Looking for inspiration for my next target I was reading Alastair Reynolds collection of short stories Beyond the Aquila Rift. One of his greatest skills in writing in my opinion is his competence in describing the vastness of space and the recurring theme of being lost or making unexpected discoveries. 

It also made me realize I’ve never looked at the Aquila constellation before and the wonderful dark absorption nebulas that are hiding between the dense starfields. 

It took a while to figure out how to best process this image. It was clear the data was there but I had to play around a bit with the background to really bring out the sense of color and scale. 

The weather has turned to downright tropical now so I need to be very careful about unexpected rainfall when I leave my scope outside. Hoping that summer stabilizes and we get more clear nights.

Big news last week as mainstream media was reporting on an asteroid having a very close encounter with earth at a distance of 290k kilometers. To put this into perspective, the moon is about 385k kilometers away. 

The news that this asteroid was only discovered on the 16th of June makes it even more interesting as it shows how unprepared we would be for an extinction level event asteroid. 

Anyway, this close distance meant that it’s possible for us, amateurs, to track and image this object. This is usually very easy, we have a bunch of software at our disposal to steer our telescopes to the desired object and start imaging. Astronomy is basically point and click today. But not for recently discovered objects. This meant looking up the NASA coordinates and manually directing our GOTO systems to the asteroid. 

On Saturday evening I joined the amazing Dobsonian Power Youtube livestream to join the channel’s Explorer Quest, where amateur astronomers who are members of the community can join the stream and cast their telescope views. Our mission was to capture this asteroid and we can proudly say this mission was accomplished. Cheers to Tiago Ferreira and his amazing Youtube channel!

Here is asteroid 2024MK flying past us at a close distance with the Pegasus constellation in the background.

I had an unexpected streak of clear nights and took full advantage to image both the Wizard and Trifid Nebula. I looked at the Wizard last year too but I was in a hurry and didn’t give it the appropriate time. This year, with 4 hours of total integration time and a better filter and proper guiding I managed to get a very decent result. It’s also enough data to experiment with the colors without making it too ridiculous. 

The Trifid is a different story. This object is barely rising over 15 degrees altitude from my location which means I only have a short time window to shoot it, through a lot of light pollution. I tried it last year and was not happy with the result. I’m very satisfied with this year’s result and look forward to trying the Helix Nebula in late August.

The days are hot, the nights are short and rainy, in other words: summer is here.

I don’t have particular plans at the moment. I’m still doing spectroscopy on the semi-cloudy nights with mixed results and I hope to maybe image the Trifid Nebula if the opportunity is there. No target list, no time pressure, just enjoying the nice weather.

I do hope the Helix Nebula will work this year as last two years the weather didn’t allow any imaging during the short time it’s visible. Fingers crossed.

Here is my first summer object, the Cygnus Wall, about 3 hours with the Antlia ALP-T processed in HOO.

I remember watching the Iris Nebula for the first time with my 224MC camera in EAA mode. I still think this is one of the most fascinating objects in space. I tried imaging it twice before, last year. The first round I wasted a good 6 hours of data by using the wrong filter. The second time I forgot to check the weather reports and ignored a wind warning causing most of my subs to be ruined. 

So here’s about 9 hours or so on this magnificent object. The combination of blue core, dark dust and gold speckled stars is just something else.

In other news, I upgraded my coma corrector to the TS GPU and while doing some tests yesterday I immediately noticed the difference in quality, so this is my last image with my baader mpcc.

Summer is upon us. I was up late and was amazed at seeing the summer triangle and even Cassiopeia in crisp clear conditions. Unfortunately there was a bit of a breeze but that couldn’t stop me from getting almost 3 hours integration time on this beautiful edge-on galaxy in Coma Berenices.

I’ll wait a few weeks now for Cygnus to be high enough to start some projects on that area. In the meantime I hope to have some clear skies to focus on star spectra.

I don’t really like postprocessing that much but it’s a necessary part of astrophotography. I usually try to keep it light. I don’t stretch the image too much, I keep the noise reduction at minimum and whenever possible I try to be as gentle as I can with saturation to keep natural colors alive.

Yesterday I had a try at the Pinwheel Galaxy. It’s not a difficult target, it’s fairly bright, only Andromeda, Triangulum and Bodes are brighter, I believe. But after my meridian flip I noticed some big streaks of light on the image. I think those are reflections of Alkaid, a bright hot star in Ursa Major, outside of the field of view but reflecting through my imaging train. So I had to really carefully process this away, which I don’t like, but anyway. Here’s the result.

And here are the streaks. I’ll need to have another look at my setup to limit those reflections in the future.

We are nearing that time of the year when galaxy season is ending and the milky way is not high enough to start imaging nebulae. I had another clear night and decided to shoot a galaxy regardless of the near full moon.

Here is M81 or Bode’s Galaxy, 12 million light-years away in Ursa Major.

April is always known for erratic weather patterns but this year is extra special. We went from 27 degrees to -1 in just a couple of days and now we seem to be getting back to warmer weather. This week I had one opportunity but things were difficult. I had a very obvious pinching effect going on with my scope which is caused by the cold and results in triangle looking stars. I don’t think I really solved it completely but managed to get about 2 hours on globular cluster M3.

I like these clusters a lot. They look like these dreamy unreal balls of stars and their age and origin are mysterious.

I have a lot of projects going on and have been updating my rig this year to invest more time in exoplanet transits and spectroscopy and have some widefield imaging gear on the way too. I hope to log some results soon.