I was finally able to add some hydrogen to the Pinwheel Galaxy - the pinkish blobs in this image. These are nebulae, rich in hydrogen gas and regions of star formation. That we can photograph these in a galaxy some 21 million light years away, from a home telescope is quite remarkable.
I don’t often photograph the moon but the Artemis II launch 🚀 inspired me to point my telescope at our rocky companion floating about 240,000 miles away.
Artemis II will take people further into space than ever before on a trip around the moon. There will be no landing or moonwalk on this trip though, this mission is about testing equipment and systems. The long term aim of Artemis is to set up a station on the moon as a base for missions to Mars.
This picture was taken from my balcony at home with a Celestron 8” HD telescope and Altair 26c camera. I decided to pull out the hues of the minerals on the moon’s surface; the blues are titanium and brown/orange tones are iron.
The good people @dwarflab have sent me a DWARF Mini smart telescope to test so I’ve been having a bit of fun with it! It’s remarkable how feature-packed it is for such a tiny bit of kit. A product review will follow but for now here are my results so far. If you’re curious about how the DWARF Mini works then drop me a question in the comments. The images you see here are...
1. Flaming Star Nebula: 154x120sec
2. Pinwheel Galaxy: 171x60sec
3. Orion Nebula: 52x60sec
4. Bode’s and Cigar Galaxies: 188x60sec
5. M13 globular cluster: 99x60sec
Each was stacked by the on-board Infinity Lab with calibration frames the telescope took itself automatically, it’s such a smooth process. The images can be processed with the DWARF app or you can take the raw files to a computer and process manually if preferred. There are other features too like auto-mosaic, star trails, lunar and solar imaging that I’m looking forward to trying…
My first attempt at a HSS colour palette image, where hydrogen gas is mapped to the red colour channel and sulphur is mapped to both green and blue channels. I think it creates a fiery appearance with its deep reds and smokey whites so it’s perfectly suited to the Rosette Nebula seen here
I like to try bring my astrophotos to life and give the impression of flying through deep space. The underlying photo is real - no AI here - and the stars are added as an animated effect in Blender. The Orion Nebula image was taken from my balcony at home with around 4 hours of exposures
The Horsehead and Flame Nebula. I shot this with a DSLR and budget refractor telescope, great options for anyone starting out in astrophotography. The key thing is patience! This image was built up over 4 nights; the first with a filter to collect the hydrogen gas and the following 3 with no filter to collect the colours. But those 4 nights spanned 3 months while I waited for clear skies. In total there are 10 hour’s worth of exposures in this single image.
The Soul Nebula lies approximately 6,500 light years away near to (from our point of view) the constellation Cassiopeia - the ‘W’ shape of stars in the northern sky. It’s sometimes referred to as the Embryo Nebula because of its shape.
I shot this image from my balcony at home over several nights, giving a total of around 19.5 hours exposure time.
The first time I processed this data was the first time I’d attempted a proper ‘Hubble palette’ image so I wanted to give it another try to get a better result. Plus we’ve been under a rain cloud for weeks now in the UK so I needed an outlet - I’m itching to get the ‘scope out again!
The Andromeda Galaxy captured from my balcony at home with a small telescope and cooled astro camera. I got some hydrogen-alpha data recently that I could blend into RGB images I took a while ago. Ideally I need a lot more to really make the nebulae pop (or maybe I’ll have to make the leap to a mono camera one day 🤔)
