Learn Astrophotography with Frank!

This is my first attempt at a mosaic… basically stitching together three views of an object that’s normally too large in the sky to fit within the field of view of my telescope. It came out alright! We’ve had a great run of clear nights the past few weeks in Florida, and I’ve invested just…

Every year I try and do a better job of capturing and processing the Bubble Nebula in Cassiopeia. Here’s this year’s attempt. The Bubble Nebula is one of my favorite objects. Not only is it interesting scientifically (the bubble is the stellar wind of a hot O-type star blowing away the surrounding gases,) it’s also…

A progression of photos taken at 15-minute intervals from 10:30 PM to 12:15 AM on the evening of Jan 20-21, 2019. Click to zoom in – there’s a lot of detail!

The galaxy M106 is an interesting one; it’s large and relatively bright – about the same size as Andromeda. And it’s in a busy part of the sky, within Canes Venatici, with lots of galactic neighbors. This image has been enhanced with Hydrogen emission data; that’s what the red dots and tendrils are. There’s one…

Formally this nebula is called vdB93, but more commonly it is a part of the “seagull nebula.” The larger nebula really does look like a flying bird, but it’s a little too big to fit in the field of view of my telescope – so I focused instead on its “head” where most of the…

This is NGC281, or the “Pac-Man” nebula. I think it’s one of those objects that might look a little like its name if you’re viewing it through a big telescope in a dark sky, but takes on a totally different character in long-exposure, narrowband images such as this. This is a total of 13 hours…