The North American Nebula (NGC 7000) is a heavily hydrogen rich emission nebula in the constellation Cygnus, near the tail of the swan shaped constellation in the northern sky. It’s fairly bright with an apparent magnitude of 4 but it does span a huge amount of space, about 2 degrees wide. It covers an area …
The new moon ahead of the 4th of July is a great time to start imaging Messier 16, known as the Eagle Nebula. A portion of this nebula was made famous by the Hubble Space Telescope‘s image of the Pillars of Creation which they imaged in spectra associated with Hydrogen, Sulphur and Oxygen. The “Hubble” …
One thing astronomy largely depends on is a dark sky. Light pollution is a real drag if you’re trying to photograph faint fuzzy things, which I happen to enjoy quite a lot. There have been ways to quantify the lack of light in the sky for years but I’ve not been able to put that …
The Whirlpool Galaxy I took last month compared to one I took from this month. The only real difference is location. The one I took from home is in Bortle 8 or 9 skies here in Allen, Texas. Surrounded by 440 acres of 24×7 illuminated concrete inside a 2 mile radius doesn’t help one tiny …
These two galaxies are believed to have “collided” about 100 million years ago. It’s one of the brightest galactic groups visible from here and was cataloged by Charles Messier from his observatory in Paris on October 13, 1773. The smaller companion galaxy was discovered in 1781 by Pierre Mechain and is recorded today as NGC …
Two nebular regions know as the Tadpole nebula on the left and the Flaming Star nebula on the right. These two heavily hydrogen rich regions are excited by the stars near them and radiate light at a wavelength of 656.28 nm which puts it firmly in the red part of the spectrum. Portions of the …
One of the things that we as amateur astrophotographers have to contend with is the ever invasive light pollution of the areas we live in. If you’re particularly unfortunate, you live in an area with large built up complexes. I have 18.7 million square feet (1.7 million sq. meters) of fully illuminated retail parking and …
A long weekend trip to X Bar Ranch near Eldorado, Texas yielded some good results despite the wildfire smoke being pulled down from Colorado.
Messier 16 Eastern Veil Nebula
I intended to do a comparison of a couple of different Light Pollution filters but the weather hasn’t exactly cooperated. All I’ve got so far is 3 hours of data on M27 with a Hutech IDAS LPS-D2, my newest filter. I want to compare that as closely as possible with the older LPS-P2 to see …