Any star gazers and amateur astronomers ?

I bought this telescope thinking I'd do Astrophotography and all it does is sit in my closet..... lol. Someday I'll get to it. Maybe when I retire in 15 years.

 

Pandas around the world are balling their eyes out knowing this thing is not being used nightly.

 

I have an 8" Meade LX200 Classic (since 1993), due to my age, the weight and size of the scope I really didn't use it as much as would have liked. I recently got a Vaonis Vespera as way to get into some EAA. Here is a photo I took 2 nights ago of the California Nebula (1 hour total exposure, 10 sec subs, 20 gain - stacked on the Vespera). The resulting tif image was stretched in GIMP, also removed some light pollution on the edges with GraXpert.

 

The Vespera has done a fine job! I can empathize with you on a larger scope. I also have an LX200 14" that can be a handful. My yard isn't the best and hauling it out for the evening's work can be difficult. Lifting it isn't a big deal--I use a game hoist and the tripod sits on a set of wheelie bars. A big telescope deserves a pier and good field of view. What I should do is go to the desert this summer.

Anyway, I listened to a talk by Sahil Hegde, a PhD student at UCLA, talk about the first stars in the universe this morning (iTelescope offers weekly talks that are always good and sometimes well above my pay grade but always interesting--the link is for the YouTube channel).

Any way, Sahil presented three images and a choice of three telescopes. All three images were of M83. The choices where a Sky Watcher Esprit 120ED, The Harlan J. Smith telescope which is 107", and the Lovell Radio Telescope. The radio telescope was obvious because unless it's a good sized array, images from a single radio telescope all look like giant blocks Most people guessed the higher res image came from the Sky Watcher but it was from the HJS (only 17% got it right). The third, which was a more wide field image was the Sky Watcher (67% got it right).

I was fascinated by the results of the quiz--I am convinced you could have put the same image from the Vespera up against the HJS and done well.

 

This is what I was talking about.

 

The Aurora came out last night, and I was able to score a few shots from the property here.

 

The Jellyfish Nebula (IC443) is a supernova remnant in the constellation Gemini. It lies adjacent to the emission nebula Sharpless 249, a star forming region. It took me over 3.5 hours to get this integrated mosaic. It was very cold so the internal battery of my scope started to die earlier than I’m used to. I rushed to get an extension cord setup but was too late so the session ended abruptly Even so, I was happy with the result.



The two prominent stars Tejat and Propus were also well formed.

 

I noticed Mt Hamilton is getting hammered with snow. For those out of the area, this is Lick Observatory. There’s gotta be almost a foot of snow already!

The Cameras are covered otherwise you can check, https://mthamilton.ucolick.org/hamcam/

 

https://twitter.com/mastronomers/status/1630919634722357249?s=46&t=Kw5WKLK_Ur2JLkF4hHsfEQ

 

Thats cool.

 

do you have a link to where you got this picture? i would like to save it to help plan a trip to see these eclipses.

 

I pulled it off Reddit. I think you’ll find all you need here:
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/eclipses/home/

 

Man, I missed this. Pretty sweet.

 

Thanks for this link. I had very similar settings to what the link called out for the star trails.

 

The Orion nebula this evening. A mosaic of 192 images with about 32 minutes of total exposure. Had to abort due to the moon and then clouds... Used a Dual Band filter with my Vespera:

 

Love the detail! The star reduction is just right. Beautiful image!

Saw a great Orion on Cloudy Nights. It's Ha and OIII 500x 10s each. This was from a 14.5" Dall Kirkham on a Paramount ME2 mount. The focal length is about 2464mm and using a mono camera. I've never seen anything like it with just Hydrogen Alpha and Oxygen-3.

 

thanks, yea i found it a couple pages in
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/news/2332/new-nasa-map-details-2023-and-2024-solar-eclipses-in-the-us/

 

My daughter lives in San Antone...gonna go for the 2024 one, maybe the 2023 if I can swing it.

 

Perfect spot for these 2!!

Pics or you didn’t go