Category: Astrophotography

As mentioned in an earlier post, I set up my 11″ Elf with the Hyperstar so I could shoot at f/1.9 and added an Optolong L-eNhance filter to the setup. This filter blocks most light but lets the reddish Hydrogen-alpha line, the blueish Hydrogen-beta line, and the greenish Oxygen III through so that your color camera can still do RGB photography. I used my ZWO ASI294MC Pro.

I’ve never shot the Veil Nebula before. It is a large (6 times the diameter of the Moon) but faint supernova remnant in the constellation of Cygnus the Swan. Recent measurements have it about 2400 light years away and the progenitor star exploded 10,000 to 20,000 years ago.

Click the images for full size.

Here we have several objects in the southern Milky Way, nestled between Sagittarius and Scorpius, as seen from the River Ridge Observatory Saturday night. In the center is the Pipe Nebula (or Barnard 67 after the astronomer who pioneered the study of these dark nebulae). It’s a tobacco pipe, or maybe something besides tobacco, and you can see the bowl and stem of it. You can see the dark nebulae tracing their way all over this. These are cold gas and dust that aren’t glowing but instead blocking the light from the stars behind them.Glowing red in the upper left is the Lagoon Nebula, one of the best star forming regions in our neck of the woods.This was made from 40 60 second images with a Canon 800D and 50mm lens at f/2. Cropped a little and processed in Photoshop.

Last Friday night/Saturday morning, I took some pictures of the Eagle Nebula (Messier 16) i n the constellation Serpens (the serpent). This was with my 11″ SCT & Hyperstar with my ZWO ASI294MC Pro. It needs more time, I only have 30 64 second images here, but I like how it turned out. Click the image for a close up.

According to Wikipedia, “The Eagle Nebula (catalogued as Messier 16 or M16, and as NGC 6611, and also known as the Star Queen Nebula and The Spire) is a young open cluster of stars in the constellation Serpens, discovered by Jean-Philippe de Cheseaux in 1745–46. Both the “Eagle” and the “Star Queen” refer to visual impressions of the dark silhouette near the center of the nebula, an area made famous as the “Pillars of Creation” imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope. The nebula contains several active star-forming gas and dust regions, including the aforementioned Pillars of Creation.”