Jupiter, 2/6/2026 (close to midnight CST)

 

 This is the best of the night, 1250/5k with the QHYiii485C through the CFF 290 at f/20.25. I'm a dabbler in planetary thus far.

 

And here is Jupiter with Europa, best 2.5k/5k. 

Saturn & Titan (11-22-2025 at 7:13 CST)

Here is Saturn with the rings edge-on. I tried to catch Titan crossing the planet's face, but by the time the sun set and the telescope and camera were set up, Titan had just slipped off.  This is best 500/2000 with the CFF 290 Classical Cassegrain at f/13.5 and QHY 5iii485c. If you look closely, another moon, Rhea, sits just to the left of the rings. Dione lurks out beyond it in the shadows.

Titan Shadow Transit (Sept. 4, 2025)

 

Here are two finished images of Titan's shadow transiting Saturn.  These were gathered between 6 and 7 a.m. UTC (1 and 2 a.m. CDT) from my backyard.  With events like these, we take conditions as they come: the sky was a bit hazy, and seeing was not great for more than a few seconds at a time.  I'm happy to have some images.

CFF 290mm f/13.5 with a Dakin 1.5x Barlow lens; QHY5iii485c.

Crescent Close-Up (NGC 6888) (August 2021)

 

I love using my CFF 290 Classical Cassegrain.  Here is an image taken (at f/8.1, 2350mm) of the brighter half of the Crescent Nebula in Cygnus.  This is a full narrowband image.  I took three hours of H-alpha then spent a night on what I thought was O3 but which turned out to be S2---ouch (slip of the brain when controlling the filter wheel)!  The S2 is blended in here.  I finally caught another 3 hours of O3.  Total time: 8 hours 50 minutes.  The H-a and S2 subs were 20 minutes long; the O3's were 30 minutes each.

After I finished the O3 subs and the Crescent slipped behind the trees, I put a diagonal and eyepiece in the big scope and enjoyed a tour of Cygnus.  Highlights included the Owl Nebula and Phi And (0.5" clean split; truly awesome to see those little diffraction patterns so close together).  As always, the scope performed like a champ.  I started observing at 3:30 a.m. and made myself put it away at 5.  I had to sleep sometime.

Lunar (Th)rilles! (Mar. 2021)

This portion of the moon's surface is covered with rilles.  It looks scratched, as if a giant cat pawed across it.  But probably these features were formed when lava tubes just below the surface collapsed, or at least that is what I have read.

The crater to the right with mountains in the middle is Bullialdus.  The long scratches stretching across the center are Rimae Hippalus.  The rille across the bottom right is Rima Hesiodus.  To its left, criss-crossing a crater (Ramsden Crater), are Rimae Ramsden.  Near the top, extending from near the top of the rightmost of Rimae Hippalus is Rima Agatharchides, which travels across Crater Agatharchides P.

In the upper left are ripples, not rimae, around the edges of Mare Humorum, but they form a nice contrast to Rimae Hippalus.

This is best 1200/2000 taken with the QHY5iii485C through the CFF 290 Classical Cassegrain at its native f/13.5.

Crater Plato and Laplace Beach (Mar. 2021)

The larger crater on the right is Plato, and the mountains arching to the left of it include craters all named Plato (M, B, C, F, etc.) or Laplace (D, B, L, M, etc.).  The curve ends at Laplace Promontorium, and down from that is Laplace A.  The two craters down and to the right of Laplace Promontorium are Helicon (left) and La Verrier.

Some things to note about the image: 

1) The long shadow cast by Laplace Promontorium.  Using trigonometry, one could figure the height of the Promontorium by the length of the shadow.

2) Lines of craters.  A small, bright line to the right of La Verrier is a row of craters probably formed when a meteorite that was broken in pieces struck one piece after the other.  There is another just a little to the right of that line that shows as a darker line.

3) The dark canyon extending straight down the lower slope of Plato.

4) The twisting, winding canyon extending down from Plato's upper left wall.

5) The streaks in the topography running up along the upper right side of the image.  What could possibly make such a feature?  It's as if some extraterrestrial giant pulled a rake along the moon.

This is best 1200 of 2000 images taken with the CFF 290 Classical Cassegrain at f/13.5 with the QHY5iii485c camera.

Copernicus and shrapnel around the mountains (Feb. 23, 2021)

Here's another moon shot.  Copernicus is one of what I consider "big splat" craters on the moon (Tycho, Aristarchus, and Kepler are others).  Copernicus is about 800 million years old---young by lunar standards.  That's why it is lighter than the surrounding area.  Anyway, the splat threw up lots of material, so the area around Copernicus is covered with little craters and stuff that I've always figured resulted from the splat.  But a ridge of mountains rings this whole area, and those were there before the splat.

