Our long Madison nightmare of clouds finally over?
NGC 2174, the Monkey Head Nebula (for the record, I don't see it), about four hours each of hydrogen, sulfur, and oxygen emission wavelengths. Shot from my urban back yard with my gorgeous 5-inch refractor.
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Black and white image of the Crescent Nebula imaged at the 656nm hydrogen-alpha wavelength, showing surrounding nebulosity.
And ANOTHER one! One night's worth of Ha data with that gorgeous, reliable 130 APO. What a rock star! This is the hydrogen data (Crescent Nebula) with the stars removed, and cropped off-center to give the impression of motion. Very much in-progress. More soon.
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The Cygnus Wall in Ha, OIII, SII, and RGB.
The Cygnus Wall in Ha, OIII, SII, and RGB, with stars removed.
Finished this one just today: The Cygnus Wall portion of the North America Nebula. Liked the starless version so well I decided to keep it too. 4.5 hours NB, 1.5 RGB. PixInsight, then combined channels with Astro Pixel Processor's HSORGB preset.
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The Dark Shark Nebula
The Dark Shark is another dim one that the 130 just casually brought to life. "No big".
I kept stretching until I was amused by the result. 2 hours of LRGB. Love the eyeliner.
Someone beat me to APOD with their Dark Shark, or else I would have submitted this.
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The Phantom of The Opera Mask emission nebula
The 130 APO continues to just keep cranking gorgeous data. Here's the Phantom of The Opera Mask, very dim but the 5" pulls it out. My own synthetic color for hydrogen, stars are catalog-calibrated. 4.5 hours of H-alpha, 1.5 of RGB for stars.
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Saturn with its moon Titan, with the moon's shadow transiting the face of the planet
Up next: Titan, with its shadow transiting Saturn. There are a handful of these transits, visible for a few weeks only every 15 years.
12" Richey-Chrétien with 2X Televue compressor, color planetary camera, couple hundred frames from several minutes of video.
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Cocoon Galaxy and companion, Arp 269
Boy, I've gotten behind in my posting! This pair of interacting galaxies is one of the closest such to us, at 85M LY. The Cocoon Galaxy and its companion have passed by each other with stellar stream trailing between them. Uncooled color planetary cam and the 8" RC.
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Deer Lick galaxy group, with NGCC 7331 at left. Inset is a hydrogen-alpha image showing supernova 2025rbs. 130mm APO refractor, mono camera, about 3 hours of total imaging time.
Here's the latest one-night wonder. From 40M LY away, NGC 7331 featuring supernova 2025rbs, here for a limited time! This imaging session was going great even with encroaching clouds till it started RAINING ON MY TELESCOPE. That was a charlie-foxtrot of car-stuffing.
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M20, the Trifid Nebula, red hydrogen emission and blue reflected starlight, with M21 star cluster at upper left.
M20, Trifid Nebula with stars removed from image (RC Astro StarXTerminator). Calibrated RGB image with red hydrogen emission and blue nebulosity by reflected starlight.
New scope won't quite frame both Trifid and Lagoon. So here's M20 (Trifid) & M21 star cluster. Couldn't stop looking at the starless image so finish-processed that too. Neighbor's comment ruined it forever, though: "South end of a northbound baboon?" Dammit Sue!
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M16, the Eagle Nebula, in narrowband false color (HSO palette).
Took the new 130mm APO refractor out for a good trot over several nights. The Eagle Nebula, H𝛼=R, SII=G, OIII=B. About 5 hours total. Really quite taken with how sharp this scope is.
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100% crop of Eagle Nebula, showing the "Pillars of Creation" made famous by the HST.
One single 30-second mono (red filter) exposure on the Eagle Nebula through the Photoline 130 APO with the 2600MM
And another -- this is a SINGLE 30-second frame on the Eagle Nebula, M16, with the red filter. What's really shocking is the 100% zoom showing the Pillars of Creation (remember that Hubble image?).
Yeah, gonna like this scope and camera *just fine*!
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The Pinwheel Galaxy, M101
First light for the new refractor. Sorry Mark is no longer with us, but I hope he'd be happy his scope is getting the love it deserves. Photoline 130 APO, just an hour worth of testing from a Bortle 4 site, LRGB on my also-new-to-me 2600MM.
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The Iris Nebula
Better take on the Iris. Two nights' data this time -- one with 30" subframes due to wind gusts, the other 60". From Merritt Reservoir in Nebraska.
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The Iris Nebula through a 1625-mm focal length Richey-Chrétien scope.
Next up on the Mad Astro Nebraska feed: One (windy) night's take on the Iris Nebula through the 8" RC with a Player One Uranus-C camera. ~4 hours integration time, had to drop to 30" for a better "keeper" ratio.
