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.