Some of my other favorite craters are in this area, too, like Lansberg, Reinhold, and Hortensius E (very cool), but I'll let you find those.  Also find T. Mayer C, which has a great internal structure.  A good resource for scouting around the moon is the map made from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.  Find the "Quickmap" at the LRO website here.  Click on the guide at upper left, click Overlays, and click "Nomenclature" on the first set of layers.  That imposes map labels on the craters.

This image is a stack of 2002/2002 images taken with the QHY5iii485c camera through the CFF 290 Classical Cassegrain at f/13.5, native focal length.  I just did the basic AutoStakkert, Registax, Photoshop routine and also used Canon Digital Prof'l 4. I can see details smaller than 1km on this image.

Schiller Area (Feb. 2021)

Conditions were very good on the night of Feb. 23 to take some images of the waxing moon.  I am a very casual lunar imager; my strategy is to set up, cool the scope off, and take a picture of anything interesting close to the terminator.  Also, solar system imaging is no specialty of mine; I'm pretty new at it.  But I enjoy observing the sky, and it's nice to do some visual observing, too, after imaging.

Schiller is an odd crater because whatever smacked the moon did it at an angle.  The crater is stretched out, and the floor peaks are all at one end.  Apparently Schiller is 112 miles long and 13,000 deep from bottom of the floor to the top of the peaks (but no ruler was used in this measurement).

This image is a stack of 2002/2002 images taken with the QHY5iii485c camera through the CFF 290 Classical Cassegrain at f/13.5, native focal length.  I just did the basic AutoStakkert, Registax, Photoshop routine.  I also used Canon Digital Prof'l 4.

Galaxies behind M44 (Feb. 2020)

This is part of M44.  M44 is a cluster of stars just 610 light years away, and this is just a small part.  I've always found M44 intriguing through the camera: behind the cluster, peeking through its stars, are lots of little galaxies.  Some of these are far away.

The two bright galaxies sitting perpendicular to each others are PGC 24284 (horizontal) and PGC 2800946 (vertical).  PGC 2800946 is 16th magnitude, and about 220 million light years away.  At that distance, the galaxy is about 62,000 light years across.  PGC 24284 (horizontal) is about the same distance, maybe 5 million light years closer, and actually just a little larger than its companion.

Behind these two, though, other galaxies lurk.  Among them I see PGC 4172192, 1.8 billion light years away (mag. 18.18); PGC 4172171, 2.6 billion light years (mag. 18.44); PGC 4172165, 1 billion light years (Mag. 18.57); and PGC 3732412, 2 billion light years (blazing away at mag. 17.65).

Among these, I see a couple of galaxies for which I have no name.  I was unable to find them on any chart I have.

The dimmest stars in the image are less than mag. 19.  The brighest star in the image is TYC 1395-2047-1, magnitude 10.86.

This image is 7x720" with the CFF 290mm f/13.5 Classical Cassegrain reduced to f/8.1.  The camera was the SXVF-H9, and the subs were taken through an Astronomik CLS filter.  Galactic stats were taken from SkySafari.

Hubble's Variable Nebula, NGC 2261, Caldwell 46 (Feb. 2020)

I took up imaging partly because of light pollution. I just wanted to see more. So sometimes a nice picture is the goal, but sometimes I just want to make an observation. Here is one observation: Hubble's Variable Nebula. It's always a fascinating sight. It's a reflection nebula, and it changes from time to time as clouds get in the way of the star's reflected sunlight. It's a bright target, easily visible from the burbs. This image was 12x300" at a focal length of 2,350mm and a scale of 0.566 arsec/pixel. The telescope used was a CFF 230mm f/13.5 Classical Cassegrain.

NGC 3344 (February 2020)

This galaxy is only about 30 million light years away.  It is a grand spiral in shape but only about 65,000 light years across, about 2/3rds the size of our Milky Way.

There are several smaller galaxies—9 of them!—in the image along the right side of NGC 3344.  Most are around 770 million light years away, give or take thirty million.

The dimmest stars in the image are about magnitude 19.

On the night I took these frames, the seeing was not great.  At the resolution of the system I used, I could only shoot within 22 degrees or so of zenith.  This image was shot at a scale of 0.566 arcsec/pixel.  The image covers 12.8 x 9.72 arc minutes of sky.  I used 9x720" subframes taken with the SXVF-H9 camera at an effective focal length of 2,350mm.  The telescope used was the CFF 290 f/13.5 Classical Cassegrain.  The camera shot through an Astronomik CLS filter.

