My Trip to Terilingua

A couple of weekends ago, I decided to take my Meade 70mm APO refractor imaging scope down to Big Bend and the ghost town of Terilingua. Big Bend is know around the country as one of the few “dark” sites with zero light pollution. I was pretty excited when the weather started to look very favorable for not only taking some great pics of galaxies and nebulas, but also to get some of my first shots of our own galaxy, the milky way. With as little as a tripod and a DSLR camera, one can do astrophotography and the milky way is the perfect place to start.

The first night, it was cloudy to start but looking at the forecast, the milky way was going to start coming up around 2 and the clouds were supposed to have moved out. So I set my alarm for 2am and went to sleep around 10pm. I didn’t need my alarm to wake me up. I was waiting for it around 1:30 and I went outside. It was a site I really cant explain. Total darkness and more stars than I could imagine. The milky way looked like a cloud coming towards me at first. I set up my tripod and star tracker and got my DSLR going with an intervalometer. I had a fast f2.8 14mm Rokinon on my camera to collect as much light as I could and also get a fairly wide angle of the sky. The hardest part was getting focus. I don’t think I was able to get it as you can see in my image. While its pretty, its not as sharp as I would like it:

The milky way with a Nikon D5300 and a Rokinon f2.8 14mm lens

Besides the fact that its out of focus, I was not able to find a good foreground (which I think is essential for a nice milky way shot).  So I got this.  Basically this has just given me a taste of what I can do and when I go back, I will be more prepared and hopefully get a better shot(s). 

On the next night and night after, I was able to enjoy a sunset while setting up my scope and the clouds would clear out both nights just as the sun was going down. It was perfect. I really wish I had more time there but since I didn’t and I wasn’t interested in staying up all night, I didn’t get as much exposure as I wanted. Each of my pics had exposure times of about an hour. 180 second subs and 300 second subs. I think the fact there was no light pollution helped me to get great images with less time but I can only imagine how awesome my images would be with 3x the integration. Here are my results from my trip:

M45 Pleiades

M101 Pinwheel Galaxy

M51 Whirlpool galaxy

Horsehead and Flame Nebula in Orion

I think one of the coolest things is in a couple of the images of galaxies, you can actually see smaller fainter galaxies. See if you can spot some! The last image of horsehead is probably what I am most proud of. I could look at the image all day. It was done with only 10-15 sub exposures of about 3 minutes per sub. I had an Optolong L-enhance filter on which will make the camera more sensitive to hydrogen alpha and Oiii ionized oxygen bands of light. With these pictures under my belt, I am excited for my next trip out to Terilingua and Big Bend to get some more targets!