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.

If you descent deeper into the rabbit hole of astronomy you will soon bump into the work of Fritz Zwicky. This absolute legend did a lot of pioneering work on supernovae, black holes, lensing, dark matter and lots of other topics. He’s also famous for this quote: “Astronomers are spherical bastards. No matter how you look at them they are just bastards.” He was a special one.

One important contribution to science was his proposal of the idea of dark matter (dunkle Materie). He came up with this theory while observing the Coma galaxy cluster and the discrepancy between the speed of movement of the galaxies and the total mass of the cluster. Something unseen, he concluded, was keeping the galaxies from flying apart. Now this was in the 1930s and it would be only years later when Vera Rubin confirmed the existence of this “dark mass”. Fascinating stuff.

Anyway – lots of reasons to try to image this cluster.

I don’t think I really managed to capture it as well as the Perseus galaxy cluster in the fall, but I still like the end result. There are over 1000 galaxies in this cluster at a distance of over 320 million light years. And for once I managed to shoot the whole night without a single mount issue.

I’ve been trying to fix my mount issues with mixed success. The huge errors in the RA axis have disappeared but have now been replaced with some smaller issues on the DEC axis. This is entirely my fault for being a bit too curious about the inner workings of my equatorial mount and tinkering with all the gears and bolts.

It doesn’t really matter really at this moment because the only (more or less) clear night we had this month was last sunday under a full moon. We had other brief moments of clarity this month but I used those to start my journey in the rabbit hole of exoplanet transit capturing – something I want to devote more time to in the future.

The main galaxy in this image is peculiar galaxy ARP214, located about 52 million light years away. Its weird shape is caused by gravitational interaction with the smaller galaxy on the left (NGC3729).

Barely visible, under ARP214, sits the galaxy group ARP322. These weird shaped dots are interacting galaxies located 370 million light years away. This is 8 hours of total integration time but as said before, the moonlight really created a layer of noise that was hard to get rid off.

Last year we had a horrible fall season but wonderful clear skies in January. The same thing happened this year. We had 3 very cold nights (-15°C) with crisp clear skies this week. I could easily recognize Ursa Major, Auriga, Orion, Draco and many other constellations with the naked eye. But cold temperatures can be tricky to work with and the mount I use for astrophotography is known for having troubles in cold temperatures, the grease that is used to lube the gears can stiffen up and cause issues. It only started to occur on the second night but at least I was able to image a full night without too much issues.

I’ve been waiting for this period of the year for a while now and have a nice list of targets ready that I want to shoot. The plan is simple: less is more. Less targets but more integration time.

First on the list is the Twin Quasar in Ursa Major. This unique object was discovered in 1979 and is the first discovered proof of gravitational lensing. What we see are basically two images of the same object, distorted by the gravity of a nearby object, in this case a galaxy (not visible in the image). Einstein predicted this space-time warping in the 30s but also claimed in his paper: “Of course, there is no hope of observing this phenomenon directly.”

But here we are.

Around 8 hours of integration time gives this image of galaxy NGC3079 and the Twin Quasar.

I made a bit of a mess during the last session. On sunday afternoon it looked like we would have clear skies around 10 PM, but the forecast kept pushing forward so I had to set up the scope and just hope for the best.

My plan was to image the Jellyfish nebula, a huge supernova remnant, but right when conditions really started to improve the target moved behind my house and I had to figure something else to image for the remainder of the night.

I had two options: switch to a broadband target in Ursa Major and image till morning or try to image something low on the southern horizon and hope for the best. The smart thing would have been to go to broadband, but that meant changing the filter and re-focus and it was already getting really late. So I opted for the last option. Something went wrong though and in the morning I noticed I only had 4 good 180 second subs on NGC2359 or Thor’s Helmet and about 60 failed ones. Here’s the result.

Anyway, lessons learned and we move on to new adventures. Unless some surprise clear night pops up before new year I don’t expect to image anymore in 2023. My new UV/IR cut filter arrived today and I hope to be shooting galaxies soon.

