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.

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.