This comet will reach its brightest point a couple of weeks from now, but the skies were clear this morning so I figured I should go for it while I can! The tail’s not as pronounced as I hoped, and processing is a bit sloppy in a couple of spots. But hey, it’s a comet. Pretty.
Had a couple of clear nights recently, and trained the ‘scope at the Rosette Nebula again. By combining this year’s data with last year’s, I created an image with a total 27 hours of exposure time! The Rosette Nebula is about 5,000 light-years away within the constellation Monoceros, and is the birthplace of the cluster…
M13 is one of the most photogenic and popular globular clusters, and it’s pretty easy to see with nothing more than a pair of binoculars if you know where to look! But it’s even prettier with a long exposure – this is about 3 hours of exposure time. Blow it up to full size, and…
The galaxies NGC4567 and NGC4568 are colliding 60 million light-years away. This is really pushing the resolution limits here; we had good “seeing” last night meaning not a lot of turbulence to smear out the light reaching my telescope, and I carefully collimated and calibrated things prior to imaging last night. About as good as…
Imaging the planets requires completely different techniques and equipment than deep-sky stuff, and it’s something I’m not really good at yet. What matters the most is the seeing conditions – how stable the atmosphere is. A big part of taking good planetary images is just having the perseverance to get out there whenever the seeing…
Granted this is only a portion of it, but for the life of me I don’t see a pelican in this thing. But, it’s still pretty. I processed this object two ways: using the “Hubble palette” that maps red, green, and blue to Sulfur, Hydrogen, and Oxygen emissions (that results in the pretty blue one)…
If you’re serious about becoming a better astrophotographer, like with anything, it’s all about practice. With every image you produce, you’ll learn something that makes your next image a little better. But life has a habit of getting in the way. You’ve had a long, tiring day at work – do you really want to…
