I remember fondly how I was observing the Dumbbell Nebula last year through the 8 inch dob.

Hot summer nights, mosquito’s, dew and the dog chilling next to me. I also remember getting lost trying to find it and blaming Vulpecula for being an annoying constellation. I was happy to read later that this area of the sky can indeed be a bit confusing when you’re manually starhopping.

Shortly after I managed to take some pictures with my phone, resulting in a greenish vague fuzz. Later that year I also managed to image it with my 224MC which looked way better. The picture below is with the 533 MCP and even if I only had 40 minutes of data due to clouds rolling in, the result is very satisfying.

This was the first planetary nebula that Charles Messier discovered in 1764 and is around 1360 light-years away from us.

This one turned out way better than expected. Conditions were a bit unpredictable with only a couple of hours of 10% cloud coverage according to clearoutside. I managed to get close to 3 hours of data before a huge wall of clouds distorted my eastern views. Post processed in Siril & Pixinsight.

This region of gast & dust is 2400 light-years away from us and it is believed that star formation is happening deep in the “trunk” of this nebula.

I added a Baader coma corrector to my setup. I read a lot of mixed reviews about this one and even some horror stories about issues with reaching focus and people needing to cut off pieces of the focuser tube. It took me a while to understand I could just slide the camera + coma corrector into the focuser.

I didn’t have much time but managed to get 20 mins on the ring nebula and it looks like the coma corrector is really improving the star shapes and overall image.

Looking at the ring nebula takes me back to last summer when I was trying to image it with my phone. Summer is coming and I look forward to imaging more milky way objects. Main target will be M16!

Imaging during a near full moon is not really a good idea, certainly not for galaxies. This is nearly 3 hours of integration time and I had to process away some of the noise but I’m still happy with the result.

Distance to earth: 12 million light-years.

After my fiasco with the Iris Nebula a couple days ago (using the wrong filter) I had another try yesterday. Yet again this reflection nebula in Cepheus was proving to be a hard nut to crack. This time I had multiple issues: guiding errors, coma, camera tilt and what I believe was probably some collimation issue.

Although I did manage to get the beautiful deep blue color of the nebula, there is a lot of noise in the dust and the stars are all over the place. Let’s hope third time is the charm.

I had two consecutive clear nights, something that didn’t happen since last summer. Managed to get 4 hours on M101 but my image suffered some weird streaks in one of the corners, below is the cropped image which turned out still very good.

Next on I got 2 hours on the Crescent, which was on my target list for this year. Additionaly I did a bit of EAA on the Owl Nebula and Hercules Globular cluster. Finally I also captured 2 hours on the Iris Nebula but I quickly discovered during post processing that I should have removed my duoband filter.

With our galactic plane becoming more prominent again I think my next big target will be the Eagle Nebula.

The milky way is slowly coming back into our night skies and this was a good moment for me to test the ZWO duoband filter.

This nebula is the result of a Wolf-Rayet star blowing stellar winds 5.000 light years away from us.

There are many wonderful objects in Ursa Major and The Little Pinwheel Galaxy is one of them. I only managed to get 3 hours of data and had to battle some high clouds but I’m happy with the result.

Distance to earth: 40 million light-years.

Inspired by Halton Arp’s Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies I decided to have a long look at NGC 4490 also known as the Cocoon Galaxy. This used to be a spiral galaxy but clashed with the smaller companion (NGC 4485) and they will meet again at some point in an epic dance of the stars.

All this is happening at 25 million light years away from us.