M38

M38 is an open cluster in Auriga, a constellation you have probably never heard of. If you find the Pleieades (an easy task) with binoculars, then start looking around a few fields of view north, you will find this and nearby M36 without much effort.

Like most open clusters, photographs don't quite capture the beauty like the view through a small scope or binoculars does. This cluster is famous for its odd shape, which is not that evident in this photo, and is completely impossible to notice with larger scopes. With a low-power eyepiece in my own scope, it is breathtaking, though.

Weather

No posts today-by the time I finished last night, it was 37 degrees and 98% humidity. My gear is still not dry, and I can't feel my fingers a day later. And yet the daytime weather was beautiful...California does this in the gaps between summer and winter. The clouds from the upcoming storms are also starting to appear, so the scope is going back in the newly-completed Telescope Shed; my custom-built 16'x16' centerpiece of the newly christened Observatorio Astronómico de El Rancho Titanico, ready for hosting Star Parties, Bar & Bat Mitzvahs, weddings and circumcisions. All with an Astronomy theme, of course.

NGC2024, the Flame Nebula

Orion is coming back...this is the Flame Nebula, next to the left-most star in Orion's belt.

Very early stack here, only 20 minutes, and this is a fairly faint nebula. But the real news is that the stack is made of 10 two-minute exposures; a serious victory in my year-long battle with cheap equipment.

I had expected that when and if I could start shooting longer subs, everything would be a piece of cake, but after shooting just a few items, it's not so clear now. My traditional method of stacking hundreds of short exposures may not be they way you'd want to do it with good equipment and a dark sky, but it does allow me to vastly improve the results with cheap stuff and loads of light pollution. And since the key to making it work is having scores, if not hundreds of individual exposures, the longer subs actually can be a disadvantage when shooting relatively bright objects. In particular, stacking huge numbers of subs allows the removal of more of the pollution. This shot is very grainy and noisy, but that just takes more exposure time to fix. What appears to be a blown-out background or a gradient problem in the upper left is actually caused by more nebulosity. Like I said, this shot is from an early stage in the process.

I keep a nice thermometer and hygrometer with me when I'm shooting. When this was done, it had fallen to 36 degrees, which is normally good for telescoping. But the humidity was 97%, which stinks. that is why the bright star-Alnitak, or Zeta Orionis-is so overblown and large. Still, makes for a pretty star.

In the next few days (while it's raining and cloudy, of course) I will be replacing even more of the mount, so in a week or so I could be back with more pictures. And with the return of Orion, I can start re-shooting things I did when I was just starting out, and will finally have some comparisons.

M30, without the moon right next to it...

A darker night, another 30 minutes of exposure. As is always the case here, as soon as I get one thing working another goes wonky; something is causing my flat frames to be heavily asymmetrical, causing the uneven gradient in the background. It'll get figured out eventually. This shot really seemed to suffer in being converted to jpeg as well.

I still say this little jewel is one of the nicest surprises in the sky this time of year...the three rows of giant red stars seem even more pronounced visually than in photographs.

M30

M30 has long been a favorite of mine. In a small scope or even good binoculars, it's a fairly tight globular cluster with two rows of bright red jewels. It can be a bit hard to find, since it's in one of those fairly rare "blank" spots in the sky, where we have an almost unobstructed view out of our own galaxy.

Since getting the replacement parts last week, after that first night it has done nothing but rain and drizzle. I tried to get this last night during a break in the cloud cover, and got all of 2 minutes exposure before the fog settled in. Assuming that one day there might be some good visibility, I can't wait to shoot some real time of this object. Given that I shot 60 dark and 60 flat reference frames, I am not sure where the background gradient came from here; it's possible that there was just too little data to work with in 4 thirty second subs.

M45 The Pleiades

This deserves a much longer exposure, but the moon was only about 20 degrees away...in a couple of weeks it will be in prime position for me to shoot it properly.

The Pleiades have to be the best known star cluster.What makes it so much more interesting to photograph than most open clusters is the large about of blue reflection nebula around it. In this short exposure, there is just a hint around a couple of stars. The nebulosity is actually just a bit dimmer than the moonlight itself, so there isn't a way to bring it out any more in these conditions. If it hadn't been for the dearth of pics the last two months, I may not have bothered posting it-but Tuesday night way like this; since I could shoot something in 30 minutes for the first time ever, that's exactly what I did. When the moon is this close to the target, no amount of baffling and flat frames can make the field even and richly black.

By the way, next time you see a Subaru, look at the badge on the hood. Look familiar? "Subaru" is the Japanese name for the Pleiades; the car company is named after it.

M2

M2 is a few degrees south of M15, a little smaller, and a tiny bit dimmer. It's still very easy to find in binoculars.

Just to the south of M2 are several more globulars-I may be able to catch them in a few days right after dusk and before they dip below the horizon.

This shot is 10 minutes at ISO 3200. The exposure for the last two pictures is not needed in order to get the clusters to show brightly; unlike remote galaxies, these are part of the Milky Way and are much brighter. Instead, I use the exposure time to kill light pollution and moonlight.

At first glance, the last two pics look like there may have been a focus problem. Actually, the focus is essentially perfect. Last night was very clear, but the seeing was awful. Because of wind and turbulence in the air, stars with twinkling madly. Twinkling is actually the effect we see when the image of a star appears to shift around a lot; under magnification, it's much easier to see that the brightness stays the same, but the apparent position moves around. In a longer exposure, that makes stars look blobbish. Even Jupiter was twinkling; it takes some pretty bad air to make planets do that.

M15

I have a lot of favorite globular clusters-and this is one of them, M15 in Pegasus. The moon was so near and so bright that I couldn't even find Pegasus visually-not one single star. After a bit of hunt and peck, I nailed it down, and here is the result. 15 minutes at ISO 3200.

Our neighborhood lost a wonderful but sick 60' eucalyptus last week; because of that, I can shoot in the part of the sky that is actually darkest here. After missing the last two months, I'm feeling pressure to get those early Fall objects while there is a chance. Fortunately, that area is very rich in clusters and galaxies, which don't always take days of effort to capture. Here is the first of them, the Pegasus cluster. This is an easy binocular find when the moon is not nearby.

Last month we also got a new monitor, and it is not calibrated in any sense; it is altogether possible that these next few photos will need to be redone once I get the screen adjusted properly.

Back in the saddle again

Once I got through the weather delays last month, it went from bad to worse...several components that were being used far harder than the original designers intended finally gave out. That included the RA worm gear and the handset controller.

Today I managed to get a hold of a nearly complete EQ-6 mount, probably ten years old, but never sold. Many parts missing, but none that I don't have...and since this is the upmarket version of the mount I have, I was able to replace the entire RA worm gear block. I still have some handset issues (it will no longer power the declination motor, for instance) but that's nothing I can't work around.

Tonight I was able to enjoy the luxury-for the first time-of picking multiple targets, and even with the full moon I got some nice subs-once I finish the stacking and processing, there should be a lot of action here. Finally!

For starters, look for a couple of globular clusters in the next day. The tracking is VASTLY improved, and nothing shows tracking problems like globular clusters, so of course that's what I had to start with...