Galaxies, Clusters and Nebulas

In the past 6 weeks I've done more stargazing than I have in the past 6 months. This includes 3 or 4 all night sessions on Mount Seymour and a few nights in the park across from our condo. The photography is fun, but very demanding. Even though it can take an hour to get one good picture, being able to look at what I've accomplished is definitely worth all the cold nights.

The latest photos, taken July 29th include a nice shot of the Triangulum Galaxy and the Pleiades. I'm especially pleased with the Pleiades mostly because I also captured the reflection nebula around it.

A few more summer pics

I'm taking full advantage of the nice weather I've finally been given. After months and months of cloud and rain its finally summer and warm in Vancouver. So over the last month I've spent many hours staring at the stars and the little LCD display on my DSLR. All that work has resulted in the following two pictures (actually there are about half a dozen more but they didn't turn out particularly well). I'm slowing getting the focusing issue under control at least with the my refractor (the SCT is still a pain to deal with photographically speaking). Anyway these pictures are of the Dumbell Nebula (look to a previous post if you want to compare it to my first image of the Dumbell Nebula.)

The second image is of the Ring Nebula. Its a very small, bright planetary nebula. This picture (like most of the images) was taken through my 85 mm refractor and I think the next time I decide to image the Ring Nebula I'll try it with my 8" SCT. Its such a small target that the extra magnification should make a bug difference.

Galaxies & Nebulae of the summer

After one of the first stargazing seasons I can remember it looks like summer has finally arrived. The last few days have been beautiful. So last Saturday I set out for a 4.5 hour stargazing session on Mount Seymour. My goal was to test my telescopes focusing ability and see how long I could track for. I was also eager to try and get some nice deep sky pictures. In addition to this I really wanted to get my autoguider working properly.

I managed to more or less accomplish most of my goals. Focusing was acceptable on the TV-85. Not perfect, to do that I suspect I'll need a motor-focuser (and a camera with live view so I can properly use my Bahtinov mask). The maximum time I could track for without trailing becoming too noticible was just under 3 minutes. Both of these resulted in some nice deep sky pictures. I still have higher expectations but it was a good start.

Summer Sun

Well, after what seems like months of rain and clouds it seems like summer might actually have arrived. The last few days have been more or less rain free and the clouds are slowly starting to reveal the blue sky behind them. Unfortunately the evenings still manage to muster enough clouds to prevent any serious stargazing. So today I took advantage of the warm summer weather to do some solar observing.

Its ironic but the sun is one of my favorite targets. There is so much detail and structure that just isn't apparent on other celestial bodies. This is particularly true with my PST. I managed to take some decent HA videos but only one of them actually processed decently. Still, I'm hopefully that the next few weeks will provide more opportunities! Enjoy!