the Hubble palette uses filters to extract red from Hydrogen alpha and a deeper red from Sulphur II and blue/green from Oxygen and a monochrome camera. Since the first two are red, you can’t do a true Hubble palette with a one shot color camera like the 294MC Pro. But you can fake it.

Here’s information about this nebula from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_America_Nebula

It was a good night at the River Ridge Observatory. This was the fourth attempt at this object in the last couple weeks and the first where nothing went wrong. This is from a stack of 50 three minute images. Done with my 11″ SCT (Elf) at f/6.3 with my ZWO ASI 294 MC Pro.

It was a short night at the River Ridge Observatory. I planned to stay until the Moon rose after midnight but the forecast mild winds turned into frequent moderate gusts the gave my telescope a case of the jitters. My target object needed to climb out of the muck so I started with this globular cluster in Sagittarius called M22. If you saw my image of M13 from the night before you will immediately notice that this one is less compact. Although globular clusters are all just big balls of stars, they don’t all look alike. In fact, there are nine classifications for them from less to more dense. This picture was just 20 or so two minute subs as the wind picked up toward the end.