The Andromeda Galaxy is arguably one of the most spectacular objects in the night sky. In typical city lights, it's completely invisible even though its apparent size is roughly 6 times as wide as the moon. In dark skies, you can see it with your naked eye as a smudge about as big as the tip of your…

A few days ago, a Type Ia supernova was discovered in Messier 82 (NGC 3034, the Cigar Galaxy).  Because of clouds, it took a few days for me to image it.  Here's my first shot of M82 and the supernova. M82 and supernova SN2014JDetails: 12x 300sec L frames, iTelecope.net's T11: PlaneWave 20…

When doing astrophotography, I've always dodged the moon like the plague.  Since not imaging when the moon is up severely limits how much shooting I can do, I decided to see what I could do with a full moon high in the sky.  I was pleased to find out that as long as you can keep the direct…

After getting a pretty good image of the Orion Nebula from my backyard, I wanted to try some tougher targets.  With about half the moon in view and it sitting near Orion, I had to move away from the Milky Way to find a good deep space object to image. I tried the Christmas Tree Cluster first.  The r…

I just got back from a dark-sky trip to Mahogany Flat Campground in Death Valley National Monument. I captured this image of the recently discovered supernova in Messier 101. Click the photo for the full resolution version. The image was taken with an unmodified Canon 5D Mark II through a Celestron …