Luna Early this Morning

Here is the waning moon early this morning. This was taken with the XTi through the AT66ED.

M42: One (Now Two) More Iteration(s)

OK, I'll stop, but I like this one the best in some respects. The colors are more respectful and pleasant, and the stretching has stopped short of graininess.

Nope. Here is one more still, processed in PSE7, which gives me better tools to show lowest light levels in the image and still not white out the brightest part of the nebula:

M77

This morning very early I found M77 for the first time. The galaxy was obviously there at 40x in the XT8, but the view brightened and sharpened considerably at 240x. At that magnification, the sky darkened down, M77's oval core was obvious, and I could see some of the next most bright band of stars around the core. This is another Messier object checked off.

M73

Tonight I found M73, those four little stars. This is another first for me. It was not nearly as good a sight as the Saturn Nebula nearby, or M2 further north. Wow! That M2 is a stunner, big and bright. Some stars around the edge were resolved in the XT8, even through heavy light pollution. The cluster was plainly visible in the finderscope.

M42: New Renditions

These iterations were processed in Photomatix. A Huntsville Amateur Astronomy Society member suggested hdr processing for astrophotos at the star party I attended in September. I had tried it with single astronomical images but not with different stretches of the same image. The technique helps, I think. It enhances the fainter parts of the nebula and helps the brighter parts not to look blown out.

M42 & M43

This is actually why I was aiming at M42. I've wanted to take a decent image of it since I was thirteen. This image is roughly 35 minutes worth of 10" and 15" exposures combined and processed in Neb 1 and touched up in DPP. It was taken from my backyard between 4 and 5:30 am on September 27 using a setup similar to that below but with only one scope on the mount: the AT66ED with the 400D attached.

M30 and the Outer Planets

Tonight I found M30, a fairly large and bright globular cluster in Capricornus. I was observing with the 100mm f/6 on the Giro III. In that relatively small scope, in my light polluted skies, with M30 so low to the horizon, and magnification at most of only 120x, I saw no stars, but it is a nice sight nonetheless. Moreover, it is one more Messier object I have now seen for the first time. I am slowly working towards seeing every one.

I also found Uranus and Neptune. Neptune is so far away and appears so small that 120x is not enough magnification to resolve it into a disk, but Uranus is a small green ball at that power. For a final treat, I turned to the Pleiades, which were just coming up over the trees. At 17x, they nearly filled the view---bright blue jewels on a dark blue sky.