There’s a lot happening in this picture. The big galaxy in the upper right is NGC7331, it’s a galaxy that is similar in size and structure as our Milky Way – about 40 million light years away. The smaller galaxies around it are actually much further out at 300-350 million light years.

The small group of galaxies on the bottom left is Stephan’s Quintet. This group of galaxies was imaged recently by the JWST and is sitting in a rich field of galaxies in the constellation of Pegasus.

There are many more galaxies in this field of view and I’m trying to figure out as much as possible about them.

On the downside there are some obvious guiding issues going on in this picture that I really need to fix. Especially if I want to hunt down more of these elusive ARP objects.

When I had my first peek at Andromeda I was using my 8 inch dob and could only see the big fuzzy ball of light from this massive galaxy. Still an amazing sight and hard to believe I could watch another galaxy from my garden. This thing is huge – visually it’s almost 6 times a full moon and has more than a trillion stars in it.

In the last few months I started thinking how to approach bigger and wider targets such as this one. I contemplated buying a fancy refractor but in the end the solution was much simpler. I purchased the skywatcher evoguide 50ed as I needed a decent guide scope anyway, mounted my 533 MCP on it with a field flattener and put the whole assembly in the finder bracket of my 130 pds. This is not ideal because it means guiding at a focal length that is much larger than the imaging scope but it seems to work just fine for now. I need to fix some of the issues (tilt in the corners) but otherwise I’m happy with the image.

If Andromeda is our big sister, then M33 or the Triangulum Galaxy is our little brother. Together with our Milky Way they make out the 3 biggest members of the Local Group.

This galaxy is very special. It has tons of star forming regions and we can actually observe emission nebulae that are sitting within the galaxy 5 million light years away.

This is a tricky object. It’s huge but also very dim. I took 6 hours of integration time in total and this is my result.

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.

I didn’t image for like 4 weeks or so and the sky looks already very different. Vega is up high, Andromeda is appearing and Jupiter & Saturn have joined the night sky spectacle.

I remember as a kid feeling summer lasting forever, blissful times without school or other obligations. But in today’s world time just flies by.

Yesterday I pointed my scope at NGC6820 and NGC6823. The latter is a small open cluster sitting in the former, an emission nebula. They both reside in Vulpecula, some 6000 light years away from us.

I’ve been really lucky lately with some great clear nights, mostly during weekends. I don’t really have time to image during the week and summer nights are already short enough. Last night must have been one of the warmest nights I’ve ever seen here. Unfortunately everything that could go wrong did go wrong.

I didn’t really have a plan so I decided to radomly point the scope at the Lion Nebula to see what kind of detail I could get out of the head of the lion. It’s a magnificent region with emission, reflection, star formation and two Wolf-Rayet stars lighting the whole area on fire.

This is what went wrong:

• I had some periodic guiding issues causing my stars to be all over the place
• Trying to fix this made me lose focus a few times
• Might also have lost a bit of collimation by tinkering on the scope all the time
• Insects kept flying into the camera cooler

The result is a bit of a hot mess that I had to overprocess to make something out of it. I will definitely try this object again with proper integration time and hopefully with some better results.

I shot this one back in April when it was still low in the sky. This is less data but in much better conditions. It’s a magnificent object and one of the key pieces of the summer sky if you ask me. Stellar winds from a Wolf-Rayet star, 5000 light years away from us.

This beautiful little emission nebula is 6000 light years removed from us.

One of the fascinating things about this region is the objext Cygnus X-1 that is lurking close by.

Cygnus X-1 is a galactic X-ray source discovered in 1971 and one of the first confirmed black holes. It orbits one of the stars in this picture which I highlighted below. It’s actually possible to image the bow shock caused by this interaction, but this would require some monochrome sensor.

Star HDE 226868 is a blue supergiant feeding Cygnus X-1 with stellar winds.

The year is flying by. It feels like only days ago I was sitting outside in the cold trying to image galaxies. Summer skies are exciting: the milky way is up and we have some amazing stars now to observe like Vega, Antares, Sadr, Deneb and many others. Late in the night Andromeda is now visible too and at the dawn of day Jupiter is appearing.

I imaged the IC1396 region 2 months ago but I decided to give it another go with some different framing and post processing.

This nebula is an eerie, ghostlike figure composed by gas and dust, illuminated by the massive star Navi aka Gamma Cassiopeia.

This was not easy. I’m currently encountering a bunch of issues that I yet have to properly identify. After I completed my polar alignment and focusing I was noticing really weird star patterns on my first few images. This is one of the frustrating bits of astrophotography. Such patterns could be due poor guiding, focusing issues, backfocus, tilt, spacing etc. On bright targets it’s easy to process away but on much dimmer objects like this one it’s a real challenge. I’ll need to investigate and fix this.

Anyway. This is one of my targets for this year and I’m happy with this first set of data. I will probably revisit this later this year when the nebula is higher up the sky and I will increase integration time as I’ve only been able to get 3 hours here.