Category: Deep Sky

On what might be the final clear night of the year, I set up my C11 (Elf) and used my Canon EOS t5 to take this picture. I used BackyardEOS to control the camera. This is 21 30 second images combined. I haven’t done deepsky other than with the stock lens of my camera in a long time and I’ve forgotten the techniques I once knew. The seeing Friday was not as bad as predicted but not great and focus was hard to come by. Once I worked through the details of acquisition, I got my images. After acquisition I remembered my focal reducer/corrector which would have helped, this is prime focus at f/10. Saturday morning I auto aligned in Photoshop and switched back to Lightroom for processing. Click image for a larger view.

Here is a short (2 frame) video of a nearby star called “Barnard’s Star” in the constellation of Ophiuchus. After the famous Alpha Centauri triple star system, this is the closest star to the Solar System at 6 light years away. By a weird coincidence, just over one hundred years ago an astronomer named E.E. Barnard discovered that this star is moving across the sky faster than any other object in the sky beyond the Solar System. This “proper motion” is measured at 10 arcseconds per year. By comparison, the planet Jupiter appears to be about 40 arcseconds across from Earth. Not a lot but easily measurable with a telescope and camera. In these two images, take 26 months apart, we can see one star move to the left just a little.

Last night, in 20+ degree weather, while I was home piddling on my laptop the Robotic Research Telescope at the River Ridge Observatory was busy taking some pictures for me. The run didn’t complete, I presume clouds came in, but I got 4 60 second images in red, green, and blue as well as one visual. I stacked those this morning according to color then combined in Photoshop with a how-to I found. Obviously 60 seconds was too much for some of the stars and it filled the pixel well depth or whatever it is called in several places. The main thing is color from monochrome and I don’t even know what I’m doing. I left the potential luminance image out of this, it is strictly RGB not LRGB.