The Soul Nebula is a complex structure of emission nebulae and open clusters, packed full of detail and contrast. I managed to get 5 hours on it last night.
It’s usually processed with either deep red colors or the mix of blue and gold from the HOO palette. I always like to go soft on these targets and try to create a “warmer shade of red.”
I won’t be imaging for a few weeks now. Incoming clouds is one of the reasons but it’s mainly because I’ll have some maintenance done on my HEQ5 mount. I will replace the gears with the belt mod which will hopefully future proof the mount for whatever equipment I might combine it with over the next few years.
My HEQ5 has been amazing though and with the exception of some issues last winter it has been working flawless for me.
I’ve started doing some research on new projects but the next targets will be the “low late fall targets” in the Orion & Monoceros region.
Autumn means rapidly changing weather forecasts, foggy mornings, high humidity and lots of dew but also nebula season, which means some of the most fascinating and popular astrophotography targets can be observed.
We’re nearing that time of the year, where clear skies become a rare event so I can only hope to be lucky this year and get some good imaging time, we’ll see.
Here are some of the finished projects from summer and early autumn: the Triangulum Galaxy, Capella, The Lion Nebula and The Ghost of Cassiopeia.
Eris is a dwarf planet located 14.5 billion km away in the so-called Scattered disc, an area beyond the Kuiper Belt. Once you star tracking objects beyond Neptune, light becomes obscure and distances become immense. 14.5 billion kilometers is about 3 times the distance between the sun and Pluto. This makes Eris probably the furthest object in our solar system we can image with our amateur equipment.
Eris is also very dim at +18 magnitude. On top of that it’s currently located in Cetus which is a constellation that is not getting very high up in my northern skies. Eris will stay in Cetus for a while during its 557 year orbit around the sun.
Preparation
Astrophotography is not that complicated. We basically look up targets in our astronomy software, figure out the framing, exposure times and which filters to use and we’re set. Once the scope is set up and polar aligned, we slew to the target and start shooting exposures. Those are then calibrated, stacked and post-processed, all of which can be done today in a semi-automated way without too much effort. The only thing we really depend on is clear skies and a stable atmosphere.
For more peculiar objects it’s a bit more complicated. Trans Neptunian Objects, small galaxies, peculiar stars, asteroids, comets etc. require more preparation and active involvement.
The first issue is that objects like Eris are not accurately tracked in most of the available (free) astronomy software. To find its precise location I had to find it in the Nasa Horizons Systems database. The second challenge is in tracking the object, this means figuring out where the object will be in the future, preferable in the same image frame and making sure there is ample clear sky available to shoot the object twice in the required time slot. The end result is hopefully two images that show the movement of Eris.
Results
In total I had 5 sessions on this object. My first session was fruitless due to the September super moon event but I did manage to clearly capture Eris on the second try. Sessions 3 & 4 were interrupted by clouds but yesterday I finally managed to find Eris again
Eris as a faint spot on the night of the 29th of September in the constellation Cetus under a near new moon. This is 1 hour of integration time with 5 minute subs.
Eris again, now moved close to galaxy PCG1139116 on the 11th of October.Even with more integration time it remains very, very faint.
Summer is coming to an end and I can only be extremely happy about the imaging time I’ve had since April till now. The year kicked off rather grim with week after week of overcast skies but everything opened up at the end of galaxy season and summer had some amazing streaks of clear skies. Even better was that my holiday period completely coincided with some of the best conditions I have ever seen.
At the same time I also have a lot of unfinished projects. I have +60 hours of unprocessed data on multiple Sharpless objects and a bunch of spectroscopy and exoplanet stuff I haven’t even touched yet. Work has taken over now and while I still image on autopilot I’ll need to find some time to work on those projects. Maybe I’ll just park them and add more data next year, we’ll see.
The important thing in this hobby is just to do what you want, whenever you want and don’t let any time pressure turn this stuff into a chore. For the next month I’ll likely revisit some targets I shot last year, look at some more interesting faint project ideas and explore new targets that are fit for my smaller new telescope.
But who knows. Last year the period between October and January was rough, to say the least. Let’s see what happens.
I’ve been considering a widefield scope for a long while and looked at countless reviews from different manufacturers. In the end I decided to just get the new Askar SQA55 without even reading a single review based on its technical parameters.
It arrived yesterday and somewhat surprisingly came with clear skies. Here’s my first light with it, about 6.5 hours on the Andromeda Galaxy.
The difference with setting up a newtonian is unsettling at first. There’s no backspace to consider, no collimation and balancing is not really a thing with a small scope like this. And while the result is a nice crisp image, I do think it can’t replace the deep field of a newt.
But I did manage to find a special star in my image. Here is M31-V0619, the original Cepheid Variable that Hubble discovered and measured so he could conclude M31 being a galaxy on its own and not some nebula in our own Milky Way.
I’ve been trying to image the Helix Nebula for 2 years. This is probably the most challenging object for me. It’s extremely low and the window of opportunity is very short. The last two years I usually had bad skies or other obligations so I was really hoping to get a shot this year and last night I got lucky.
