It was a great night at the River Ridge Observatory last night. There was some haze from west coast forest fires but other than that it was clear with little wind and mild temperatures. I might have heard a coyote. I set up my 11″ SCT with a 0.63 focal reducer and broadband light pollution filter. I started with the Great Globular Cluster in Hercules, aka M13. This was followed by the Ring Nebula, or M57, as filler. Truth be told it is a little small for this scale but I wanted to wait for my next object to get past the meridian and be in the western part of the sky. That third object was the Dumbbell Nebula, aka M27. The Moon rose a little after 11PM so I packed it up and went home to a half-night’s sleep. I’m planning to go again tonight.
M13, the Great Globular Cluster in HerculesM57, the Ring Nebula in LyraM27, the Dumbbell Nebula in Vulpecula
Last night I did some astrophotography at the River Ridge Observatory before the Moon came up. This is the Cocoon Nebula aka IC5146 in Cygnus. This was shot with an IDAS NBZ UHS dual narrowband filter that lets Hydrogen Alpha and Oxygen III light through and little else. The former is red, the latter green. The blue channel was almost nonexistent. This was almost two hours of five minute shots with my 11″ SCT at f/6.3 and ZWO ASO 294MC Pro.
Friday, August 26, 2022 was a good night to observe. I set up my 11″ SCT, Elf, with my ZWO ASI 294 Pro camera at f/6.3. I started with the Eagle Nebula (M16) in Serpens then later I switched to the Crescent Nebula in Cygnus. In both cases, I set up a session of 30 5 minute images at a gain of 300. This means a total of as much as 2.5 hours. The first finished at about 12:30 and the other at 3AM. Around midnight I noticed the Milky Way very bright and that the Pleiades had cleared the trees. Then, I spotted bright orange/red “star” through a gap in the trees that I knew immediately had to be Mars. I had lost track of it and now it was at least two magnitudes brighter than it was the last time I saw it. When I finished and left at 3:40, Orion was just rising.
Both of these images were shot and processed similarly. I used StarNet++ to remove the stars so that I could process the nebula separately.
M16, the Eagle Nebula in Serpens. The nebula contains several active star-forminggas and dust regions, including the “Pillars of Creation”.NGC 6888, the Crescent Nebula in Cygnus. The Crescent Nebula is an emission nebula in the constellation Cygnus, about 5000 light-years away from Earth. It was discovered by William Herschel in 1792. It is formed by the fast stellar wind from the Wolf-Rayet star WR 136 (HD 192163) colliding with and energizing the slower moving wind ejected by the star when it became a red giant around 250,000 to 400,000 years ago. The result of the collision is a shell and two shock waves, one moving outward and one moving inward. The inward moving shock wave heats the stellar wind to X-ray-emitting temperatures.
