Just over an hour’s worth of exposure for this one. This was the 2nd object of the night, the first being Betelgeuse, which was only a few frames.
I had better conditions for this shot at the beginning of the session than later in the night for other objects. Too bad it didn’t stay like that.
While shooting this, two older ladies came by to see what I was doing. Interesting conversation, but I think I went right over their heads trying to explain a supernova remnant. LoL! 🙂
A quickie Sunflower Galaxy. Needs more exposure, obviously. I killed some time waiting for M64 to get into position shooting this.
This object was the main goal of the night. Not quite the 3 hrs I wanted to give it, but almost. I took a nap while this was brewing, and ended it since the mount needed a meridian flip to keep going. Instead of doing that, I decided to get M13 instead.
Here’s a detail crop view with a little more color saturation to go along with the above:
Last object of my imaging session for the night of Feb 1st/2nd, 2020 was the globular cluster, M13. Twilight was just starting when I stopped at 100 sub-images. Not too bad for a quickie.
Here is an image of a comet that is big and bright enough to make some interesting images, especially when it passes near objects like the Double Cluster. I missed the closest approach of these two due to weather and other factors, but at least I got the parting shot of them together.
This one was difficult to bring out the nebula since the UHC-S filter blocks some of the blue that this object predominantly shines in. But, it captures enough of the OIII, Hydrogen Alpha and Beta light to produce an image even from the heavily light-polluted location that I’ve been imaging from.
I was surprised how well this came out with only about an hour of data. I was after galaxies this night and I only took this to kill time. Even the 33 minutes worth I posted initially looked half-decent. I will have to devote a session to this one and possibly use the L-eNhance filter instead of the UHC-S.
3 hours of exposure for this object. I used SharpCap 3.2 LiveStacking and a Baader UHC-S filter to cut through the light pollution in a Bortle 8 Red Zone metro area.
M51 on Jan 25, 2020. 280 x 30 sec, Gain 42, Offset 15, -20C, UHC-S filter, QHY183c, TV-85 at F/5.6.