M97 in Ha (April 8, 2014)

This planetary nebula in Ursa Major is one of the few popular narrowband targets up during the spring.  It's a bright one, too.  This is only H-alpha.  I hope to get the OIII, too, and combine them.  But the night I set up to collect the OIII data became unexpectedly cloudy at 11 pm.  Oh, well.  In the meantime, M97 is slipping behind my trees.  I may have to wait till next year.  Either way, the data interests me.

This data is 8x1200" with the 6nm Proti Astronomik Ha filter and 10x900" with the 12nm Astronomik Ha filter.  The dimmest stars in the image are below magnitude 19.

Full resolution image here.

Telescope: Orion 254mm f/4.7 Newtonian and Baader MPCC
Camera and Exposure: SXVF-H9 (8x1200" with the 6nm Proti Astronomik Ha filter and 10x900" with the 12nm Astronomik Ha filter), Alnitak Flatman flats
Guiding: SX Lodestar and SX SFW+OAG
Mount: Takahashi NJP
Software: Nebulosity, Photoshop CS3
Location: The Woodlands, TX

M64 ( April 2014)

Full resolution image here.

A color image of this galaxy was my goal since January, but we had nothing but cloudy nights near new moons until April.  Then the first two clear nights were hazy, and I had equipment problems.  Finally, I obtained a good night's worth of data on the 22nd.  I obtained 23x900" of data, and then M64 went behind the trees.

The galaxy is famous for the dust lane near its center, and also because the inside part of the galaxy rotates one way and the outer part rotates in the opposite direction!

Telescope: Orion 254mm f/4.7 Newtonian and Baader MPCC
Camera and Exposure: SXVF-H9C (23x900"), Alnitak Flatman flats
Filter: Astronomik CLS
Guiding: SX Lodestar and SX SFW+OAG
Mount: Takahashi NJP
Software: Nebulosity, Photoshop CS3
Location: The Woodlands, TX

M57 (April 2014)

Full resolution image here.

How many images of the Ring Nebula does one need?  I figure at least one for each telescope available, and perhaps one for each camera with each telescope.

Actually, I was shooting something else which set behind the trees around 4 am.  Rather than shut down for the night, I slewed to M57 for a short session.

There is something delightful about shooting relatively bright objects.  It's so easy to get a good signal-to-noise ratio.  Besides, M57 is so colorful!  Why not shoot it often?

Telescope: Orion 254mm f/4.7 Newtonian and Baader MPCC
Camera and Exposure: SXVF-H9C (14x180"), Alnitak Flatman flats
Filter: Astronomik CLS
Guiding: SX Lodestar and SX SFW+OAG
Mount: Takahashi NJP
Software: Nebulosity, Photoshop CS3
Location: The Woodlands, TX

While waiting for clouds to go away in March of this year, I pulled some data from the Hubble Legacy archive.  Here's a much more detailed image of the Ring Nebula from the Hubble Space Telescope, thanks to those who maintain the archive and the creators of FITS Liberator, version 2.

Full resolution image here.

M67,Twice (12-2012 to 2-2013)

 Full resolution image here.

There is a time during the night in December through February when bright targets are not too plentiful.  This one, M67, is one of the few.  In between working on dimmer targets, I took some frames of M67.  We see M67 in the constellation Cancer.

M67 is an open cluster of stars that is between 2,500 and 3,000 light years away.  Its age is between 3.5 and 5 billion years.  Our Sun is about 5 billion years old, we believe.  The Sun and M67 are moving in the same general direction through space in our Milky Way Galaxy.  Some have speculated that our Sun was once a member of the cluster, though later studies (such as here) make this seem unlikely.

Regardless, M67 is a beautiful open cluster in a telescope.  No image really captures the beauty of the stars, but these remind me of the cluster.

The first was taken with the AT111EDT, a refractor.  The spikes were placed on the stars with software.  I think they are subtle and give the stars a bit of sparkle.  That image leads the three because it most nicely frames the cluster.  Here is the same image without the spikes:

Full resolution image here.

And here is one taken through the Orion 254mm f/4.7 Newtonian.  In this image, the spikes are part of the star shapes created by the telescope.  The color for the Newtonian image comes from the Palomar and AAO Digital Sky Survey II, publicly available on the web.  Thanks to Dick Locke for generously sharing a color-balanced sample image.

Full resolution image here.

