The first thing I do in the morning is check my phone to get the latest weather updates. December is usually a horrible month to image and this year we’ve had a lot of snow on top of everything. Occasionaly some of the weather apps seem to indicate a few hours of clear skies but usually this turns around quickly and we end up with clouds.

Today I noticed some discrepancies between various websites. Ventusky seemed to indicate I was one of the lucky few in Europe with clear skies for a few hours but clearoutside showed a more pessimistic forecast.

In the end I had about 2 hours of okayish conditions to work with. Setting up was difficult though. The melting snow has turned my garden into a muddy place which increases the risk of losing balance during imaging. There were also some cold wind gusts messing with my guiding.

Normally I would go for a galaxy during this moon cycle but the lack of time and suitable targets was a real issue. In the end I decided to image the Fish Head. This is a pretty star forming region and is actually the tip of a larger object, the Heart Nebula, over 6000 light years away.

I did a quick process in HOO palette and I’m happy with the result.

Imaging has been difficult lately. There are however brief spells where clouds seem to disappear and the cold, dry air results in amazing moments of clarity. So I end up just shooting through the clouds, dropping a lot of data in processing and try to work with the few gold nuggets that remain.

I don’t really mind, my hope is that conditions will improve in winter & spring for galaxy season, those are the targets I enjoy most.

I managed to shoot two more objects. The first is The Crab Nebula (also Taurus A or Messier 1). It’s one of the best known supernova remnants, the first object on the Messier list and easy to find and shoot. The story of this object is interesting because we know now that Chinese astronomers observed the supernova happening in the year 1054.

The second object is the brightest and closest nebula in the night sky, the Orion Nebula. While I’m very happy with the colors and the detail in this image, I still think this object is way more rewarding with visual astronomy. Through a telescope the Orion Nebula is one of the few objects where we can actually see color and it’s one of the most spectacular visual objects in the sky.

Lots of cloudy nights so lots of things to think about. I’ve added a few accessorries to the imaging arsenal, mainly an autofocuser and a new narrowband filter, the Antlia ALP-T. I finally also decided to sell my Dob and EQ platform and made a good deal including a Telrad and 5 eyepieces. The reason of selling the dob was mainly to focus on my astrophotography rig which I still can use for visual, as my 130 PDS is a very capable scope anyway. For planetary stuff I still have my planetary camera and barlow. This keeps my setup compact and leaves me only with gear I’m actively using. The 200p dob was sitting mostly in the garage gathering dust and the platform was at risk of becoming the new home of a mice family that keeps invading our home.

I was still a bit sad to see the dob go, mainly because of all the great memories of discovering the night sky with my dog on one side and a copy of Turn left at Orion on my lap. Good times.

I had 4 hours of clear skies this week and thanks to daylight savings I could image between 6 PM and 10 PM without too much issues. I really wanted to test the new filter. IC63 or The Ghost of Cassiopeia is not the best target for this narrowband emission filter, because it’s both a reflection and emission nebula, but I like how much detail I could get out of the Ghost.

This is a beautiful but tricky object. The main star, “Navi” or Gamma Cassiopeia is 65.000 times brighter than our sun. It”s the top central star of the famous “W” formation that we can see with the naked eye in the night sky.

The nearby ghostly looking dust and gas is irradiated by the star and turning red because of it, which is the emission part of the nebula. But some of the dust is reflecting the blue light of the star, making it also a reflection nebula.

I had only 1 hour of clear sky last night that quickly turned into fog. I still decided to test out some things and point the scope at the Pleiades, the most iconic star cluster in the fall sky. In the end I had to throw away most of the subs and try to work with 1 hour of questionable data.

There’s a lot of noise and some weird artifacts but it’s still cool to see the bright blue nebulosity appear around the main stars.

With Taurus up I’m hoping to image both the Crab Nebula and Jellyfish Nebula. While I wait for clear nights I’ll probably spend some time cleaning my mirror, figuring out cable management and continue to design the observatory plans.

Flashback to last year where I didn’t have a single clear night between the end of November and mid January. October has been like that, continuously cloudy and I’m worried about the rest of the fall season, considering this is one of the best periods for amateur astronomy.

Last night though we got some good conditions coming out of nowhere with clear skies from 11 PM till 4 AM.

I was not really sure what to do, I had just finished working on my mount trying to reduce backlash and I kind of hoped to test it during a night with full moon, not during perfect conditions. Additionally I had to work the next day so I couldn’t babysit the scope all night.

