This is the object that got me hooked on astrophotography. Well, sort of. I started a long time ago with a Pentax 35mm film camera and a CG5 mount and tried to take a picture of Cygnus. It was horribly underexposed, but one of the frames had just enough exposure to make out the North …

NGC 7000Read More

This was shortly after (I think) some work to improve the collimation on the Ritchey-Chretien. I don’t know why I didn’t concentrate on a single target, but I jumped around from several last March, so once again I have mediocre data on all. Object M65, M66, NGC 3628 Camera ASI1600MM-Pro, Luminance Only Lens/Scope AstroTech RC6 …

Leo Triplet, Luminance Mosaic TestRead More

And if that title wasn’t enough to pull you in… The seeing in Brooklyn is always bad. I’m on a flight path to LaGuardian. So 3-arcsec is typical. And did I mention I’m in Brooklyn, NY? So the light pollution is always bad. Which make star clusters reasonable targets. Object M36, Open Cluster Camera ASI1600MM-Pro, …

M36 with Marginal Collimation, a Misbehaving Mount, and Poor SeeingRead More

I subscribed to Adam Block’s online tutorials and have been working my way through them. It’s a long, slow process. He’s incredibly thorough, sometimes painfully so, though I supposed that’s better than the opposite (skimming over things so fast you can’t follow along). So while I’m nowhere near finished with the tutorials, naturally I had …

Triangulum Dust CloudsRead More

This was a “filler” project; I was setting up to image further east, an object that was still below the horizon, but had time to kill and realized that M33 and the core of the rather small Triangulum constellation would fill the frame of my Canon T6i with the 85mm Rokinon lens. So, why not? …

M33 and Triangulum RegionRead More

It was the end of the night really, and as the Earth rotated, my real target had moved behind the neighboring apartment, but the night was still dark (well, as dark as it gets is Brooklyn, which is not very), so I pointed to the Rosette as a good target for imaging with the narrowband …

Rosette Nebula (NGC 2238)Read More

So…a while back I dropped my AstroTech RC6.  That was a very sad day. It landed partially on the USB plug for the filter wheel which destroyed the jack. I had to desolder the jack and solder in a new one (which now works again, yay!). But the scope itself took a hit and was …

M15 with Bad CollimationRead More

It wasn’t a very clear night, and this was a back-up target for the not-so-transparent skies. I had planned to take a set of images testing the procedure for doing a mosaic. Around 9pm, the sky looked decent with hints of the Milky Way overhead. Unfortunately, that didn’t last. So instead of a mosaic, I …

Sagitta from Jones BeachRead More

This year our troop went to Ten Mile River (Camp Aquehonga) twice. It’s a long tale and I’ll spare you. I normally help out and co-teach the Astronomy merit badge class but during our second week (actual week 4 of the camp), attendance was very light and no one had signed up for the classes. …

Ten Mile River Scout Camp AstronomyRead More