Sun and moon combo: I finally got some OK skies overnight last night and few enough clouds to shoot through during the day today to get another moon/sun combo. These images were captured a little over 9 hours apart.
Picture of the day: This wild-looking supernova remnant is nicknamed the Jellyfish Nebula. Supernovas produce some of the strangest objects in the night sky.
Finally! A clear day for some solar imaging and what a view today! My phone has been buzzing all day as all of these spots are firing off solar flares.
The sun and moon captured about 6 hours apart on April 23. The sun was super active with tons of sunspots and the moon was 100% full. I captured the moon right after it cleared the trees and the color is unedited.
Both were captured from my backyard with my QHY168C camera and EQ6-R mount. I used a homemade solar filter with Thousand Oaks film for the sun shots.
Abell 31/SH2-290 is a very large, but faint planetary nebula in the constellation Cancer. I knew I was in for a challenge when I took my first 10 minute sub of this object and could barely make it out. I gathered 30 hours of exposure time, but it could use a great deal more to help control the noise with the extensive stretching needed.
I wasn't planning to do any solar imaging yesterday, but I changed my mind once I saw what the sunspots were up to! That large sunspot region is cranking out solar flares at an impressive rate. Hopefully I'll get another chance to image on a clearer day before they disappear around the side.
It was not a good day for solar imaging, but I pointed my scope (with solar filter, of course) at the sun and waited for a break in the clouds. I finally got a bit of one and captured 2000 frames of video. Normally, I tell the software to pick the top 25%, but that stack had weird artifacts. Lowering to 5% produced a really nice image, which might be my favorite yet.
It's the time of year when widefield imagers like myself get extra jealous of those long scopes and ponder what to image until the big stuff pops back up. I captured this data in one session last year and never did anything with it. I decided I'd take a swing at processing it, complete with 2x drizzle, heavy crop, and some BlurX tossed at it.
This is a work-in-progress image of the Boogeyman Nebula. Located off Orion's left side, this area is rich with red hydrogen alpha gas and dark dust. This image contains about 6 hours of Ha data + 11 hours of broadband data, but it could use quite a bit more. Orion is setting earlier and earlier and the nights are getting shorter, so hopefully I can grab enough data before it's gone for the season.
I've been capturing solar and lunar images with my 72mm refractor, but I figured I'd give the Dobsonian a go, since it has more focal length (1200mm vs. 420mm). I kept it simple to start - I connected my DSLR directly to the scope, framed up the moon on the edge of the field, and hit record until the moon drifted close to the edge of the frame. I re-framed and repeated several times. (Processing details in thread)
The dusty reflection nebula in this image is Messier 78, sometimes called "Casper the Friendly Ghost Nebula." The red wall on the left side is part of Barnard's Loop, which is a huge arc of bright red hydrogen gas. For this image, I combined 21 hours of broadband data with 9 hours of narrowband data to pop out the red color.
This is a weird one. The Crescent Nebula's shape comes from a fast-moving wave of emissions from a high-energy star colliding with a slower-moving wave of emissions from that same star earlier in its lifecycle. Whoa! The result is this weird brain shape wrapped in a nearly translucent blue oxygen shell.
From the constellation that brought you Orion Nebula and Horsehead Nebula, here is Monkey Head Nebula!
This is one example where I can see where it got its name - I see the profile of perhaps an orangutan (an ape, but close enough?) gazing off the left side of the image.