Here’s about 2 hours of noisy data, shot at 17 degrees altitude right above some houses, processed as best as I could on this wonderful planetary nebula. We’re lucky this thing is very bright which means little integration time is needed.
While I was waiting for the Helix to be high enough to start imaging I captured two hours on the Eagle Nebula which was suprisingly good data as well.
This has been an amazing summer and I’m already looking forward to autumn.
M27 or the dumbbell nebula takes many of us back to our first time using a telescope. This dying star shedding off its layers is one of the brightest deep space objects one can observe and one of the easier targets to spot during the summer months.
I have fond memories of the hot summer nights spent with my 8 inch telescope searching for this object and getting lost in the nearby constellations Sagitta and Vulpecula. This is such a rich part of the sky where it’s easy to get lost and stumble on other objects like open clusters or colorful stars.
This summer I used M27 to check my guiding, focus and test some quick things before I move on to the main target. This image is the result of all these brief test sessions put together.
I also added another hour of data shot with my IR 850 filter. This filter blocks ultraviolet and visible light but lets through the infrared. It’s mostly suited for planetary work but also works on stars.
The bright star in the second image with the red arrow is the so called “Goldilocks Variable”. This is a Mira type variable that outshines the nearby stars at its peak but is not visible in duoband or even with a normal broadband filter in its normal state. Next (observable) peak is expected in July 2026. Last observable peak was in July 2019 – if you’ve shot the dumbbell in that time it will be visible, otherwise not. With the IR filter these stars pop instantly.
Mira stars are pulsating variables in the red giant phase, like our sun in the future. What is cool is that theoretically we could have a new planetary nebula at some point inside M27, that is if it’s still around then.
After my little journey around brown dwarfs I was able to capture a T-Tauri star last week. These stars are in the pre-main-sequence, as opposed to brown dwarfs who will never reach this phase.
This is V1331 Cygni, a “T Tauri” star in Cygnus, in the middle of dark nebula LDN981.
What makes this star special is the little nebulous ring surrounding it. This is believed to be a circumstellar accretion disk. Usually these young stars are hidden in a nebula but in this case we can clearly see the star thanks to a jet blowing away the dust that would otherwise block our view.
Circumstellar accretion disks are where planets and asteroids are born so we’re potentially witnessing the early days of a solar system.
I’m on PTO so I have all the time in the world. I had 3 clear nights in a row and decided to image the Elephant Trunk Nebula and the Bubble Nebula. I’ve imaged both before and I really like to go back to those old images and compare.
Here is my first EAA image of IC1396 versus my most recent capture with a total integration time of 7.8 hours. On the EAA image the trunk is only visible as a dark feature.
Same with NGC 7635. Seeing that Bubble ‘pop’ on the screen for the first time was something special.
The EAA images were made with a planetary camera, focal reducer and a cheap UV/IR cut filter. The long exposure images were made with the same scope but with a cooled astro camera, a rather expensive duoband filter, an autofocuser, coma corrector etc. And while the EAA images were made sitting outside (sometimes in the cold), the long exposure images were made sitting inside while the scope and mount were doing everything on autorun mode.
Some people will say that makes astrophotography boring. But I still enjoy researching targets, reading about them and processing the final result. But they have a point. The excitement of EAA, live astronomy, starhopping and going really deep on objects (even if that results in blurry images) is a wonderful feeling. I didn’t ask anyone, but I’m sure lots of astrophotographers miss that sensation of sitting outside and discovering the universe with their own eyes, getting lost in dense milky way starfields. But as our busy lives take over, astrophotography is a very convenient way to stay ‘connected’.
I could go deeper from here on and invest in a better scope, more filters and maybe a monochrome camera but I don’t feel that urge. Instead I like to devote more time on spectroscopy, exoplanet transits and dimmer objects (which might require a larger scope unfortunately).
My plan for the rest of the summer is to focus on astrophotography during the clear nights and shoot some spectroscopy data anytime I can in between the clouds.
The nights are getting longer again. We now have nautical dark around 10 PM till 3.40 AM which means I can capture a lot of data in a clear night. I shot 3 objects recently. The Swan Nebula, NGC7822 and The Crescent Nebula.
The Swan Nebula is a star forming region low in the southern sky and I was only able to get 1 hour of integration time on it, but it’s enough to make it pop. NGC7822 is a huge object and I tried to focus on the core of the region but had to deal with a lot of noise due to some high clouds. The Crescent is a familiar object, it’s easy to shoot and very bright but I decided to go at it again because I never shot it with my Antlia filter.
I will probably go for a few more familiar objects in the next sessions before I go back to more challenging targets.
In the meantime I’m also figuring out my observatory project and the possibility of adding a 200mm lens to my equipment to shoot those bigger fall nebula targets. We’ll see.
To make my journal a bit more accessible I’ve linked my image gallery directly with my instagram account. You don’t need an account to browse it, you can click on every image and it will load the description.
