Category Widefield

Hydrogen Alpha Mosaic – Test Framing w/ the Moon for scale

It’s that time of year when Cygnus rises high over head and displays a multitude of nebulous treasure.  This mosaic is only a portion of the Cygnus constellation but represents a large patch of sky almost 9 x 9 degrees.  This is only a test framing as I create a game plan for a summer long imaging project.  For a sense of scale, I have included a gibbous moon which was not part of the original image as well as a full scale crop of the Crescent Nebula, bottom right, to show the full size scale of the original 83 megapixel image.

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Cygnus Mosaic in Hydrogen Alpha FSQ-106ED Apogee U16 AP900GTO Baader Ha Narrowband Filter 9x20min total exposure

 

 

Wagman Observatory – 6/14/2014

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We had a few good meteors that we saw last night although I captured only one of the small ones that nobody else saw.

 

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Tom doing his thing and showing us the night sky.

 

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Moonrise over the hill

Greene County 5/31/2014

Three AAAP members were preset at the Greene County Observing Site Saturday night.  It turned out to be a pretty decent night.

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Crescent Moon with Earth Shine and Jupiter
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Greene County Site Looking South at the Summer Milky Way. Light pollution is more prominent here now than in past years.

 

Additional Information:

The area around the Greene County Observing Site has seen a lot of new industry construction; most of it related to the Marcellus Shale boom.  Take a look at the Google Map view of all the new light sources that weren’t there 3 years ago.  About 70% are from the last year alone.  #1 is one of the brightest lights seen in the above Southern Milky Way shot.

Greene County

 

 

Campmeeting Observatory – Starlapse

A series of short exposures combined in Deep Sky Stacker using a maximum pixel value to create an apparent long exposure without burning out foreground features.  The green leaf pattern on the observatory is from the lights across the street shining through the trees.

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