Telescope: Astro-Tech AT111EDT and William Optics P-FLAT4 (eff. at f/5.6)
Camera and Exposure: SXVF-H9C; L (15x180"), R (6x300"), G (7x300"), B (7x300"); Alnitak Flat-man flats
Filter: Astronomik CLS and RGB filters
Guiding: SX Lodestar and SX OAG
Mount: Takahashi NJP
Software: Nebulosity, Maxim DL, Registar, Photoshop CS3
Location: The Woodlands, TX 

Telescope: Orion 254mm f/4.7 Newtonian and RCC I
Camera and Exposure: SXVF-H9 (L: 9x240"), T-shirt flats
Filter: IDAS LPS-P2
Guiding: SX Lodestar and SX OAG
Mount: Takahashi NJP
Software: Nebulosity, Maxim DL, Registar, Photoshop CS3
Location: The Woodlands, TX

NGC 1999, the Keyhole Nebula (Dec. 12, 2012)

This is NGC 1999, the Keyhole Nebula.  It is a reflection nebula lit by the star on the right edge of the lower part of the keyhole.  The nebula is so bright there that it is difficult to see the star separately from the nebula.

The interesting thing about the Keyhole Nebula is that it is actually a hole.  Many dark spots seen against a brighter nebular background are cold clouds of gas and dust.  Not so the Keyhole, apparently.  The keyhole feature appears actually to be a hole.  Deep images with a variety of infrared scopes (reported here) show that in the keyhold feature there lurks ... nothing.  What blasted a hole through this patch of otherwise brightly lit cloud?  That is a mystery, but the area is full of young stars just beginning stellar life.  Perhaps one of them blasted a tunnel right through.

Mine is not a deep image.  Surrounding the blue reflection nebula is a lot more gas and dust that is not lit up so brightly with reflected light.  Some more interesting objects my image only begins to show are also brighter in other pictures of the region.  You can see some of them in Adam Block's image, here, taken with a much larger scope from the top of a very dark mountain.  In my image you can see just a hint of these other things in the reddish background and in the red glowing objects just to the right of the Keyhole Nebula.

Telescope: Orion 254mm f/4.7 Newtonian and RCC I
Camera and Exposure: SXVF-H9 (R: 9x240"; B: 10x240" (synthetic green)), T-shirt flats
Filter: Astronomik RB, IDAS-LPS2
Guiding: SX Lodestar and SX OAG
Mount: Takahashi NJP
Software: Nebulosity, Maxim DL, Registar, Photoshop CS3
Location: The Woodlands, TX

M1 (Dec. 12, 2012)

Link to full resolution image here.

In 1054 A.D. , Chinese astronomers noted a new star in the sky.  It shone so brightly that folks could see it in the daytime.  But the star was temporary.  In fact, it was not a new star at all but an old star that exploded.  This nebula is the result of that explosion.  M1 is a supernova remnant.  It is one of the coolest deep sky objects in the heavens.

Why so cool?  Well, first, this is one of the few deep sky objects whose origin was observed by human beings, and it's been growing ever since.  Most objects in the sky change very slowly by our time scale, but not this one.  In fact, some amateur astronomers have observed changes in M1 in their own images over time.

Second, M1 is not just a supernova remnant.  It is the home of what is left of the star that exploded.  The core of the supernova did not have enough mass to become a black hole, so it stopped just short of that and became a neutron star.  Within it, gravity's power has overcome the forces that create space within atoms, crushing the elements away.  What is left is a ball of neutrons only 15-18 miles wide that contains more mass than the Sun!  Pretty heavy stuff!

But there is more.  The neutron star and its interactions with its immediate environment produce more than just visible light.  Radio waves, x-rays, and gamma rays all stream out of the center of M1.  See NASA's combined optical and x-ray image of the center of M1 here.  The neutron star's intense radiation causes this to happen.

Even more remarkably, the neutron star is spinning very quickly.  It's strong electromagnetic field concentrates the radio waves into pulses that tick like a clock in space.  When astronomers first heard it, its regularity suggested that astronomers were receiving a signal from aliens.  But theorists later determined how a neutron star could produce such pulses.  We call such a spinning neutron star a pulsar.

The pulsar itself is visible in this image.  At the center of the nebula are two stars, easily visible next to each other.  The pulsar is the dimmer of the two, on the right.  We may not have a picture of a black hole yet, but we have images of the next closest thing.  How cool is that?

