Astronomy Nightly

Here's my latest astrophotography project, the Rosette Nebula. The clouds haven't been kind lately and it's getting late in nebula season to image the Rosette, so I had to scrape together what time I could on it. I gathered 12.2 hours of data over 5 nights for this. After rejecting images with high …

It's amazing what you can see if you stare long enough. I'm lucky to have fairly decent skies at our home. They're not world-class skies, but they're not horrible either. Once leaving the nearest "road to town," you'd drive about 5 miles on winding country roads to find our house. There are no stree…

Here's another backyard astronomy project. This is the Fish Head Nebula, IC1795. In the sky, it's a little corner hanging off of the Heart Nebula on the opposite side of the Soul Nebula in the constellation Cassiopeia. The Heart and Soul get lots of astronomer attention and I shot both of them this …

This was another side-quest project while waiting for a much bigger project's target to rise. The Elephant's Trunk Nebula is a star-forming area and emission nebula that's part of a much larger area named IC1396. It hangs out about 2400 light years away in the same chunk of sky as the constellation …

Honestly, this started out as another "filler" project. I was looking ahead to winter projects and wanted to get fairly deep looks at several targets I hadn't shot before. A little over a month ago when I started this, those targets didn't get high enough in the sky to start imaging until several ho…

The Soul Nebula is very near my last project, the Heart Nebula, and is also an emission nebula in the Cassiopeia constellation. I captured over 56 hours of data for this image between October 17th and 23rd, 2024. I think this is another "my biggest project to date." I used Siril’s OSC_Extract_HaOIII…

The Heart Nebula is an emission nebula in the Cassiopeia constellation. The light from this left the Heart Nebula 7,500 years ago and thankfully found its way to my telescope. It's massive at 165 light years across. Between Oct 9 and Oct 16, 2024, I captured almost 43 hours of data for this image. I…

The Pacman Nebula is another new target for me. It's an emission nebula in the Cassiopeia constellation. It's about 9500 light years away and 48 light years across. Between Sep 9 and Oct 8th, I captured 35 hours of data. I used Siril’s OSC_Extract_HaOIII script and a 60/40 Ha/OIII split on the green…

This is Sh2-54, an emission nebula region in the Serpens constellation. It's about 6200 light years away and 126 light years across. I've imaged the Eagle Nebula and Omega Nebula near this, but I haven't imaged Sh2-54 before. I decided to shoot it late in its season, so I was only able to get a few …