The Horsehead Nebula (Fall 2021)

OK, it's not like I've never taken an image of the Horsehead Nebula, but I haven't with this scope and camera.  This one took four nights and includes only frames east of the meridian (till the tree blocks the view). I was happy to capture signs of four or five Herbig-Haro objects identified in this paper.

This is 56x300" with the 203mm Synta ONTC Newtonian at f/4.95 with the Atikc 460EXC and an Astronomik CLS filter.

Jupiter: Double Shadow Transit (Nov. 23, 2021 or UT Nov. 24, 2021)

 

Sometimes the sun and one of Jupiter's moons line up so that the moon's shadow crosses Jupiter's face. The shadow looks like a black spot on the planet. Tonight two shadows crossed Jupiter together---a photo op! The right shadow is Ganymede's; the left is Callisto's. In between them is the Great Red Spot. To the right and below the planet, you can spot the moons themselves, Ganymede nearer Jupiter and Callisto further away.

 

This image was shot through my wonderful 6-inch f/8 Newtonian telescope with a QHY5iii485c. 5,268 subframes were taken and 60% of them stacked and sharpened to make this image. The scope is Dobson-mounted, so I dragged the scope twice to make Jupiter transit across the camera chip three times.  I'd have used the CFF290 on the NJP, but I can only see Jupiter from the north end of the yard, where I can't see the north star to set up my mount (OK, yeah, without drift-aligning, but we all have our limits).

Lunar Eclipse (Nov. 19, 2021)

Canon T3i through the SkyWatcher ED80 with 0.85x reducer-flattener: this was about 3:11 a.m. CST on Nov. 19.  The eclipse was never full, and the camera couldn't handle the dynamic range.  Through the eyepiece, the moon was stunning!

NGC 206, an OB association in the Andromeda Galaxy (Fall 2021)

What looks like a cluster of blue stars in this image (and was called a cluster by Edwin Hubble) is actually a large association of young type-O and -B stars (hot, large, and bright) that shines 2.5 million light years away in the Andromeda Galaxy.

This image is 44x1200" with the Atik 460EXC, 203mm Synta ONTC Newtonian at f/4.95, and an Astronomik CLS filter.

M103 (Nov. 2021)

This simple but striking cluster in Cassiopeia was captured with 29x300" using an Atik 460EXC through the 203mm Synta-ONTC Newtonian at f/4.95 and an Astronomik CLS filter.  Seeing was actually pretty bad the night of capture.