This image is a combination of (1) a stack of frames taken through an H-alpha filter with (2) a short color image I took a year ago through the same telescope.  I have simply slapped the color over the H-alpha image.  Here is the H-alpha alone:

Here is the capture data for the H-alpha image:
Telescope: Orion 254mm f/4.7 Newtonian and RCC I
Camera and Exposure: SXVF-H9 (H-alpha: 10x900"), T-shirt flats
Filter: Astronomik 12nm Ha
Guiding: SX Lodestar and SX OAG
Mount: Takahashi NJP
Software: Nebulosity, Maxim DL, Registar, Photoshop CS3
Location: The Woodlands, TX

The color data is described here.

M42 Trapezium (Sept. 22, 2012)

The lovely little cluster called the Trapezium lies at the heart of M42, the Great Nebula in Orion, and is named after the shape made by its brightest stars.  M42 and the Trapezium are one of the grandest sights in the sky and are subjects for serious study.

The cluster's stars are close together, literally as well as apparently.  They appear so close that they were once thought to be one star, Theta Orionis.  As astronomers over time split the star into more and more components, they named the components with letters.  The brightest star in the cluster is Theta Orionis C.  It is very bright, very hot, and generates most of the ultraviolet radiation that makes the gas around it glow.  In the image, the star at the top of the Trapezium is D.  The two brighter other stars that make up the trapezoid, going from left to right, are A and B.  Here is a close crop of the cluster:

As more components were discovered, more letters were used.  The semi-bright star between A and B (and just to the right of A) is E.  The star just above C is F (which looks elongated; actually there are two stars there).  The star just below D is G, and directly below G is I.  Moving to the lower left of I is H, which is just below C and to the left of A.  Next to H, to H's immediate left, is another star, and I have no idea what it's name is.  Nor do I know the names of the other, nearby stars.  Actually, I was surprised to see so many here.  But this is not anywhere close to all the stars in the cluster.  Many of them shine in wavelengths other than those allowed by the two filters that I used to take this image.  I should explain.

One of the cool things about this nebula is that stars in it are still forming.  There is still a lot of dust obscuring stars that have formed, and the stars do not all glow with the same intensity at all wavelengths.  When we take pictures, we often use different filters that cut out all but a few wavelengths.  This allows us to focus only on the gases that light up the nebula, to the exclusion of almost all other light (including streetlights in front of my house).  For example, this image records light with a wavelength of 656.28 nm.  At that wavelength we find light emitted by ionized hydrogen.  Very near it we also find the light of ionized nitrogen, and my filter (called an h-alpha filter because it focuses on the hydrogen emission) just happens to pass light from a band 12 nm wide.  It is wide enough that it also picks up the nitrogen signal.  This image also records light taken through another filter that allows the wavelengths of 495.9 nm and 500.9 nm, and this light is emitted by ionized oxygen.  This filter is often called an OIII filter.  The h-alpha line is in the red part of the spectrum, and the OIII lines are green, but I've mapped OIII to blue here, also, because blue and red make a better picture.  So here you see the stars as they shine at those wavelengths.

But look at this next image.  I also took an image through an SII filter, which allows in light of ionized sulfur, at wavelengths of 671.6 and 673.1 nm.  The image is quite different:

More stars appear, and they are brighter.  Why is that so?  It may be because these stars radiate more light from ionized sulfur than from hydrogen, nitrogen, or oxygen.  I suspect that is the case.  Notice that stars G, H, and I are dimmer in this SII image, and that F is not elongated.  

The best way to see this cluster, though, is at infrared wavelengths.  Not until wavelengths of 750 nm do we reach the infrared.  Infrared light cuts through the dust, so an infrared image shows hundreds more stars in the area.  An example from the Hubble Space Telescope is here.  How cool is that?  On the other hand, when the Hubble records in h-alpha, nitrogen, and OIII, as I did, it picks up the same stars I do in the first image above (and a few more with Hubble's better resolution and bigger aperture, of course, but nothing like the infrared), as here.

Anyway, I took these images of the Trapezium from my backyard, in about an hour's time.  The stars are so bright that only short exposures would keep the stars small enough to remain separate.

Telescope: Orion 254mm f/4.7 Newtonian and Astro-Tech Coma Corrector (eff. at f/5.17)
Camera and Exposure: SXVF-H9 (H-alpha: 11x30"; OIII: 15x30"; SII: 15x30"), T-shirt flats
Filter: Astronomik 12nm Ha, OIII, and SII
Guiding: SX Lodestar and SX OAG
Mount: Takahashi NJP
Software: Nebulosity, Maxim DL, Registar, Photoshop CS3
Location: The Woodlands, TX

NGC 281 Bi-Color (September 2012)

Full resolution link here.

