I don’t really like postprocessing that much but it’s a necessary part of astrophotography. I usually try to keep it light. I don’t stretch the image too much, I keep the noise reduction at minimum and whenever possible I try to be as gentle as I can with saturation to keep natural colors alive.

Yesterday I had a try at the Pinwheel Galaxy. It’s not a difficult target, it’s fairly bright, only Andromeda, Triangulum and Bodes are brighter, I believe. But after my meridian flip I noticed some big streaks of light on the image. I think those are reflections of Alkaid, a bright hot star in Ursa Major, outside of the field of view but reflecting through my imaging train. So I had to really carefully process this away, which I don’t like, but anyway. Here’s the result.

And here are the streaks. I’ll need to have another look at my setup to limit those reflections in the future.

We are nearing that time of the year when galaxy season is ending and the milky way is not high enough to start imaging nebulae. I had another clear night and decided to shoot a galaxy regardless of the near full moon.

Here is M81 or Bode’s Galaxy, 12 million light-years away in Ursa Major.

April is always known for erratic weather patterns but this year is extra special. We went from 27 degrees to -1 in just a couple of days and now we seem to be getting back to warmer weather. This week I had one opportunity but things were difficult. I had a very obvious pinching effect going on with my scope which is caused by the cold and results in triangle looking stars. I don’t think I really solved it completely but managed to get about 2 hours on globular cluster M3.

I like these clusters a lot. They look like these dreamy unreal balls of stars and their age and origin are mysterious.

I have a lot of projects going on and have been updating my rig this year to invest more time in exoplanet transits and spectroscopy and have some widefield imaging gear on the way too. I hope to log some results soon.

With all those small, faint ARP galaxies and quasars, one would almost forget that the visually most spectacular ARP galaxy is right under our nose under the name of ARP85, better known as the Whirlpool Galaxy or Messier 51.

The string of nights with high cirrus clouds continue, but there are clear moments and I managed to get 3 hours of integration time on this target and pull out a lot of detail in post-processing.

Interesting also to compare with some of my older attempts to see how I’m evolving in this hobby. Below two images were my first attemps with a planetary camera and no guiding or complicated post-processing. I couldn’t believe I was imaging colliding galaxies from my backyard. I still can’t believe sometimes.

Let’s see if we can bag a few more galaxies before we’re back to planets, nebulae and other peculiarities.

It’s been mostly cloudy lately so I did some spring cleaning. Tuning the mount, cleaning the mirrors, fixing my focuser. While doing that I accidentaly chipped a part of my secondary mirror by gently dropping it on our kitchen island. Not good. Needless to say I was a bit anxious for my first imaging session.

The problem lately is that we have a lot of high cirrus clouds, so while it looks okay to image there is actually too much noise to get some proper data. I decided to try it anyway and went for TON618, an iconic quasar located near Canes Venatici and Coma Berenices. I got about 4 hours of data and happy to report no signs of weird reflections due to my mirror issue.

TON618 is huge. It’s one of the brightest objects in our universe, it hosts an ultramassive black hole which for a long time was considered the largest ever detected and it’s located over 18 billion light years away.

There is much more to see in this image, like the faint galaxy (UGC7604 right next to the quasar) and NGC4414, the beautiful spiral in the lower right corner. I checked my image in Aladin and discovered a bunch more distant galaxies and faint quasars.

We are supposed to get some proper clear skies later this week so hopefully I can capture some ARP galaxies before the end of galaxy season.