This is one of the most iconic and well known DSO’s, famously discovered in 1888 by Williamina Fleming. I collected about 5 hours of integration time on this target but had to throw away about 3 hours. I believe this target deserves at least 10-15 hours so I’ll park it for now and revisit next winter.

I’ve been trying to get a proper image on the Jellyfish Nebula for a while now. This supernova remnant in Gemini is probably my favorite deep sky object. I did capture something last December which I shared here, but the session was plagued by high clouds and I was never really happy with the final result.

I tried two more sessions this year with my 130PDS in November but I had the same issues with high clouds. 

The sudden appearance of clear skies in the last weeks gave me another opportunity though. I decided to take no risks and go for the widefield approach with my SQA55 and I am happy with the result. I still feel I might revisit this one at some point with a SII filter to bring out some of the green of the nearby nebula.

2024 has been an amazing year for my astrophotography. It started rough with only a couple cold clear nights in January but really opened up by April. In total I managed to work on 38 projects with many of them exceeding 10 hours total integration time. 

I also managed to get some pictures of objects that were really high on my bucket list such as the Twin Quasar, TON618,  brown dwarfs, the Trifid Nebula and the Helix nebula. 

I need to prep my 130PDS now for galaxy season and as I said before I might look at upgrading to a bigger refractor in the near future. No rush though, the universe is not going anywhere anyway. 

I had two clear nights on Christmas which I used to gather about 11 hours on the Rosette Nebula and another 7 hours on the California Nebula. With the cold weather outside this really made me appreciate the simplicity of a small refractor. I can carry the whole setup outside and I’m up and running within 10 minutes. Compared to my small newtonian I never have to go outside to tinker or change things, it just works.

This is driving me down the rabbit hole of potentially looking for a new scope to go after smaller targets. I love my newt but it has some serious flaws (mainly the weak focuser). I could get a better, bigger newt but that comes with extra challenges. I could also get a bigger refractor but that too comes with certain limitations. I’ll probably overthink this for the next few months.

For now I’m looking forward to galaxy season again.

A rather unique event happened this week, two consecutive clear nights in november! I really wanted to test my mount after the belt mod upgrade and used the Pleiades as a test target.

The belt modification – before and after:

There are more targets I would like to shoot but everything will depend on the weather. This shot of the Pleiades was taken with the SQA55 so I’ll try another target soon with my ‘heavier’ setup, the 130 PDS.

The Soul Nebula is a complex structure of emission nebulae and open clusters, packed full of detail and contrast. I managed to get 5 hours on it last night.  

It’s usually processed with either deep red colors or the mix of blue and gold from the HOO palette. I always like to go soft on these targets and try to create a “warmer shade of red.”

I won’t be imaging for a few weeks now. Incoming clouds is one of the reasons but it’s mainly because I’ll have some maintenance done on my HEQ5 mount. I will replace the gears with the belt mod which will hopefully future proof the mount for whatever equipment I might combine it with over the next few years.

My HEQ5 has been amazing though and with the exception of some issues last winter it has been working flawless for me. 

I’ve started doing some research on new projects but the next targets will be the “low late fall targets” in the Orion & Monoceros region.

Autumn means rapidly changing weather forecasts, foggy mornings, high humidity and lots of dew but also nebula season, which means some of the most fascinating and popular astrophotography targets can be observed.

We’re nearing that time of the year, where clear skies become a rare event so I can only hope to be lucky this year and get some good imaging time, we’ll see.

Here are some of the finished projects from summer and early autumn: the Triangulum Galaxy, Capella, The Lion Nebula and The Ghost of Cassiopeia.

Eris is a dwarf planet located 14.5 billion km away in the so-called Scattered disc, an area beyond the Kuiper Belt. Once you start tracking objects beyond Neptune, light becomes obscure and distances become immense. 14.5 billion kilometers is about 3 times the distance between the sun and Pluto. This makes Eris probably the furthest object in our solar system we can image with our amateur equipment.

