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.

I set up late on Saturday without knowing what to expect. Clearoutside was predicting orange conditions, Ventusky was giving me mixed signals on clouds and according to my phone we would have clear conditions till 4 AM. In the end I had a lot of clouds but most of them away from my target. I decided to go for the Lagoon Nebula, one of the lowest targets I can image. My guiding was not optimal and I had some tilt issues I couldn’t resolve but I managed to get around 2 hours worth of data.

This is a really cool nebula. It’s huge (angular size is 3 times the full moon) and there’s so much complexity caused by hot young stars, stellar winds and nebulosity.

I decided to play around with the HOO normalization scripts from Bill Blanshan and this is the result I got.