Author: Suzanne Beers

Happy Holidays from Beers Astrophotography

Merry Christmas 2023 (where did this year go??) & Happy New Year 2024 from the Half Circle House gang – Suzanne & Paul; Zeus & Gracie; the (bee) girls; the Cardinal; and Big Zeus, Big Bertha & the Southern Cross 2023 AP in review… Mother Nature has been particularly disagreeable on New Moon clear skies […]

1-session, 2-session, 3-session, four – Jellyfish

I spent a clear Veterans’ Day night on the front patio capturing more data on the Jellyfish Nebula. Unfortunately, the framing of the capture produced an image not as I had intended, so instead of sharing that night’s data I’m sharing yet another multi-session image of IC443 Jellyfish Nebula. The good news is I spent the night collecting not ideal data from the front patio, NOT during precious dark skies time!

A November Dark Skies Night at Starry Meadows

Again Mother Nature vetoed our planned November dark skies trip. So, in a last-minute desperate move to get at least one night in dark skies – I went to CSASTRO’s property near Gardner, Colorado for a single night of imaging on 4Nov2023 – “sleeping” in the Expedition in between attending to the Southern Cross who captured two DSO’s and the Canon 5DSR on the star tracker that captured the Milky Way.

Eclipse night DSO imaging

After letting two clear, dark sky nights pass me by, I WAS going to image during our last night in Los Alamos for the annular solar eclipse. I imaged two targets, but the data from the second (NGC1909 Witch Head Nebula) wasn’t enough to stand on its own. But not to fret…you’ll be seeing it soon!)

October Front Patio Imaging

I’m running a little (okay, a lot – over a month) behind on processing the images I captured from the front patio during a string of clear nights in early October 2023 before we departed for our trip to Los Alamos, New Mexico for the annular solar eclipse. I used Big Bertha, since she wasn’t going along on the eclipse trip and because I had finally done correctly calculated the back focus needed for the field flattener to actually correct coma in the images, rather than exacerbate it. I wanted to give the correctly assembled ASI2400-BB-FF-LeX imaging train a test run.

The Heart finally has its Soul Nebula

I have attempted to image IC1848 a few times in the past, but never ended up with an image worth sharing. Having figured out the field flattener back-focus “issue” I was having with Big Bertha and the ASI2400MC, I was able to capture data to produce this 4-tile mosaic image of the Soul Nebula, allowing it to join its soul-mate the Heart Nebula in the gallery!

Happy Halloween – the Ghosts of Cassiopeia

I have been collecting data on IC59&IC63 Ghosts of Cassiopeia for over a year – all from the front patio, with mixed results (mostly bad!). This image is comprised of data collected over two sessions in 2022 (2Sep2022, 2Dec2022) with Big Zeus – which seemed to exacerbate the halos from Navi with its open – and three (of four) sessions in 2023 (8Sep23, 16Sep23, 9Oct23).

Butterfly…placeholder #2

This version of the IC1318 Gamma Cygni Nebula (a.k.a (one of the several) Butterfly Nebula) was captured on two nights from the front patio during during the Southern Cross “framing validation” captures leading up to our annular solar eclipse and dark skies trip to Los Alamos. No…this didn’t get captured in dark skies…yet!

Letting go of an obsession, for now…

SH2-129 Flying Bat (the Ha (red) region) and OU-4 Giant Squid (the OIII (blue) region) have been an obsession for me to capture for over a year, with the obsession really kicking in this summer. This image is comprised of data from seven (7) separate imaging sessions (and no including the data from a couple of others!)…it still needs work, but I’m setting it down for now to move on to other tasks (obsessions?)