Eris is also very dim at +18 magnitude. On top of that it’s currently located in Cetus which is a constellation that is not getting very high up in my northern skies. Eris will stay in Cetus for a while during its 557 year orbit around the sun. 

Preparation

Astrophotography is not that complicated. We basically look up targets in our astronomy software, figure out the framing, exposure times and which filters to use and we’re set. Once the scope is set up and polar aligned, we slew to the target and start shooting exposures. Those are then calibrated, stacked and post-processed, all of which can be done today in a semi-automated way without too much effort. The only thing we really depend on is clear skies and a stable atmosphere. 

For more peculiar objects it’s a bit more complicated. Trans Neptunian Objects, small galaxies, peculiar stars, asteroids, comets etc. require more preparation and active involvement. 

The first issue is that objects like Eris are not accurately tracked in most of the available (free) astronomy software. To find its precise location I had to find it in the Nasa Horizons Systems database. The second challenge is in tracking the object, this means figuring out where the object will be in the future, preferable in the same image frame  and making sure there is ample clear sky available to shoot the object twice in the required time slot. The end result is hopefully two images that show the movement of Eris.

Results

In total I had 5 sessions on this object. My first session was fruitless due to the September super moon event but I did manage to clearly capture Eris on the second try. Sessions 3 & 4 were interrupted by clouds but yesterday I finally managed to find Eris again

Eris as a faint spot on the night of the 29th of September in the constellation Cetus under a near new moon. This is 1 hour of integration time with 5 minute subs.

Eris again, now moved close to galaxy PCG1139116 on the 11th of October. Even with more integration time it remains very, very faint.

Gif animation with inverted view added

Summer is coming to an end and I can only be extremely happy about the imaging time I’ve had from April till now. The year kicked off rather grim with week after week of overcast skies but everything opened up at the end of galaxy season and summer had some amazing streaks of clear skies. Even better was that my holiday period completely coincided with some of the best conditions I have ever seen. 

At the same time I also have a lot of unfinished projects. I have +60 hours of unprocessed data on multiple Sharpless objects and a bunch of spectroscopy and exoplanet stuff I haven’t even touched yet. Work has taken over now and while I still image on autopilot I’ll need to find some time to work on those projects. Maybe I’ll just park them and add more data next year, we’ll see. 

The important thing in this hobby is just to do what you want, whenever you want and don’t let any time pressure turn this stuff into a chore. For the next month I’ll likely revisit some targets I shot last year, look at some more interesting faint project ideas and explore new targets that are fit for my smaller new telescope.

But who knows. Last year the period between October and January was rough, to say the least. Let’s see what happens.

I’ve been considering a widefield scope for a long while and looked at countless reviews from different manufacturers. In the end I decided to just get the new Askar SQA55 without even reading a single review based on its technical parameters.

It arrived yesterday and somewhat surprisingly came with clear skies. Here’s my first light with it, about 6.5 hours on the Andromeda Galaxy.

The difference with setting up a newtonian is unsettling at first. There’s no backspace to consider, no collimation and balancing is not really a thing with a small scope like this. And while the result is a nice crisp image, I do think it can’t replace the deep field of a newt.

But I did manage to find a special star in my image. Here is M31-V0619, the original Cepheid Variable that Hubble discovered and measured so he could conclude M31 being a galaxy on its own and not some nebula in our own Milky Way.

I’ve been trying to image the Helix Nebula for 2 years. This is probably the most challenging object for me. It’s extremely low and the window of opportunity is very short. The last two years I usually had bad skies or other obligations so I was really hoping to get a shot this year and last night I got lucky.

Here’s about 2 hours of noisy data, shot at 17 degrees altitude right above some houses, processed as best as I could on this wonderful planetary nebula. We’re lucky this thing is very bright which means little integration time is needed.

While I was waiting for the Helix to get high enough to start imaging I captured two hours on the Eagle Nebula which was suprisingly good data as well.

This has been an amazing summer and I’m already looking forward to autumn.