At the beginning of February, we had some clear weather, which doesn’t happen too often for this month. I managed to take advantage of it and produced these 3 images. One was a short run (The Monkey Head,) but the other two were more involved.
M44 Open Cluster was a mosaic and took a little over 95 minutes to capture (286 x 20 sec.) The Tadpoles (IC 410) took two nights of imaging and I let the Seestar S50 stack the resulting two sets of sub-images. It was about 4.88 hrs of exposure.
More Seestar S50 Images taken from the city.
“Lynx is home to the fascinating globular cluster NGC 2419. Although visually faint and small what makes NGC 2419 special is its distance; at 275,000 light-years it’s one of the furthest known Milky Way globulars. In fact, twentieth century American astronomer Harlow Shapley nicknamed it ‘The Intergalactic Tramp’ believing it to have possibly broken away from the Milky Way and headed off into deep inter galactic space. However, recent observations indicate Shapley hypothesis was incorrect and NGC 2419 is still gravitationally bound to the Milky Way just moving in a highly eccentric orbit.” – FreeStarCharts.com
This was 3 hrs in one continuous run using 20 sec sub-images using the Seestar S50. Taken on Jan 1, 2026 in the early morning hours in Bortle 8/9 conditions.
It was a little hazy with below average transparency Christmas Eve night 2025, so before it got too bad, I decided to try and take a mosaic of the Double Cluster, instead of a nebula or galaxy as a target. Taken with my Seestar S50 for 48 minutes using 30 sec sub-images.
After waiting a while for the tech to mature, I decided that a Smart Telescope would be fun to play with. So, I got the cheapest one on the market.
ZWO built it originally and they spun off a new company called Seestar to market it. In this case, the unit is the Seestar S50, a 50mm triplet in an all-in-one design including mount, camera, computer and storage.
Here’s the first light images from it:
I normally don’t image during a full moon, but the weather was beautiful and I had a new telescope to do more testing with. Plus, there was a comet just begging me to take it’s picture. I couldn’t pass up the chance.
I ended up taking images both Saturday and Sunday nights. I tried to give lots of time to single objects and not jump around so much, for a change.
The comet was very low in the west at dusk. I had to quickly get shots and didn’t notice a building’s awning was in the shot along with street lights casting reflections from that direction. Clouds coming and going didn’t help, either.
But! This comet is bright enough to show up (with a tail!) that low in the muck of a Bortle 8-9 zone! That’s quite bright, by most comet imaging standards!
The Cone and the IC 446 Nebula area. It was well placed and I shot 4 hours for IC446 on one night and did a short run on the Cone next door the following night.
I always enjoy seeing M13 again after it emerges in the late winter morning skies high enough to get imagery. The colors got washed out with all the moonlight, unfortunately. I created a darker version with more color enhancement, but the washed out look remains:
Oh, well… I had fun taking it and processing it. 🙂
Here’s the very first stacked image taken with my new Astro-Tech AT60EDP. It’s a 60mm, F/5 Petzval telescope with 300mm focal length. This was 64×180 sec using the new scope. Location was a Bortle 8-9 zone with a bright moon out, 48F, clear and above average transparency. The second version is the full field.
Comet 62P/Tsuchinschan near the galaxies NGC 4608, NGC 4596. Also included are M58, M59, M60 and other faint galaxy fuzzies in the Virgo Galaxy Cluster.
M4 Globular Cluster, Antares and friends in Scorpio. It was still the 1st light night for my new AT60EDP, but at 5:00 AM the next morning. This is 11 x 3 minutes with a QHY294C, Antlia Triband RGB Ultra filter from a Bortle 8-9 zone. Still noisy with only 33 minutes and there was some twilight, but I’m sure I’ll be able to add to it in time.