I recently had the chance to take some wide-angle images of the Milky Way core from a site with a small amount of light pollution, and no moon. (Yay for the new moon falling close to a weekend, as well!)

Sadly, there was a lot of fast-moving, high-level cloud that played havoc with most of the sub-frames I took. I was pretty certain that I’d end up throwing most of them out, so ended up taking 50 of each target, just to be safe. However, I was pleasantly surprised to see that my stacking software ignored the clouds and gave me some very good images to work with.

What’s going on here?

If you’ve been following my blog, then you’ll know a bit about the gear I have. So what’s not correct about the below image?

In case you’re wondering, my telescope is a refractor (ie, a tube with lenses at each end) and cannot make those spikes you see on the stars. A reflector telescope has the secondary mirror suspended by a ‘spider’, and light bouncing off the back of the spider’s legs create the distinctive spikes.

Conditions were almost ideal - clear skies, no moon, and a near-perfect polar alignment. Aside from the light spilling from next door, it was as dark as it gets in my backyard. Of course, we’re now forecast to have a week of rain.

All these images were processed with Siril, then fed into Affinity Photo for final tweaks and editing.

I was at a bit of a loss as to what to image, and then a helpful post on the ASV’s Facebook page mentioned a series of stellar clusters. The first on the list being Omega Centauri. Why not??

I’ve been hearing good things about a software package called ‘Siril’. It’s open-source, under active development and came heavily recommended by other astrophotographers. The only problem is the steep learning curve, and somewhat sluggish response when using it on my macOS machine.

I found a tutorial on YouTube, and decided “Hey, that can’t be too hard to do…” So used the software for processing the telescope’s second set of images.

As I have said earlier, being a member of the ASV gives me access to their dark sky site a couple of hours north of home. Last weekend, it was the new moon, and so I booked some time off work (yay for having too much accrued leave) and got myself organised to take advantage of a dark (moonless) sky.

Because it can be pretty cold up there, I was not wanting to sleep in the car (been there, done that, and it wasn’t much fun) I booked myself a room so I could stay in (relative) comfort. The ASV facilities are a bit spartan, but really, you’re not up there to sleep - you’re there to view the night skies.

Conditions were much better than last time. Clear skies, no moon, and a near-perfect polar alignment. For once things were going my way.

As before, the subs were stacked in Sequator and tweaked in Affinity Photo.

The first target of the night was Messier 7, also known as Ptolomy’s Cluster. A reasonably prominent star cluster located close to the ’tail’ of Scorpius. It’s visible to the naked eye, and makes a good target.

I am a happy Viking - I have a really good telescope now and the basic knowledge of how to use it properly.

Conditions were not good - a thin layer of either high cloud or ground-hugging smoke haze, too much light pollution, and I totally failed to polar align correctly. (I couldn’t see any stars through the Star Adventurer’s polar scope, so it was a best guess effort. It showed, too, as I stepped through all the captured images and watched the stars slowly march across the screen.)

Yet another Eta Carinae and the Large Magellanic Cloud

Eta Carina is a totally fascinating object in the night sky. Almost visible to the naked eye, you need a good set of binoculars or a ‘scope to see it, and a camera setup to really get a great view of it. I strongly suggest you read up on what is a mind-boggling piece of space.

Eta Carinae is a cloud of highly energised gas that has been blown off from a pair or close-orbit super-giant stars, The primary star is about 150 solar masses (ie, weighs 150 times as much as our sun) and is 5 million times brighter. It’s companion is “only” 90 solar masses and 4 million times as bright. At their closest approach, they are as far apart as Mars is from our sun. In terms of stellar distances, this is very, very close.

What have we here?

If you recall my previous (and dismal) attempts at capturing meteor trails, you’ll know that I didn’t capture a single one.

This time, I was taking some wide angle shots of the Milky Way, rising vertically from the south. The camera was running on auto-pilot, capturing plenty of frames for stacking and processing, and I was wandering around looking at the night sky and cursing the amount of light pollution.

Given how clear the night skies have been recently (or at least when I did the imaging..) I decided to have another try at the Orion, Flame and Horsehead nebulae.

I’m not totally happy with the results, especially the Horsehead being so dark, but I can’t really complain too much. One day, when I get a proper telescope with a decent focal length I’ll have another go at it.