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 …
Jan 7/8, 2020Allen, Texas (Bortle 9)No LP filter (nuts!)60x 2 minutes (2 hours total integration time) William Optics RedCat51QHY 168C Cooled CMOS color cameraiOptron CEM60EC mount, unguided
Taken from my back yard in Allen, TX. Bortle 9 skies.