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First clear night in forever
It’s been a few weeks of clouds, so when I finally got a clear night I spent a long time out there finding new objects. It’s mostly galaxies this time of year, but I think the two planetary nebulas at the end are my favorites of the set.
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Whirlpool Galaxy
I decided to focus on M51 this time. I also experimented with my camera in monochrome mode to reduce chroma noise. The wide shot is about 70 minutes of exposure and looks nice and smooth, but subtracting the background gradient reveals how little dynamic range there really is.
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Orion and the Whirlpool
Managed to get a few images in a shorter night with my SCT. Was having mount trouble unfortunately. M87 was a new observation. I was hoping to resolve the jet at the core, but wasn’t getting enough stars to align repeated exposures. Looks like I accidentally saved out my only image with star markers enabled.
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Antannae Galaxies
This is a pair of colliding galaxies, named for the long thin wisps extending from them. Those didn’t resolve in my image. This target is low and in the middle of the Detroit light dome from my home, so it was very difficult to get anything out of it.
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Owl Nebula
I caught a glimpse of the Owl Nebula through my small refractor and decided to get a closer look with my C8 SCT. It’s a challenging target – dim enough that it doesn’t stand out much from the light pollution even with a longer exposure.
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DSOs and Two Quasars
Another clear night with the little scope! This includes my first quasar observations, billions of light years away.
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Supernova!
While looking up M108 to see if there were any interesting facts about it I learned that there was a supernova detected in it just last month! So I went back to my photo and found it. The red glow doesn’t appear in older high-quality photos but the star-forming region just below it does, so […]
