After my fiasco with the Iris Nebula a couple days ago (using the wrong filter) I had another try yesterday. Yet again this reflection nebula in Cepheus was proving to be a hard nut to crack. This time I had multiple issues: guiding errors, coma, camera tilt and what I believe was probably some collimation issue.

Although I did manage to get the beautiful deep blue color of the nebula, there is a lot of noise in the dust and the stars are all over the place. Let’s hope third time is the charm.

I had two consecutive clear nights, something that didn’t happen since last summer. Managed to get 4 hours on M101 but my image suffered some weird streaks in one of the corners, below is the cropped image which turned out still very good.

Next on I got 2 hours on the Crescent, which was on my target list for this year. Additionaly I did a bit of EAA on the Owl Nebula and Hercules Globular cluster. Finally I also captured 2 hours on the Iris Nebula but I quickly discovered during post processing that I should have removed my duoband filter.

With our galactic plane becoming more prominent again I think my next big target will be the Eagle Nebula.

The milky way is slowly coming back into our night skies and this was a good moment for me to test the ZWO duoband filter.

This nebula is the result of a Wolf-Rayet star blowing stellar winds 5.000 light years away from us.

There are many wonderful objects in Ursa Major and The Little Pinwheel Galaxy is one of them. I only managed to get 3 hours of data and had to battle some high clouds but I’m happy with the result.

Distance to earth: 40 million light-years.