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.

There’s a lot happening in this picture. The big galaxy in the upper right is NGC7331, it’s a galaxy that is similar in size and structure as our Milky Way – about 40 million light years away. The smaller galaxies around it are actually much further out at 300-350 million light years.

The small group of galaxies on the bottom left is Stephan’s Quintet. This group of galaxies was imaged recently by the JWST and is sitting in a rich field of galaxies in the constellation of Pegasus.

There are many more galaxies in this field of view and I’m trying to figure out as much as possible about them.

On the downside there are some obvious guiding issues going on in this picture that I really need to fix. Especially if I want to hunt down more of these elusive ARP objects.

When I had my first peek at Andromeda I was using my 8 inch dob and could only see the big fuzzy ball of light from this massive galaxy. Still an amazing sight and hard to believe I could watch another galaxy from my garden. This thing is huge – visually it’s almost 6 times a full moon and has more than a trillion stars in it.

In the last few months I started thinking how to approach bigger and wider targets such as this one. I contemplated buying a fancy refractor but in the end the solution was much simpler. I purchased the skywatcher evoguide 50ed as I needed a decent guide scope anyway, mounted my 533 MCP on it with a field flattener and put the whole assembly in the finder bracket of my 130 pds. This is not ideal because it means guiding at a focal length that is much larger than the imaging scope but it seems to work just fine for now. I need to fix some of the issues (tilt in the corners) but otherwise I’m happy with the image.

If Andromeda is our big sister, then M33 or the Triangulum Galaxy is our little brother. Together with our Milky Way they make out the 3 biggest members of the Local Group.

This galaxy is very special. It has tons of star forming regions and we can actually observe emission nebulae that are sitting within the galaxy 5 million light years away.

This is a tricky object. It’s huge but also very dim. I took 6 hours of integration time in total and this is my result.

We have clear skies again! It’s been a couple hot and humid weeks now with little to no opportunities to image but finally I could get some integration time in the last two nights. My main target for August is the Helix Nebula, but I’m starting to wonder if that one will remain elusive again this year, it’s just too low on the horizon to get proper time with it from my backyard.

So I started imaging the Triangulum Galaxy, I’m at 6 hours of data and hope to start post-processing soon.

While doing that I got curious about another target on my list: ARP273, one of the most beautiful galaxies in Halton Arp’s Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies. We’re actually looking at two interacting galaxies here, UGC1810 and UGC1813. The result is a beautiful ‘cosmic rose’ figure.

This is my deepest image yet, we’re looking at a structure that is 300 million light years away.