Arp 117 (IC 983 & 982) & Arp 79 (April 2018)

I've always been fascinated by these galaxies.  They are out of my league for "pretty picture" imaging because my skies are not the best.  I think the dimmest spiral arm of IC983, the huge spiral galaxy on the left, is almost dimmer than my local skyglow.  Still, a guy can observe.

The thing is, these galaxies are amazing.  IC 983 and the smaller spiral IC 982 appear to me to be interacting.  Two of IC 983's spiral arms appear bent toward the smaller spiral.  In a way, these remind me of M51 and NGC 5195, which is Arp 85.  But whereas M51 is small, perhaps 50,000 light years across, IC 983 is huge, perhaps 400,000 light years across!  M51 is a mere 25 million light years away, but IC 983 is ten times further—254,000,000 light years away! Yet IC 983 still dominates the view in this image (taken with the exact same setup used to image M51 earlier this year; you can see how massive IC 983 must be!).

One thing that always intrigued me about IC 983 and Arp 79, the small spiral on the right, was that in most images I have seen, their spiral arms are bent at seemingly impossible, nearly 90-degree angles.  This seemed odd to me; how could gravity cause that?  Yet in my fairly deep and detailed image (equal to the most detailed images I've seen of these galaxies), the spiral arms of both galaxies look pretty normal, their angles normally curved.  I've decided that prior images suffer from lack of depth or over-processing.  I am happy to see this mystery ended.

This image is 28x720", taken over three nights (because these galaxies set behind a tree after three hours).  The camera was the SXVF-H9, and the scope was the CFF 290 Classical Cassegrain at f/8.1.

The best color images I've seen of this set are here and here.  The second of these is quite detailed.  Both are worth a look.

M51 and NGC 5195 (April 2018)

Just another M51 and companion galaxy NGC 5195.  The grand spiral M51 lies perhaps 25 million light years from here.  M51 appears to be quite a bit smaller than our own galaxy. The companion, NGC 5195, is interacting with M51.  These two always amaze visually as well.

This image is 26x480" with the SXVF-H9 through CFF 290 Classical Cassegrain at f/8.1 and an Astronomik CLS filter.

Quasar: QO957+561 A/B (March 30, 2018)

This is an image of the so-called "Twin Quasar."  The two dots near the center upper-half of the image are light from a quasar, a galaxy that is very far away,  The upper dot is called A and the lower one B. The light from B is combined with that of a galaxy that appears so close to B that my telescope cannot distinguish between the two.  But astronomers with larger telescopes have taken spectra of these light sources and discovered that they are very distant.

They are so far away that the expansion of the universe has red-shifted their spectra.  The two dots A and B have a red-shift measured at 1.41, and the galaxy that appears near B is red-shifted 0.355.  Astronomers have found a galaxy cluster in the line of sight at a red-shift of around 0.5.  We can translate these measurements into light years.  The light from quasar components A and B has been traveling 8.7 billion years.  The light from the galaxy appearing next to B left its source 3.7 billion years ago.  The galaxy cluster in the area produced the cluster's light around 5 billion years ago.  My image shows only A and B, not the galaxies in between us and them.  But a nice Hubble Telescope image here shows the galaxy near B and the background cluster.

This is a record for me.  I've never recorded light as old as 8.7 billion years!

What is even more remarkable, the galaxy and cluster between us and A and B acts as a gravitational lens.  A and B are actually a single light source! We see them as two because the strong gravity of the galaxy and cluster in between acts as a lens, bending the light from the far-away quasar into what we see as two images, A and B.  This is proof that gravity bends light, and it is a predicted effect of the theory of relativity.  The Twin Quasar was the first gravitational lens discovered, in 1979, and it is the first one I have imaged.

This image is 21x480" with the SXVF-H9C through the CFF Classical Cassegrain at f/8.1.  As always, the telescope performed wonderfully.  This image was taken under a nearly full moon.  The Twin Quasar is in western Ursa Major, however, so quite far from the full moon in late March.

I relied on this paper in writing this brief summary.

Merope and IC 349 (Sept. 2017)

This is an oft-imaged nebula.  I have imaged it before (search in the window at top left for earlier images).  Merope is the bright star, and IC 349 is the tiny, fan-shaped nebula reflecting Merope's light, just to the right of the star under the diffraction spike.  The nebula may be responding to radiation pressure from Merope, being slowly swept away, but this is not known.  Anyway, the nebula is a challenge to see, and I've taken several images of it.  I think it looks like an angelfish, so to me it is the Angelfish Nebula.

This image was taken at 2353mm with the CFF Classical Cassegrain and the SXVF-H9.

