Astrophotography Archives - Page 43 of 61

July 25, 2020December 16, 2020

7/25/2020 The Trifid Nebula

I captured this image of the Trifid Nebula early Saturday morning with my 11″ SCT and Hyperstar. The original image was significantly larger but the nebula is a little small for that scale and so I cropped it. This was made from 30 64 second images.

According to Wikepedia, “The Trifid Nebula (catalogued as Messier 20 or M20 and as NGC 6514) is an H II region located in Sagittarius. It was discovered by Charles Messier on June 5, 1764. Its name means ‘divided into three lobes’. The object is an unusual combination of an open cluster of stars; an emission nebula (the lower, red portion), a reflection nebula (the upper, blue portion) and a dark nebula (the apparent ‘gaps’ within the emission nebula that cause the trifurcated appearance; these are also designated Barnard 85). Viewed through a small telescope, the Trifid Nebula is a bright and peculiar object, and is thus a perennial favorite of amateur astronomers. The Trifid Nebula is a star-forming region in the Scutum spiral arm of the Milky Way. The most massive star that has formed in this region is HD 164492A, an OIII star with a mass more than 20 times the mass of the Sun. This star is surrounded by a cluster of approximately 3100 young stars.”

Below is another view of the nebula. Unintentionally, this was recorded in monochrome. I’ve only cropped the rough edges to give you a better idea of the scale that the Hyperstar and this camera can achieve.

July 24, 2020December 16, 2020

7/18/2020 The Andromeda Galaxy

It took me nearly a week to process this image but I finally did. I’ve seen many better images of the galaxy but this is without a doubt the best I’ve ever done of it even with my poor Photoshop skills. This was taken with my Hyperstar adapter on the C11 (Elf) with my ZWO ASI 294MC Pro. Approximately 60 images of 60 seconds each went into it. It’s not a mosaic, the galaxy fit into the field of view. Stacked in Deep Sky Stacker then post processing in Photoshop.

July 18, 2020December 16, 2020

7/17/2020 Comet NEOWISE

I returned to the Maumelle River WMA with Carl to try for the comet again. The conditions were not as good as Wednesday night. Clouds, haze, heat, mosquitoes. The sky did do some clearing so I took some shots. I set up a tracking mount this time since I wanted to shoot at 300mm instead of 50mm. I hoped to take 30 second subs but my slapdash polar alignment didn’t allow for that. I settled on 10 seconds which was still too long but without tracking, I could only have done a second or so.

The haze cut down the contrast a lot and in fact toward the end you could barely make out the comet in binoculars. When I first looked at the images, I thought the night was a bust but decided to stack 10 images (with Deepsky Stacker) and see what that looked like. I was able to get something I could work with. I processed the result in Lightroom Classic. Each frame was 10 seconds, ISO 3200, 300mm FL, f/5.6.

I might be kidding myself but I think I can barely make out the ion trail above the bright dust trail to the right of the comet’s head. The dust trail curves downward slightly while the ion trail is straighter.