Wednesday's Saturn

We had a clear night last week! It wasn't even that cold. I reassembled the big scope and snapped a pic of Saturn.

The Trapezium

Here are two pics of the Trapezium star cluster. It's embedded in the center of the Great Orion Nebula. These images are from a week ago, we had a nice clear night here. I had imaged the Trapezium previously with my old camera; I don't think I captured any more detail this time but the color balance is much better IMO. The first picture is in true color.



The second is a false color image that includes near-infrared light - this allows you to see more stars that are otherwise obscured by all the dust in the nebula.

Nov 28th

Here's Jupiter from the night of the 28th. There's a moon shadow near the limb. Jupiter season is winding to a close, not sure if I'll get any more good pics until next opposition!

Nov 19th, 2010

Here is Jupiter from last Friday night (I think?) The jet stream was right overhead that night so conditions we not very good, but at least it was clear!

Clearing off the Hard Drive

The Straight Wall and surroundings on the Moon

An old Jupiter taken with a wide field planetary camera. From Oct 14th.

The same setup, taken in UV light.

Tested out a different set of software for deep sky imaging, and took this pic of the Elephant's Trunk Nebula. Misread the histogram on the new software a vastly underexposed the image! Was able to salvage the above image however.

Here's a pic of the tiny storm that is believed to be the first sign of the return of the Southern Equatorial Belt. Taken Thursday night.

Not Jupiter - The Dumbbell Nebula (M27)

This is my first Jupiter-free update in a while. This pic is of a planetary nebula, a dying star, in the summer constellation Vulpecula. It's called the Dumbbell Nebula but I think it looks more like a Bowtie Nebula. It's object #27 on Messier's list.

I took this picture with my 100mm refractor, the color data is from an image I took a few years ago with my DSLR, and the brightness (luminosity) was captured last month with my ST-402, a highly sensitive monochrome camera. I combined the two images in Photoshop. You can click on the pic to get a slightly larger version.

Telescope Comparison

I finished processing my data from the 12th last night. I had both the 9.25" and the 18" scope out that night , here's a comparison of how Jupiter turned out in each.