We have clear skies again! It’s been a couple hot and humid weeks now with little to no opportunities to image but finally I could get some integration time in the last two nights. My main target for August is the Helix Nebula, but I’m starting to wonder if that one will remain elusive again this year, it’s just too low on the horizon to get proper time with it from my backyard.

So I started imaging the Triangulum Galaxy, I’m at 6 hours of data and hope to start post-processing soon.

While doing that I got curious about another target on my list: ARP273, one of the most beautiful galaxies in Halton Arp’s Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies. We’re actually looking at two interacting galaxies here, UGC1810 and UGC1813. The result is a beautiful ‘cosmic rose’ figure.

This is my deepest image yet, we’re looking at a structure that is 300 million light years away.