My first two subs were not good but luckily I discovered my balancing was off. After rebalancing I had around 20 excellent subs so I decided to go to sleep. This morning I found my scope covered in dew and frost but my asiair showed me around 115 subs so the plan worked. Unfortunately when checking the last 40 or so subs I found elongated stars. I’m not exactly sure what the root cause is, could be guiding but also balance or loss of polar alignment.

All things considered I’m very happy that I got some imaging time.

The object is NGC2403, a spiral galaxy in Camelopardalis, 8 million light-years away from us. Its structure and amount of star formation make it look at lot like M33 and if you would compare Hubble images it would be difficult to see the difference.

Not many clear nights lately. I’ve been mostly working on figuring out a future garden observatory project and listing some stuff I would like to add to my setup (better narrowband filter, autofocuser, mirror baffle, dew heater).

I’ve also started working on improving the backlash on my HEQ5 mount. Last night was a full moon so not worth really to try and image but I still wanted to see if my efforts had lead to better guiding. So here’s the core of the Heart Nebula under a full moon.

It’s still very hot and humid for the time of the year in what looks to be yet another Indian summer. The constellations at night tell a different story though. With Taurus and Auriga showing late at night and Orion peeping early in the morning we know that summer is coming to an end.

Fall is a wonderful time to image. In my opinion this is the time with the most diverse and dramatic objects in the night sky. I look forward to image some of them. I’ll keep looking out for ARP galaxies too.

My latest image falls in the category of faint galaxies.

This is the Perseus galaxy cluster. It’s one of the largest known structures in our universe, housing thousands of galaxies. I went a bit hardcore on the editing to show just that, minimizing the stars to show the galaxies faint light. The longer you look, the more galaxies appear.

This galaxy is one of the furthest Messier objects at 32 million light-years. I took a total of 5 hours integration time for this galaxy and ended up with a very messy noisy soup. I’m not sure why exactly, these were perfect galaxy shooting conditions: no moon, clear skies, no wind.

The name Phantom Galaxy is due to its very low surface brightness. It’s one of the hardest Messier objects to observe visually and needs very dark skies to do so.

I’m happy with the result after processing. We can even see some of the star formation regions in this beautiful spiral galaxy.

I had one more clear night last weekend and my plan was to use the evoguide on the Heart Nebula. Unfortunately I seem to have lost an adapter somewhere so I had to figure out something else to do. I really wanted to image something bright after all the faint galaxies from the last weeks.

I ended up collecting around 5 hours of data on the Pacman Nebula and processed it in a light HOO palette.

I also invested a bit more time lately in learning more about Pixinsight and I will probably reprocess some of my older data. Additionaly I hope to have some time during the week to observe and image Neptune.

So I’ve been reading a lot about Halton Arp lately. Arp is famous for a lot of things in astronomy. He compiled the magnificent Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies and wrote Seeing Red: Redshift, Cosmology and Acamedic Science. He’s most famous (or infamous) for claiming that red-shifted quasars that visually seem close to a galaxy, might actually be connected somehow to that galaxy. This statement has huge consequences for the definition of redshift, it would mean redshift might not be the best way to calculate distances in space and thus undermine the whole big bang theory.

Now this was years ago and sadly Arp passed away in 2013. Today you can still find articles, youtube videos and forum posts from people who agree with Arp, usually followed by a typical internet style debate ranging from ‘there’s a crisis in cosmology’ to ‘we live on a flat earth’.

Hubble data confirms that Arp was wrong though and that these quasars, even if they look closely connected to a galaxy visually, are actually millions of light-years removed from the objects they seem close to.

All this reading about Arp’s adventures inspired me to take pictures of faint weird galaxies and quasars. I compiled a nice little list in excel of all 338 ARP objects from the Atlas, sorted them by magnitude and viewing season and captured two of them last weekend.

On the first image we have Arp 78, a spiral galaxy 130 million light years away. Its weird shape is explained by the interaction with smaller companion galaxies which can be seen on the left of the galaxy and very faintly on the right too.

On the second image we have two galaxies, ARP 37 is the one on the top, it’s also known as Messier 77 and it’s a beautiful spiral galaxy about 47 million light years away. Another spiral galaxy is in the picture, viewed edge-on. It’s NGC1055 – 52 million light years away. The distance between the two galaxies is estimated at 7 million light years.

Both images have a rather short total integration time (1.5 hours for ARP 78 and 2.5 hours for ARP 37) so I struggled a lot with removing the noise and getting some detail out of the galaxies. Still I’m happy with the result.

In the next months I hope to image more of these Arp galaxies. They are all small and faint so I always need to find a nice way to frame them, preferably with other nice targets in the field of view. If I can find some really cool ones I will try to increase my total integration time too.