Category: Deep Sky

It was a good night at the River Ridge Observatory. Warmer temperatures, no wind, good seeing. My primary target was the Triangulum Galaxy (aka M33) which I’ve never gotten a good image of. This one could be better but is still the best I’ve done with the object. It is three hours of two minute subs using my 11″ SCT at f/1.9 with my ZWO ASI 294MC Pro and an IDAS LPS D3 light pollution filter. After I finished this object, I spent an hour capturing “Caroline’s Rose” (aka NGC 7789).

From Wikipedia:

The Triangulum Galaxy is a spiral galaxy 2.73 million light-years (ly) from Earth in the constellation Triangulum. It is catalogued as Messier 33 or NGC (New General Catalogue) 598. With the D25 isophotal diameter of 18.74 kiloparsecs (61,100 light-years), the Triangulum Galaxy is the third-largest member of the Local Group of galaxies, behind the Andromeda Galaxy and the Milky Way. It is one of the most distant permanent objects that can be viewed with the naked eye.

NGC 7789 (also known as Caroline’s Rose or the White Rose Cluster) is an open cluster in Cassiopeia that was discovered by Caroline Herschel in 1783. Her brother William Herschel included it in his catalog as H VI.30. This cluster is also known as the “White Rose” Cluster or “Caroline’s Rose” Cluster because when seen visually, the loops of stars and dark lanes look like the swirling pattern of rose petals as seen from above.

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.