This was my one carefully pre-planned image for the 2014 Oregon Star Party: taking into account the large field of view afforded by the Takahashi FSQ-106, I mapped out a view that would encompass a large number of galaxies around the region of the edge-on spiral galaxy NGC891. NGC891 is a 10th magnitude galaxy…
Repost: Cepheus OB4 from Oregon Star Party 2014
Final (for now) process of images of star forming region Cepheus OB4 captured at Oregon Star Party. To the left of the image is diffuse nebula NGC7822, with the OB4 complex to the right. The bright star just below center right is BD+66 1679, a magnitude 5.7 K1 star which is the only naked eye…
Reprocessing: M45 from Oregon Star Party 2014
M45 captured at Oregon Star Party in 2014. This was somewhat opportunistic; I hadn’t imaged this object in a long time, and hadn’t planned to this time around, but after opening the door of my trailer at 2am and seeing it in a perfect position in the sky to image, decided it would be worthwhile….
The Eagle Nebula in Tri-Color
One more time… this time with three filters: Hydrogen-alpha, Oxygen-III and Sulfur-II. The mapping to color channels is using the fairly conventional “Hubble palette”, that is, Sulfur-II mapped to red, Hydrogen-alpha to green and Oxygen-III to blue (ie in spectral order). In this case, however, I also used the H-alpha as a luminance channel. …
More Pictures of the TARDIS
I was asked for some more pictures of the TARDIS showing exactly how the setup works. I just quickly took these pictures this evening, but took it down again; it’s still cloudy here :-(. It only takes 5 minutes to set up, though, which was the idea; it’s the closest I can get to observatory…
Building the TARDIS Micro-Observatory
The TARDIS micro-observatory is now in operation; hopefully we’ll start to see a few more cloudless nights and I’ll be able to capture some new data. In the meantime, a brief write-up of the construction. The idea started with a need to cut down my nightly setup and teardown time. Not having a permanent observatory,…