A moonless night spent with M8

Cleardarksky.com predicted above average transparency tonight, a rarity for us here in the Adirondack mountains. So I decided head out on this night of the new moon and the day when a solar eclipse had been visible in South America! The transparency was good, and so was the seeing. I was Joined by Jim and […]

GPS Module flips out again

It’s been a while, but the GPS module stopped responding again. This is the fourth time. I developed a reset procedure to resurrect it, and had to apply that again. Only this time, I installed a handy reset button. Once again, the GPS came back to life after being reset.

Owl Nebula

I saw a video on YouTube where an astronomically inclined couple chronicled their adventures capturing the Owl Nebula. It’s an object I never tried observing, and I was intrigued. It’s quite an interesting nebula. I took eleven, 10-minute exposures. These are the longest exposures I’ve done successfully so far. Canon 40D Parameter Notes Lens CPC-800 […]

Greatest of Rings

M57 – the Great Ring Nebula. That dim, barely discernible deep sky object is the first that I spied in my 4 1/2″ Newtonian – and what propelled me towards upgrading to my 8″ CPC-800. The photos I’ve taken periodically haven’t amounted to much. M57 is a small object to capture with my 40D DSLR […]

Comet 21P/

I got a few exposures of comet 21P on July 20th and made them into a mini-movie: This is six frames of 3-minutes each. A small tail is beginning to form, and I was able to observe this visually in addition to what’s seen in these exposures.

Bode’s Cigar

We had another great night of observing at Norton Cemetery on May 12th. Early thin clouds gave way to improved seeing and transparency as the night progressed, with great views of Jupiter. Sometime I’ll experiment with planetary imaging but I’m not set up for it yet. Rather, I took some four-minute exposures of M81&M82 (Bodes […]

Whirlpool of a night

The darkest night and best transparency I’ve seen in quite a while finally arrived. It was a bit cool, but I got some terrific views of Jupiter and the Whirlpool Galaxy. Jupiter was nearly at opposition and looked great – the biggest and brightest I’ve seen. Four cloud bands were clearly visible as it rose […]