In a couple days Venus will be at greatest eastern elongation. Getting any detail out of Venus is a real challenge though. But the real joy here is the simplicy of the setup:
A simple dobsonian telescope, equatorial platform and planetary camera.
No guiding, no cable mess, no polar alignment, no balancing or any of the other mess that is needed for deep space astrophotography. I look forward to planetary season to image Neptune, Mercury and Uranus later this year.
Probably the most dramatic scenery in this part of the sky. It took me multiple edits and crops but I’m happy with the final result.
I had 3 clear nights in a row during this weekend. These are difficult times, the galaxies are fading away from us and the summer objects are still very low. I spent the nights imaging this wonderful nebula and did some work on Cygnus Wall and crescent Venus.
I also did an attempt at HOO:
At my latitude I wasn’t really sure how well this would go. The Eagle Nebula is sitting in the constellation Serpens, which for me means aiming my telescope South, which also means the glow of one of the busiest highways in the country. I managed to get around 2.5 hours of data in the end between 1AM-4AM. I might revisit this object a few times in the coming weeks and months.
This nebula is most known for the Pillars of Creation, huge towers of gas and dust, imaged by the Hubble ST in 1995 resulting in what’s probably its most popular image. Recently it was also revisited by the James Webb ST.
I remember fondly how I was observing the Dumbbell Nebula last year through the 8 inch dob.
Hot summer nights, mosquito’s, dew and the dog chilling next to me. I also remember getting lost trying to find it and blaming Vulpecula for being an annoying constellation. I was happy to read later that this area of the sky can indeed be a bit confusing when you’re manually starhopping.
Shortly after I managed to take some pictures with my phone, resulting in a greenish vague fuzz. Later that year I also managed to image it with my 224MC which looked way better. The picture below is with the 533 MCP and even if I only had 40 minutes of data due to clouds rolling in, the result is very satisfying.
This was the first planetary nebula that Charles Messier discovered in 1764 and is around 1360 light-years away from us.
This one turned out way better than expected. Conditions were a bit unpredictable with only a couple of hours of 10% cloud coverage according to clearoutside. I managed to get close to 3 hours of data before a huge wall of clouds distorted my eastern views. Post processed in Siril & Pixinsight.
This region of gast & dust is 2400 light-years away from us and it is believed that star formation is happening deep in the “trunk” of this nebula.
I added a Baader coma corrector to my setup. I read a lot of mixed reviews about this one and even some horror stories about issues with reaching focus and people needing to cut off pieces of the focuser tube. It took me a while to understand I could just slide the camera + coma corrector into the focuser.
I didn’t have much time but managed to get 20 mins on the ring nebula and it looks like the coma corrector is really improving the star shapes and overall image.
Looking at the ring nebula takes me back to last summer when I was trying to image it with my phone. Summer is coming and I look forward to imaging more milky way objects. Main target will be M16!
Imaging during a near full moon is not really a good idea, certainly not for galaxies. This is nearly 3 hours of integration time and I had to process away some of the noise but I’m still happy with the result.
Distance to earth: 12 million light-years.
