The bright spiral galaxies NGC4631 (Whale) and NGC4656 (Hockey Stick) are locked in a cosmic dance about 30 million light years away in the constellation Canes Venatici.

This image was shot without using raw luminace frames at all. There are 2.5 hours of Red, 2.5 hours of Green and 2.5 hours of Blue exposures integrated to make this image.

This will complete the springs “galaxy season” for me and I am very pleased with how the TEC-140 and QSI583 have performed. I’m hoping to move on to some of the traditional summer objects soon and try out some new “toys”. Stay tuned…

I’ve been trying to find time to process this image for a while. NGC4725 is a very nice super giant spiral galaxy in Coma Berenices. Also visible to the left is the smaller spiral NGC4712 and in the bottom right is the very interesting NGC4747 which shows a tidal stream from collision with another galaxy.

The weather has not been very good for astrophotography this spring. I managed to get two nights worth of data of the famous triplet of bright galaxies in Leo a couple of weeks ago.

It’s been a while since I posted. Been busy with other projects. I decided to reorganize my website yet again because I don’t like the limitations of WordPress. I have gone back to script generated static pages for most of the site and the gallery but I have retained the WordPress blog. Enough administrativa, on to the astrophotography…..

I shot this data last month and have finally finished processing. It’s an HaRGB composite from two nights in January.

For the past two months I have been taking a little divergence from my usual “pretty picture” imaging. I have been helping my daughter with a science fair project. She has been using my scope and camera to collect exoplanet transit data! We imaged 5 separate transits altogether and were able to detect the dimming of the host star with varying degees of success in all 5 cases. Here is one of the best light curves.

And the budding scientist!

About a year and a half ago I threw in the towel on long focal length imaging from my home. The seeing in central Texas is rarely better than about 2.5 arcseconds and I was tired of struggling with reflective optics and collimation. That’s when I started my quest for the ultimate refractor which culminated in the purchase of a used TEC-140. This is truly the finest telescope I have ever owned and with the TEC field flattener it is a joy to use. Still, I occasionally yearn to imaging a tiny galaxy or planetary nebula. That was a long way to say that I know that M76 is not the ideal target for my 1010mm focal length imaging rig but I wanted to see how it would do so here is my attempt at the Little Dumbell.

And here you can see the uncropped version,

My can of Jet Lube MP-50 grease came in and I found some time to clean, regrease and adjust the RA and Declination axis worm gears in my mount. Why order grease from the internet you may ask? Well this stuff is amazing. It maintains viscosity over a very wide range of environmental conditions and is rated from -350F to 700F!

After the adjustments I ran PEMPro on my mount a few days later and measured an uncorrected peak-to-peak periodic error of only 2 arcseconds!

Since it’s still cloudy and raining I went back to my last RGB set for M27 and using the new Hα data came up with this composite. The RGB was a little thin but better than I remembered.

I finished installing my new AAG Cloud Watcher. This is a really cool device that uses IR thermometry to determine when the sky is cloudy or clear. I put in a new 4×4 post next to the observatory to install the sensor on. I ran a 1-1/2″ electrical conduit from the observatory to the top of the post and capped it with a rain hood. I’m planning to eventually use this same post for a weather station and an all-sky camera so I wanted it to be easy to run more cables in the future.

The unit connects to my observatory PC via serial port and a Windows driver manages collecting data. I can connect to this driver with my observatory automation software in order to stop an imaging session and shutdown my observatory in the event of clouds or rain. This is the graphical display,

The weather has not been very cooperative lately but I did manage to grab about 6 1/2 hours of Hα filtered data from M27. I plan to collect some new RGB data for an hα-RGB combo. I stretched this pretty hard to show the outer gas halo.