Holoea! (November 2017)

This is the western half of the open cluster M36.  Please find the curious object that looks like a comet with an upward sweeping tail.  Look at about 6:30, halfway from center to lower left edge.  This is Holoea.  The three different versions of the image highlight different parts of this faint object.  After you have found Holoea, please see the write-up below.

Holoea means "flowing gas."  This object was discovered in 1995.  No one is certain just what it is, yet.  Spectroscopy and radio interferometer observations suggest that the object involves a K2 star, two young stellar objects (YSOs) that are moving toward star status, and one pre-stellar condensation of gas that is beginning to glow. Just how those objects are together in the sky is not clear yet, but something, probably one of the YSOs, is ejecting gas outward at 650 kilometers per second!  The system is considered a valuable information source for the stage of star formation between (i) condensing gas cloud and (ii) the point at which a YSO no longer accretes gas.

This image is 17x720" with the SXVF-H9C and Astronomik CLS filter through the CFF 290 Classical Cassegrain at f/8.1.  I thought I might make a color image, but the object is so faint that color would not have been pretty.

Reports are that Holoea has grown brighter, and perhaps it has since the 1950s, but my full-visual-spectrum image suggests it is around magnitude 18.5, something close to the measurement taken in the 1990s.  The faintest stars in the image are around magnitude 20.

My report relies on 2 Jeff Kanipe & Dennis Webb, Annals of the Deep Sky 156 (Willmann-Bell 2015); O. Morata, Y.-J. Kuan, P.T.P. Ho, H.-C. Huang, E.A. Magnier, and R. Zhao-Geisler, Millimetric and Submillimetric Observations of IRAS 05327+3404 "Holoea" in M36, 146 The Astronomical Journal 1 (2013), at http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0004-6256/146/3/49/pdf ; and Magnier's original paper (1996) for the magnitude measured in the 1990s.  I learned of Holoea from Kanipe and Webb.

NGC 1514 (Fall 2017)

This lovely planetary nebula sits on the northern edge of the constellation Taurus, almost in Perseus.  It is visible in late fall and winter.  NGC 1514 was discovered by William Herschel in November 1790.  His study of it is supposed to have persuaded him that not all fuzzy deep sky objects were unresolved groups of stars; this one, he thought, looked like something else.

Perhaps what persuaded him was the very bright star at its center, such a contrast to the nebulosity surrounding it.  The star at the center is a spectroscopic double star.  A study released in 2017 shows that the two stars have a highly eccentric orbit of about 9 years!  (Thanks, Mike Ressler, for the tip (see the comments).)  This study followed other studies that suggested an orbit as short as 10 days (2003) or that the two stars did not orbit each other at all (2016).

In 2010, a NASA infrared telescope revealed that NGC 1514 has two, symmetrical rings around it.  The rings are located outside of the nebulosity shown above and glow in a part of the spectrum not picked up by my camera.  It is proof that even well-studied objects can present new mysteries.

This image is 19x600" through an OIII filter with the SXVF-H9 and 36x720" through an Astronomik CLS filter with the SXVF-H9C.  All sub-frames were taken through the CFF 290 Classical Cassegrain at eff. f/8.1 in Fall 2017.

M43 (Nov. 2017)

Here is M43, the nebulosity surround in NU Orionis, the brightest star in this image.  NU Orionis is a B-type star and radiates UV radiation that probably makes M43 glow.

This image is just 16x240" through the CFF 290 Classical Cassegrain at eff. f/8.1 on a night of about average seeing, which means that 2453mm is too long for the seeing conditions.  It was shrunk 14% to accommodate the poor seeing conditions.  Still, it is an interesting image.  M43 is always overlooked for its near neighbor M42.

M76 (Fall 2017)

I gathered data for this image over four nights in September and October.  M76 is found in our constellation Perseus.  Looking back, I should have taken much longer OIII subs.  I started out with 8-minute subs for narrowband, but the extended lobes of the nebula remain mostly invisible without longer exposures.  For the last Ha, I switched to 20-minute subs.

This is 31x480 in OIII, 9x480 in Ha, and 14x1200 in Ha.  Camera was the SXVF-H9.   Telescope was the CFF 290 Classical Cassegrain at eff. f/8.1.

NGC 7008 (September 2017)

NGC 7008 is a planetary nebula in northern Cygnus.  It has strong H-α and OIII signatures.  But the OIII is brighter than the H-α, so the H-α shows up in this two-color composite as a whitening (or, near the center, a graying) of the OIII's cyan.  There is a hint of red around the center of the nebula.  NGC 7008 is said to be around 2800 light years away, and at that distance the nebula is about one light year across.

For this image, I gathered 7x720" in H-α and 8x720" in OIII, using Astronomik narrowband filters, through the CFF 290 Classical Cassegrain with the SXVF-H9 camera.