The first thing I do in the morning is check my phone to get the latest weather updates. December is usually a horrible month to image and this year we’ve had a lot of snow on top of everything. Occasionaly some of the weather apps seem to indicate a few hours of clear skies but usually this turns around quickly and we end up with clouds.

Today I noticed some discrepancies between various websites. Ventusky seemed to indicate I was one of the lucky few in Europe with clear skies for a few hours but clearoutside showed a more pessimistic forecast.

In the end I had about 2 hours of okayish conditions to work with. Setting up was difficult though. The melting snow has turned my garden into a muddy place which increases the risk of losing balance during imaging. There were also some cold wind gusts messing with my guiding.

Normally I would go for a galaxy during this moon cycle but the lack of time and suitable targets was a real issue. In the end I decided to image the Fish Head. This is a pretty star forming region and is actually the tip of a larger object, the Heart Nebula, over 6000 light years away.

I did a quick process in HOO palette and I’m happy with the result.

Imaging has been difficult lately. There are however brief spells where clouds seem to disappear and the cold, dry air results in amazing moments of clarity. So I end up just shooting through the clouds, dropping a lot of data in processing and try to work with the few gold nuggets that remain.

I don’t really mind, my hope is that conditions will improve in winter & spring for galaxy season, those are the targets I enjoy most.

I managed to shoot two more objects. The first is The Crab Nebula (also Taurus A or Messier 1). It’s one of the best known supernova remnants, the first object on the Messier list and easy to find and shoot. The story of this object is interesting because we know now that Chinese astronomers observed the supernova happening in the year 1054.

The second object is the brightest and closest nebula in the night sky, the Orion Nebula. While I’m very happy with the colors and the detail in this image, I still think this object is way more rewarding with visual astronomy. Through a telescope the Orion Nebula is one of the few objects where we can actually see color and it’s one of the most spectacular visual objects in the sky.

Lots of cloudy nights so lots of things to think about. I’ve added a few accessorries to the imaging arsenal, mainly an autofocuser and a new narrowband filter, the Antlia ALP-T. I finally also decided to sell my Dob and EQ platform and made a good deal including a Telrad and 5 eyepieces. The reason of selling the dob was mainly to focus on my astrophotography rig which I still can use for visual, as my 130 PDS is a very capable scope anyway. For planetary stuff I still have my planetary camera and barlow. This keeps my setup compact and leaves me only with gear I’m actively using. The 200p dob was sitting mostly in the garage gathering dust and the platform was at risk of becoming the new home of a mice family that keeps invading our home.

I was still a bit sad to see the dob go, mainly because of all the great memories of discovering the night sky with my dog on one side and a copy of Turn left at Orion on my lap. Good times.

I had 4 hours of clear skies this week and thanks to daylight savings I could image between 6 PM and 10 PM without too much issues. I really wanted to test the new filter. IC63 or The Ghost of Cassiopeia is not the best target for this narrowband emission filter, because it’s both a reflection and emission nebula, but I like how much detail I could get out of the Ghost.

This is a beautiful but tricky object. The main star, “Navi” or Gamma Cassiopeia is 65.000 times brighter than our sun. It”s the top central star of the famous “W” formation that we can see with the naked eye in the night sky.

The nearby ghostly looking dust and gas is irradiated by the star and turning red because of it, which is the emission part of the nebula. But some of the dust is reflecting the blue light of the star, making it also a reflection nebula.

I had only 1 hour of clear sky last night that quickly turned into fog. I still decided to test out some things and point the scope at the Pleiades, the most iconic star cluster in the fall sky. In the end I had to throw away most of the subs and try to work with 1 hour of questionable data.

There’s a lot of noise and some weird artifacts but it’s still cool to see the bright blue nebulosity appear around the main stars.

With Taurus up I’m hoping to image both the Crab Nebula and Jellyfish Nebula. While I wait for clear nights I’ll probably spend some time cleaning my mirror, figuring out cable management and continue to design the observatory plans.