Here is the Pacman Nebula again, a closer view.  The H-alpha data shown earlier this month falls naturally in the red part of the spectrum.  To this I have added OIII.  Ionized oxygen is green, but it is weaker than the H-alpha.  In this image, I have used H-alpha for red, OIII for blue; I combined this data (20% Ha, 80% OIII) to create a third data set, which I used for green.  This is a slightly false color, but I think it is easy on the eyes and shows the data well.

Telescope: Orion 254mm f/4.7 Newtonian and Astro-Tech Coma Corrector (eff. at f/5.17)
Camera and Exposure: SXVF-H9 (H-alpha: 1x900" + 12x1200"; OIII: 15x1200"), T-shirt flats
Filter: Astronomik 12nm Ha and 12nm OIII
Guiding: SX Lodestar and SX OAG
Mount: Takahashi NJP
Software: Nebulosity, Maxim DL, Registar, Photoshop CS3
Location: The Woodlands, TX

IC 1590 & NGC 281 (Sept. 6, 2012)

Link to the full resolution image.

I've always wanted to get closer to the cluster at the center of this nebula.  A clear night this week presented an opportunity.  I had some trouble with the 254mm Orion Newtonian early on: a poorly installed dew heater was warping the secondary.  When I realized what the problem was and shut off the dew heater, the field quickly flattened out.  By that time, NGC 281 was just coming over the trees.  This is my first image of the nebula with the big Newt, and the first time I've shot H-alpha through the big scope.  I don't think it will be the last time.  This is also first light since installing a Protostar tubeliner inside the scope.

NGC 281 and the open cluster in the center of the image, IC 1590, are about 9,500 light years away.  The nebula is bright because the stars in it are bright.  The nebula is an emission nebula, which means that the gas of the nebula (hydrogen in this image) is excited by the ultraviolet light of the stars in the cluster.  The cluster and nebula are a package deal.

What I like about this nebula in particular are the clumps of gas and dust in front of it.  The clumps are being worn away by starlight, but several of them stand out against the face of the cloud, including the long river near the cluster and several little globules in the upper right.

It's a grand sight!  I recommend clicking on the full resolution link above, toggling F11, and panning about.

Telescope: Orion 254mm f/4.7 Newtonian and Astro-Tech Coma Corrector (eff. at f/5.17)
Camera and Exposure: SXVF-H9 (1x900" + 12x1200"), T-shirt flats
Filter: Astronomik 12nm Ha
Guiding: SX Lodestar and SX OAG
Mount: Takahashi NJP
Software: Nebulosity, Maxim DL, Photoshop CS3
Location: The Woodlands, TX

NGC 5850 (May 18, 2012)

This galaxy is a rather difficult target.  Its central bar is fairly bright, but the ring and outer spiral arms are diffuse and difficult to separate from the skyglow above my suburban home.

The galaxy is interesting both because of its morphology and because it appears to have developed asymmetry as a result of its encounter with its larger neighbor to the northwest, NGC 5846, which can be seen glowing at the bottom edge of my image (in which north is to the right).

My favorite image of NGC 5850 comes from the Mt. Lemmon SkyCenter and is linked here.  Ah, what one can do with a 24" scope on top of a mountain.

NGC 5850 is between 58 and 93 million light years away.  Most distance estimates to the apparent neighbor galaxy, NGC 5846, are closer to the larger number.

Trees and dew limited my exposure time to just over 3.6 hours.  The image may improve quite a bit if I double that on a later night.

Telescope: Orion 10" f/4.7 Newtonian and Astro-Tech Coma Corrector (eff. at f/5.17)
Camera and Exposure: 31x7' thru the SXVF-H9
Filter: Hutech IDAS-LPS2
Guiding: SX Lodestar and SX OAG
Mount: Takahashi NJP
Software: Nebulosity, Maxim DL, Photoshop CS3
Location: The Woodlands, TX

M106, or NGC 4258 (April 21-22, 2012)

Full resolution image here.

Galaxy M106 is nearby, large, and busy. The galaxy is estimated to be around 22 to 25 million light years away.  At that distance, its size appears to be around 125,000 light years across.  M106 is a Seyfert galaxy, meaning that a spectrum taken of its nucleus appears to show bright light from certain ionized gases moving at great speeds both toward us and away from us.  An accretion disk around a very large black hole is a good explanation for this data, so one is suspected at the heart of M106.  Masers have also been detected in M106 and used to calculate the galaxy's distance.  What a maser is is a little hard to explain, but there is a good introduction here and more information exists around the web.  Also, something in M106 appears to be generating tremendous shock waves that ram into gas near the galaxy's center; the shock waves heat the gas so that it glows with infrared and x-ray radiation.  More details here.  Yup, busy place.

