Category: Deep Sky

Here’s a picture of Messier 3 (M3) in the constellation of Canes Venatici. Taken last night with my 11″ SCT set at f/6.3 at the River Ridge Observatory. If you are familiar with the stars Arcturus (4th brightest in the sky) and Cor Caroli (Alpha Canes Venatici) this lies almost exactly halfway between them and is an easy target with binoculars. M3 is a globular cluster of about 500,000 stars about 34,000 light years from here.
Come to National Astronomy Day at Pinnacle Mountain State Park on May 11 and you might see it for yourself. Click on the image to see it full size.

Above is a picture of the edge on spiral galaxy known as NGC 891 in Andromeda, discovered by William Herschel perhaps the greatest astronomer ever. I took this Sunday evening at the River Ridge Observatory with my 11″ SCT on a CGEM DX mount and my Canon EOS T5. This is a composite of six 60 second images and my paltry Photoshop skills. I framed the shot to get the other little edge on spiral on the left. I don’t know it’s designation yet. There is also a a fuzzy above it about a third the way from the top.

Below my friend Don Walters imported the picture into PixInsight and ran a script to identify several galaxies. I had spotted three counting the big one, he found eight more. Looks like a star chart with those lines and designations.

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.