Astrophotography

Part of my series in the constellation of Cygnus, are the Western and Eastern sections of the Veil Nebula. The relatively nearby (2400 light-years) remnants of a supernova occuring between 10-20 thousand years ago and composed primarly of oxygen, sulfur and hydrogen, making them a fantastic target for narrowband imaging. Between weather, the length of the nights and target availability, Cygnus has been one of my favorite constellations to shoot this year, after having very little luck previously with nebula imaging.

I had some great viewing of Cygnus this summer and was able to take an assortment of nebula shots that I am pretty happy with overall. The Crescent Nebula was a bit of an experimental shot for me, I really had no idea how it was going to turn out in my field of view. I wound up taking two shots about a month apart. The first one in mid-July I took a handful of light frames while just scouting around Cygnus and was pretty intrigued by the result, though the star field obscuring the nebula was pretty intense.

I had some great opportunities over the summer to work with the lead astronomer of the Battle Point Astronomical Association in order to help better align the Ritchie telescope (it turns out that working on very large and custom mounts is a lot more challenging than backyard commodity setups). After some prying and hammering and replacing some worn out parts, we were able to get the RA axis almost perfectly aligned, though we still have some noticeable drift in the DEC axis.

Most commonly overshadowed by its slightly more majestic partner in the Hercules constellation (M13), M92 is still one of the most prominent globular clusters of the northern skies at only around 27 thousand light-years distance. There’s something alluring to me about globular clusters in particular, perhaps related to their age–nearly as old as our galaxy itself–or simply just because I like to imagine what the night sky would look like if our solar system were inside one.

A stretch of gravitationally interacting galaxies forming part of the Virgo cluster, Markarian’s Chain includes M86 (the large elliptical galaxy in the center-right of the shot, the central galaxy of the Virgo cluster) and further to the left in the shot the galaxy pair NGC 4453 & NGC 4438, known as the ‘Eyes Galaxies’ for easily apparent reasons. Unfortunately not a part of the sky that I can shoot from my own yard.

Capturing the Owl Nebula has probably been one of the more difficult targets for me. Bad weather, bad luck, bad tracking and just a dozen small things that all got in between me and being able to take a good photo. My first attempt was back at the beginning of April, and I had initially chosen the target to do some testing of my light pollution filter. Unhappy with the results though I doubled-down and kept making adjustments and shooting until I was able to get something I felt okay with.

While I wait for my camera to be replaced, it’s back to my trusty Canon DSLR. At just over 12 hours of data captured (just under 11 hours actually used in integration) taken over April 6th and 12th, I was able to put together a view of M106 and some of the surrounding galaxies, capturing the wispier halo that envelopes the brighter and more active core of the galaxy. This was the first time I’ve used data from multiple nights for a single shot, and I’ll certainly be making some improvements in the future, mainly around how to control for field rotation and some tweaks for larger batch integration in PixInsight.

After nearly two months of waiting for my new camera to finally arrive (QHY268C), I was able to get 4 hours of observing on a night of middling seeing and some challenging light pollution issues before it started having hardware issues requiring shipping it back for replacement. I love the arrangement of M81 and M82 next to each other in the sky, with one straight-on and the other seen from the edge, though it was a challenge to get this shot to turn out at all with the overall low-quality data I gathered.

With the improvement I saw in my revisting of M51 I was pretty eager to try M101 again as well. Not the least because it is in an ideal position in the sky for my yard setup (with trees, I have an band from around 70° to 30° declination that I can track throughout the night with RA 14H currently clearing obstructions right about 10PM, so anything in Ursa Major is an ideal target for me in March).

Despite pessimistic weather models, this past Thursday turned out to be the first clear night I’ve had for observing since last September. While I was late getting started (due to said pessimistic models) and also my first time trying to setup in the yard of our new house, it turned out to be a pretty ideal night. Rather chilly (better for my uncooled 800D if not so great for me), and clear of clouds until past 4AM.

Another story of revisiting a previous target with a bit more experience. A similar story to my introduction to imaging Jupiter, this shot was originally taken in July of 2019, and mostly due to inexperience there was only a single usable light frame (of 30 seconds total exposure) to work with and processing it was just tweaking levels in Photoshop to get it looking as good as possible. I figured now that I was a little bit more comfortable with PixInsight, it might be time to revisit the old data and see if I could clean it up any.

Back in summer 2019, while at a friend’s house looking through his telescope at Jupiter, the idea of getting into astrophotography started to germinate someone in my brain. Soon after, I had done the bare minimum of reading to find some open-source software tools for image stacking and roped him into staying up late and putting his gear to use. With his Celeston 6" SCT, a Nikon DSLR (with a hand controller) and lots of new software I had no idea how to use, we went to work.

My first attempt at capturing M33–the Triangulum galaxy. Was finally able to get a good amount of time on a target (6 hours, captured over 2 nights), and got what were easily my best results to date. Triangulum, 2020 - Full Size

Tried my luck at another galaxy target, this time the Whirlpool galaxy. While I wasn’t able to get much more integration time (only 80 minutes), the shot turned out a little cleaner thanks to better flats and darks. Still wound up with some noise that I wasn’t able to eliminate in processing, likely due to alignment errors. Whirlpool Galaxy - Full Size

After quite a few failed nights working out all the issues in my setup, this was my first successful deep-sky shot. M101, the Pinwheel Galaxy. Plenty still went wrong, I was only able to get 75 minutes worth of exposures before dew and tracking issues shut me down for the night and my flats didn’t turn out (leaving me to crop out a large dust mote), but I was still happy to see the first glimpse of another galaxy taken through my telescope.