Crayford vs. Rack&Pinion focuser – time will tell…
We finally had a clear night at home, to give me the chance to run the autofocuser exercise with my new rack&pinion focuser…which is still being elusive. Nevertheless, when patience ran thin with that process, I was able to gather data on NGC6888 Crescent Nebula.
Powderhorn July 4th dark & clear skies!
We finally had a forecast for clear skies at a dark skies location during the New Moon weekend! (You may recall that the last time we had that was in January – for one windy and cold night!) So we packed up the Beast – with both the Southern Cross and Big Bertha (and all their paraphenalia), all our camping equipment, gourmet meal fixings, and Zeus – and headed to the Gunnison, Colorado area. We camped for three nights over the 4th of July long weekend very near to the spot we camped last June on BLM land near Powderhorn. We had windy days, but gloriously dark and still nights allowing me to capture data on seven (YES – 7!!) targets.
The Final Errant Piece of the Southern Cross Equipment Falls into Place!
Since returning from my March 2024 Atacama Desert imaging trip, I’ve been struggling with hardware and software issues. The GPS card in my Rainbow Astro RST-135 mount seems to have been the final malfunctioning piece of hardware to be identified, diagnosed, and fixed in early June. Mid-June provided the first clear skies to give the full set-up a test run. …and it seems apropos that I would chose to image M8 Lagoon Nebula!
The Flying Bat obsession continues
May brings the return of visibility of nebulae to the Northern Hemisphere skies! With that returned visibility, comes my return to the obsession I started last year (with our dark skies trip to Powderhorn, Colorado in June 2023) of imaging the SH2-129 Flying Bat and OU-4 Giant Squid Nebulae. This image still isn’t great – but better than the one I posted last year, so stand by for more with this teaser now!!
Aurora Borealis tint the clouds over Colorado Springs
“Americans as far south as Alabama and Northern California are being treated to a show of the northern lights this weekend from a powerful geomagnetic storm which reached Earth. “The aurora is when we get energized particles that have left the sun in more quantities than usual, and they interact with Earth’s magnetic barrier,” Shawn Dahl, senior space weather forecaster for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, explained to CBS News. The geomagnetic storm reached Earth Friday evening as an “extreme” G5, according to the NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center. Geomagnetic storms are ranked from G1 to G5.” (From: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/maps-northern-lights-forecast-us-aurora-borealis/)
Total Solar Eclipse collage
The Great American Eclipse, visible in totality from Texas to Maine, was an event not to be missed! We, like many others, put our bets on Texas weather being clearer in early April than anywhere else in the country. But…in a weird twist of fate, those in Ohio and Maine had clearer weather. From our vantage point in San Saba, Texas we had clear skies right up until a big cloud rolled through about 15 minutes prior to totality! But it wasn’t completely dense, so we were able to see and photograph all the major phases of totality, get some interesting “eclipse in the clouds” images, and have another fun-filled and amazing adventure!
Milky Way over SPACE Atacama Lodge
The processing of the deep space objects from the Chile trip and then the processing of the total solar eclipse images from the Texas trip got ahead of my processing the Milky Way images I took while in San Pedro de Atacama. While the Southern Cross was imaging the IC2944 Running Chicken, Danita and I both imaged the Milky Way, that was stretched low across the southern sky.
Total Solar Eclipse – San Saba, Texas – 8 April 2024
The Great American Eclipse, visible in totality from Texas to Maine, was an event not to be missed! We, like many others, put our bets on Texas weather being clearer in early April than anywhere else in the country. But…in a weird twist of fate, those in Ohio and Maine had clearer weather. From our vantage point in San Saba, Texas we had clear skies right up until a big cloud rolled through about 15 minutes prior to totality! But it wasn’t completely dense, so we were able to see and photograph all the major phases of totality, get some interesting “eclipse in the clouds” images, and have another fun-filled and amazing adventure!
The most AMAZING astrophotography trip to the Atacama Desert!
Over two years in the making – planning, re-planning, provisioning, testing, packing – the most amazing and perfect astrophotography trip came to fruition in the gloriously dark and clear skies of Chile’s Atacama Desert in early March 2024. I couldn’t have dared to dream that the skies would be so dark and so clear – but they were – six nights of imaging, capturing the beauty of the Southern Hemisphere skies. …and days filled with touring adventures!
SHO Hubble Palette Rosette Nebula
Yesterday, as I processed the Rosette Nebula image I wondered what an SHO version might look like…