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Bright red, green, and blue auroral pillars from Nebraska's Merritt Reservoir.
Madison Astro Society members did a campout at Merritt Reservoir in Nebraska (site of the famous Star Party).
I took some pictures! :-)
This one is practically unedited -- much brighter than was to the eye, of course, but colors are straight out of the camera.
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And another first look -- this one is M104, the wonderfully-named "Sombrero Galaxy". Again the issue with the walking noise, gotta solve that. 70' of integration time from my back yard. This one will definitely improve as I add more data.
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The Cocoon Galaxy and its gravitationally-interacting companion.
A much, much better Cocoon. Figured out the dumb mistake that led to the donuts. Didn't even have to retake any of the flats or light frames. However I kept getting terrible "walking noise" if I used all the integration time, so this is only 10' of integration!
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At last! The Thor's Helmet image is in the bag -- not perfect, could always use more data and tweaks, but after working on nothing else since mid-January...I think it's done! Supernova remnant in hydrogen and oxygen, RGB stars. 8" RC telescope.
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Elephant's Trunk again; think I've learned a thing or two in the meantime. 3h Hubble (S-H-O = R-G-B) palette+1h broadband for star color. Really brings out the molecular structures in the nebula. That brings me up to date; I'll post new ones as I finish them.
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NGC 7635, the Bubble Nebula, in the HSO palette plus RGB stars.
NGC 7635: Bubble Nebula. Pentultimate image on my journey. 6H of H-alpha, OIII, and SII plus ~1H broadband for accurate star color.
The Bubble is blown by immense stellar winds from the huge bright center star that will probably go supernova in 10-20M years. 9/2024.
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Aurora borealis from Blue Mount State Park, May 2024
Much of North America saw the aurorae last spring. Janet and I almost missed it, but a friend texted me and we dragged our aged butts out to Blue Mound. Awful glad we did. This is what Photoshop's "auto tone" made of my panorama. Naked-eye, wasn't quite so wild.
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"Third contact" at the 2024 total eclipse. Lunar valleys allow bits of the chromosphere to show.
2024 Eclipse #3! My favorite, just past totality and just before the diamond ring. The huge prominence at 4 o'clock was naked-eye visible the whole time, it was crazy how you could see the whole corona but with this tiny spark just blazing out.
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2024 total eclipse, showing the corona and solar prominences
Next up are a few shots of the 2024 total eclipse. We went to Paragould, AR and I shot from the motel parking lot. This is a composite of 6 different images from 2 scopes -- HDR widefield for the corona, and three from the 8" for detail. Exposures 1/2000" to 1/30".
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NGC 6888, the Crescent Nebula. Largely H-alpha emission, but with RGB star color.
NGC 6888, the Crescent Nebula. Ha+OIII+RGB stars. Wikipedia: "...formed by the fast stellar wind from the Wolf-Rayet star WR 136 colliding with and energizing the slower moving wind ejected by the star when it became a red giant". WR 136 is the center bright star.
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M27, the Dumbbell Nebula
I originally got the 8" scope for Galaxy Season, the spring when the nebula-rich part of the Milky Way has moved into the daytime sky and so distant galaxies are The Thing. But it also has enough reach for tiny planetary nebulae. Here is M27, the Dumbbell Nebula.
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Dawn over Lake Michigan from Newport State Park in Door County, with the Moon shining through high clouds.
Continuing with that one magical night at Newport State Park, here's what greeted my snoozeful eyes as I was packing up. May 2023.
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Just gonna put this out there every once in a while: #redwolfastro means redwolfastro.com, where you can buy prints of my stuff. Won't deluge you, I promise, but just an occasional shout-out.
Milky Way from Newport State Park
Newport Park is still my favorite astro place. Frequently I'll set a camera up to do some Milky Way imaging while the scope looks at some deep sky target. This is from May 2023, while I was imaging M94, the Croc's Eye. The lakeshore is really wonderful to work from.
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M101, the Pinwheel Galaxy, with an arrow pointing to supernova SN 2023ixf
Stars in a deep sky image are invariably in our own galaxy and just happen to be in the line of sight. But Japanese astronomer Koichi Itagak, whose avocation is supernovae, found one (SN 2023ixf) in M101, the Pinwheel Galaxy. ONE STAR visible from 21M light years!
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Deep sky image of the Needle Galaxy
Now caught up in time to my current rig: 8" Richey-Chétien scope, cooled mono cam with filter wheel, big-prism off-axis guider with a super-sensitive guide camera on a chonker of a mount. NGC 4565, the Needle Galaxy. About five hours of integration time, 3/2023.
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