There is a fine Hubble Telescope image of the center of M106 published here.  It is a mirror image of mine, but if you can flip the images in your head, you can easily match features. Clicking on the full resolution link just under the image above may help with the comparison.  The features are most easily matched when my image is at its original size.

This image is first light with the Astro-Tech Coma Corrector.

Telescope: Orion 10" f/4.7 Newtonian and Astro-Tech Coma Corrector (eff. at f/5.17)
Camera and Exposure: Total 10.33 hrs thru SXVF-H9, 37x10'; SXVF-H9C, 25x10'
Filter: Hutech IDAS-LPS2
Guiding: SX Lodestar and SX OAG
Mount: Takahashi NJP
Software: Nebulosity, Maxim DL, Photoshop CS3
Location: The Woodlands, TX

M5 (April 21, 2012)

My galactic target had set below the trees, and two hours of darkness remained. This globular cluster of stars, called M5, had just passed the meridian and so was placed conveniently for my westward pointing scope. This image is simply luminance, or, in other words, "full spectrum" black and white. The lack of color is ok, I think. Rarely do I see color I really like in globular cluster images. The beauty of them lies primarily in the overwhelming number of stars. I was a bit disappointed that, with eight-minute exposures, the center of the cluster was completely blown out. Next time I will try to take some shorter sets, too. But I wanted the outer halo of stars that you see here.

This night was my first with the Astro-Tech Coma Corrector.

Telescope: Orion 10" f/4.7 Newtonian and ATCC (eff. at f/5.17)
Camera and Exposure: SXVF-H9, 10x8'
Filter: IDAS-LPS2
Guiding: SX Lodestar and SX OAG
Mount: Takahashi NJP
Software: Nebulosity, Maxim DL, Photoshop CS3
Location: The Woodlands, TX

M20, the Trifid Nebula (4-22-12)

OK, the Trifid again, too.  My last color image of this was taken with the 6" without a coma corrector, and it showed.  This one is much better.  Shrunken to 60% of original size.

Telescope: Orion 10" f/4.7 Newtonian and Astro-Tech CC (eff. at f/5.17)
Camera and Exposure: SXVF-H9C, 13x6'
Filter: IDAS-LPS2
Guiding: SX Lodestar and SX OAG
Mount: Takahashi NJP
Software: Nebulosity, Maxim DL, Photoshop CS3
Location: The Woodlands, TX

M8, the Lagoon Again (April 22, 2012)

Back to the Lagoon Nebula.  From my backyard, this nebula is only visible for a couple of hours at a time.  During galaxy season, the 10" is on the mount when it's really too late in the morning to go after another galaxy.  But the Milky Way is coming up over the trees about 3:30 am, and there we find this!  Glowing hydrogen gas provides the red color, and oxygen the blue that whitens up the nebula in the brighter lower middle.  Some blue may also be light reflected from the relatively new nearby stars.

This is also my first imaging run with the Astro-Tech Coma Corrector.  It's taken me a while to fit it in with the camera setup, but it appears to work beautifully.

Telescope: Orion 10" f/4.7 Newtonian and ATCC (eff. at f/5.17)
Camera and Exposure: SXVF-H9C, 9x5'
Filter: IDAS-LPS2
Guiding: SX Lodestar and SX OAG
Mount: Takahashi NJP
Software: Nebulosity, Maxim DL, Photoshop CS3
Location: The Woodlands, TX

M96 (March 25, 2012)

M96 is between 26.4 and 56 million light years away, but estimates cluster around 35 million light years.  M96 is found in the constellation Leo, not far (well, relatively speaking) from M95.  The ring of M96 is quite faint.  It does not stand out well against my light-polluted sky.  But I am here for the exploration, after all, and this is what appears in my 2.26-hour set of exposures.  Enjoy!

Telescope: Orion 254mm f/4.7 Newtonian and Baader RCC1
Camera and Exposure: SXVF-H9, 17x8'
Filter: IDAS-LPS2
Guiding: SX Lodestar and SX OAG
Mount: Takahashi NJP
Software: Nebulosity, Maxim DL, Photoshop CS3
Location: The Woodlands, TX

NGC 4725 (March 25, 2012)

This beautiful galaxy is between 34 million and 71 million light years away, but most estimates are huddled around 41 million light years.  It is found, like M64, in the constellation Coma Berenices.  The galaxy is classified as an intermediate barred spiral, but you can see something like that.  It is peculiar, though, in that it appears to have just one spiral arm.  NGC 4725 is also classified as a Seyfert galaxy, which means that a spectrum taken of its nucleus appears to show bright light from certain ionized gases moving at great speeds both toward us and away from us.  An accretion disk around a very large black hole is a good explanation for this data, so one is suspected at NGC 4725's heart.

