Blog

NGC 896, IC 1795 or The Fish Head Nebula

Messier 101, M101 for short or NGC 896 is also known as the Heart Nebula Fun Facts Distance from Earth – 6 light-years Location – Cassiopeia What is it – Emission and reflection nebula The image above is made up of 22, 3-minute exposures. The moon was bright but low in the sky, but I…
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NGC 6960 – Revisited

With my original image of NGC 6960, I wasn’t really happy with the outcome of the processing. With the scope I have, I don’t expect the best images but the big blue halos bugged me. This time I processed the image with PixInsigh and Photoshop and I think the outcome is better, but still not…
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Messier 101 – Pinwheel Galaxy

Messier 101, M101 for short or NGC 5457 is also known as the Pinwheel Galaxy Fun Facts Distance from Earth – 21 million light-years Location – Ursa Major What is it – Face on spiral galaxy Discovered by Pierre Mechain 1781 The image above is made up of 5, 5-minute exposures. On the night I…
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My Second Image – NGC 7000

NCG 7000 is also known as The North American Nebula or part of it Fun Facts Distance from Earth – 2,590 ± 80 light-years away Location – found in the Cygnus (The Swan) Constellation What is it – Giant emission nebula Discovered by William Herschel on October 24, 1786 The image above is my second…
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My First Image – NGC 6960

NCG 6960 is also known as The Witch’s Broom Nebula or The Western Veil Nebula amongst others Fun Facts Distance from Earth – 1470 light-years away Location – found in the Cygnus (The Swan) Constellation What is it – Supernova remnant Age – about 10,000 years old Discovered by William Herschel on September 5, 1784…
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PixInsight

Wow, what a complicated app this is. While researching software I looked into a lot of applications and there are so many each with plus and minus points, but I settled on PixInsight because it seemed to do everything in one application. The only downside is the learning curve but there seems to be a…
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The Wife said YES!!

With it being the height of summer and the alignment of the tripod, then the polar align and work the next day, I was only getting about 45 minutes to an hour to configure the setup which really isn’t long enough. To reduce the amount of set-up time and hopefully give me a much better…
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Alignment Frustrations

It’s been a few days now trying to polar align and align my scope, but every time I have to put it away and go through the same process the next time out. So something had to change. After looking into computer control I decided to play with Astroberry not because this is the software…
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New Toys

Researching astrophotography on the internet is not a good idea because you get jealous of what others are producing image-wise and I want the same results and I know my old Meade DSI 1 colour and Meade DSI 1 Pro wasn’t going to cut the mustard. Cameras are so expensive but it was a necessity…
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The Mount

After finding my old mount was deceased I purchased what look to be an upgraded like-for-like replacement. The SkyWatcher EQ3-2 Pro Go-To mount. The mount arrived promptly so I got assembling, which didn’t take too long, and hooked it up to the power. Sweet I thought it was working, lets’s update all the firmware and…
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