A couple of nights of wide field after a great galaxy season

Well galaxy season was fun and it gave me some good times with my first big telescope, the Edge 8HD, but after not having any wide field targets for a few months, it was nice to get a couple shots out of the meade 70mm APO and try out my new Spacecat51! I had some troubles leading up to these shots because of my HEQ5 pro mount but they were worked out for these shots. I will save those fixes for another post. Here was my first target:

This is the Elephants trunk. It is huge… This was shot at 300 seconds x 30 subs. Used the L-enhance on the meade 70mm and this was my first use of my new asi071mc pro. Ive seen some excellent images of this target before and while mine doesn’t look like the hubble space pallet, I really like the way it turned out. I think I might try this one again because I think I can get more out of it. Here is my next night’s image:

Now we are talking! I think my horsehead nebula is my favorite image but this is a very close second and I did this from my backyard! Here is the eastern and western veil nebula. This is also another 30x300 second exposure and I did this with the Spacecat 51 and the asi294mc pro. I regret not using the 071 on this target because I think I could’ve pulled out a little more detail but its hard for me to complain about this image. I will definitely take some more shots at this as it comes up higher in the sky with some different setups. I also want to try and edit this image again and get rid of some stars. Dunno if that is possible but Im gonna try.

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!