Telescope: Orion 10" f/4.7 Newtonian and Baader RCC1
Camera and Exposure: SXVF-H9, 17x8'
Filter: IDAS-LPS2
Guiding: SX Lodestar and SX OAG
Mount: Takahashi NJP
Software: Nebulosity, Maxim DL, Photoshop CS3
Location: The Woodlands, TX

M64 or NGC4826, the Black Eye Galaxy (March 23, 2012)

This galaxy, found in the constellation Coma Berenices, is between 13 and 25 million light years distant, though estimates average (and most are close to) about 17.3 million.  So this galaxy is a near neighbor.  It's distinctive feature is the group of dust clouds close to the center of the galaxy.

One study of this galaxy found that, near its center, the galaxy's gas and stars are moving in the same direction, but, if one moves to the outer regions, the gas moves in a direction opposite the stars!  Cite.  Because stars formed out of the galaxy's gas, some event must have occurred to cause this, perhaps the infall of a great deal of new gas, but coming from the opposite direction.

Telescope: Orion 10" f/4.7 Newtonian and Baader RCC1
Camera and Exposure: SXVF-H9, 24x8'
Filter: IDAS-LPS2
Guiding: SX Lodestar and SX OAG
Mount: Takahashi NJP
Software: Nebulosity, Maxim DL, Photoshop CS3
Location: The Woodlands, TX

M95 & SN 2012aw (March 23, 2012)

Finally, a clear night of imaging!  This is galaxy M95, between 29,000,000 and 42,000,000 light years from us, found in the constellation Leo.  The bright star just to the left of the nucleus is a supernova that was discovered March 16, 2012, and has been observed by professionals all this last week.

Amateur images like mine have been popping up all over the internet.  It's just an opportune time.  M95 reaches meridian around midnight this week, and that makes it ideal for folks like me to aim a telescope at it.  I tried to get an image of M95 last year on March 15.  It just happened that this week there was also a supernova exploding in the galaxy! How cool is that?

Final note: The galaxy on the far left of the large image is PGC 31984.

Telescope: Orion 10" f/4.7 Newtonian and Baader RCC1
Camera and Exposure: SXVF-H9, 56x4'
Filter: IDAS-LPS2
Guiding: SX Lodestar and SX OAG
Mount: Takahashi NJP
Software: Nebulosity, Maxim DL, Photoshop CS3
Location: The Woodlands, TX

M65 (NGC3623) (Feb. 25, 2012)

M65 is estimated to be 29,000,000 to 52,000,000 light years away.  We find it in Leo.  The galaxy appears near two other galaxies (M66 & NGC 3628) that possibly (likely?) have had some gravitational interaction, but M65 does not appear to be disturbed by them (see here).  Maybe the nearness is more apparent than real.

This image was cut short because my secondary dew'd up.  I actually included a few frames from after the start of dewing.  The dew destroyed star shapes and lessened contrast and depth.  It's clearly a problem I will have to address.  This is the first session in which dew has been a problem, of about ten or twelve with this scope over the last year.

Telescope: Orion 10" f/4.7 Newtonian and Baader RCC1
Camera and Exposure: SXVF-H9, 13x10'
Filter: IDAS-LPS2
Guiding: SX Lodestar and SX OAG
Mount: Takahashi NJP
Software: Nebulosity, Maxim DL, Photoshop CS3
Location: The Woodlands, TX

Melotte 15 in IC 1805 (Oct. 28, 2011)

Melotte 15 is a cluster of young stars at the heart of a large cloud of gas and dust often called the Heart Nebula, IC 1805.  Mel 15 is the heart of the Heart.  The cloud and cluster lie in the constellation Cassiopeia.

Telescope: Orion 10" f/4.7 Newtonian and Baader RCC1
Camera and Exposure: SXVF-H9C, 20x10'
Filter: IDAS-LPS2
Guiding: SX Lodestar and SX OAG
Mount: Takahashi NJP
Software: Nebulosity, Maxim DL, Photoshop CS3
Location: The Woodlands, TX