Sometimes I feel like I have three full time jobs. The day job at LunarG, writing for Sky & Telescope takes more time than you’d think, and I’m heavily involved in this new gizmo that is being made by Pegasus Astro. Another small treat each month is writing an article for the folks at Sky Safari on some astrophotography target of the month. This month is Messier 81, or Bodes Galaxy as it is sometimes listed. If you have Sky Safari and the Premium subscription, click on the ‘Tonight” icon, and you’ll find these under “Featured Story” for a couple of weeks each month.
Bodes Galaxy, or Messier 81
While working on Junes edition this last weekend, I was looking for a good image of this galaxy, and I really wasn’t satisfied with anything I’d done recently. Then I remembered 9 years ago while working on a review of Sky-Watcher’s 12″ Quattro reflector, that I had gotten a great image of this galaxy with my Starlight Xpress Trius 694 CCD. The image still just didn’t seem up to my standard. Recently however, I’d gone through the process or organizing all my astronomical data, and I quickly found the original data from that night. May of 2016. That’s some old data, but it was great data and with 9 more years of experience processing with PixInsight and friends, I was able to quickly produce the above image, which I’m not too ashamed of. If you want to know more about this galaxy, you should get yourself a copy of Sky Safari š
Keep your original data folks. I remember that night too. It was only a few months after loosing my youngest son in a skiing incident in Montana. The loss of a child makes everything wonderful taste like ashes for a while, and I thought a night under the stars might bring back some light. It did not. If you are struggling with this, get some help. Some time, and some help did in fact eventually bring back singing sillily in the car, and the joy of being under the stars for me. The original processing of this data was no doubt rushed and robotic at that time too. It’s been lying in wait all this time waiting for me to give it the treatment it deserved. Finally, here it is. This one is for you Alex.
Happy Halloween! It seems an appropriate day for my latest work, NGC 7380, also well known as The Wizard Nebula. I’ve always loved this nebula as I have an affinity for Wizards and fantasy literature and movies. This emission nebula is colored by glowing hydrogen and oxygen gases. It’s about 8 hours of exposure with RGB filters, and some “narrowband” filters that only let wavelengths of light through from Hydrogen and Oxygen atoms.
So do you see the Wizard? Upper left is his pointed hat. Following the arc down, you see the hands spread out, over a bubbling caldron. Takes a little imagination, but once you see it, you’ll never forget it! I even think I see a little face near the big “bubble” feature under the hat.
The Wizard Nebula, or NGC 7380This is a new feature I’ve not seen before
There is a little something “spooky” going on with this image. There’s a little loop above the Wizards right hand. Small at the end of an area of gas with a glowing edge.
Close look at this bright loop feature
The loop is very bright, and doesn’t show up in my Ha or OIII images, but it’s very bright in the RGB images.Ā There’s a bit of a bubble feature here in some images I’ve found, and at first I thought perhaps it was a processing artifact. I went back to the original sub exposures, and it’s very clear, especially in the strong red and green color channels (you can see it in blue too, but blue is usually a lot fainter).
I’ve searched online and sent this to another atro-imaging friend. Honestly, if it weren’t Halloween, I might even have waited to publish this, because I really want to convince myself it’s a processing artifact. I shot the RGB data on October 25th, if anyone out there shoots the Wizard, I’d love to know if you see this too. Or… maybe… it’s a GHOST and it’ll be gone! Muhahahah…
Oh, almost forgot the tech details. This was taken with a Sky-Watcher Esprit 150 and their 0.77x reducer. Player One Poseidon-M camera with Chroma RGB and narrowband filters. Ha and OIII, both 3nm band pass. 8.7 hours total exposure time over three different nights.
I love the expression “Happy Holidays” because there’s a whole bunch of Holidays and they start with Halloween for me. So, let me be the first to say Happy Hallowe…. Holidays!
Astrophotography did not start in color. Various chemical techniques culminated in using glass plates with chemical films, which still produced a black and white image. A technique still in use at professional observatories in the 1970’s when the original Star Wars was released. My most unpopular advice about astrophotography today is to start with monochrome sensors and do monochrome imaging. Monochrome (black and white) sensors are far more sensitive than color sensors. Yes, CMOS is great kiddies, but CMOS mono is still even better than CMOS color! An ongoing project of mine is “Backyard Galaxies”, where I shoot galaxies from my light polluted back yard outside Orlando Florida. I use a monochrome sensor, with no light pollution filter. Color is very hard to do in light polluted skies, but I find monochrome works quite well. Yes, you have to take short exposures so as not to saturate your sensor, and the raw image is awash with light. Curves and levels however will bring that image right out. I might have to do a longer piece on why this works sometime, but for now, I encourage you to give it a try. The image below is only 38×90 second exposures. I used a Sky-Watcher Esprit 150 refractor with the 0.77x focal reducer and a Player One Poseidon M camera and a Chroma Luminance Filter (necessary even for monochrome images).
The Triangulum Galaxy (M33) in monochrome.
Oh, this by the way is Messier 33, the Triangulum galaxy. It’s a fairly large galaxy in apparent size as it’s not terribly far away. Only 2.7 million light years!
What are you waiting for? Got get yourself some backyard galaxies for too!
Deep sky astrophotographers often resort to a “narrowband” filter (or line filter) to image deep sky objects when the Moon is up. This is because Moonlight scattered in the sky often washes out most color filters. However, when imaging emission nebula, we often will use a special filter that is sensitive only to a particular wavelength of light that is emitted by these narrowband targets. The most common is called “Hydrogen Alpha”, and it gives many nebula a bright pink/red appearance when photographed. This wavelength is not scattered in the sky by Moonlight and so you can do perfectly good “deep sky imaging” when the Moon is out. In fact, this particular wavelength is also great for light polluted areas.
I love the Moon too though, and every time I find myself using one of these filters because the Moon is up, I also turn the camera towards the Moon for a shot. These kinds of filters produce a monochrome image, but that’s fine for the Moon. In addition, they are very much in the red end of the spectrum and these wavelengths are slightly less perturbed by a turbulent atmosphere, which can result in a sharper image.
Deep sky astrophotographers often resort to a “narrowband” filter (or line filter) to image deep sky objects when the Moon is up. This is because Moonlight scattered in the sky often washes out most color filters. However, when imaging emission nebula, we often will use a special filter that is sensitive only to a particular wavelength of light that is emitted by these narrowband targets. The most common is called “Hydrogen Alpha”, and it gives many nebula a bright pink/red appearance when photographed. This wavelength is not scattered in the sky by Moonlight and so you can do perfectly good “deep sky imaging” when the Moon is out. In fact, this particular wavelength is also great for light polluted areas.
I love the Moon too though, and every time I find myself using one of these filters because the Moon is up, I also turn the camera towards the Moon for a shot. These kinds of filters produce a monochrome image, but that’s fine for the Moon. In addition, they are very much in the red end of the spectrum and these wavelengths are slightly less perturbed by a turbulent atmosphere, which can result in a sharper image.
Deep sky astrophotographers often resort to a “narrowband” filter (or line filter) to image deep sky objects when the Moon is up. This is because Moonlight scattered in the sky often washes out most color filters. However, when imaging emission nebula, we often will use a special filter that is sensitive only to a particular wavelength of light that is emitted by these narrowband targets. The most common is called “Hydrogen Alpha”, and it gives many nebula a bright pink/red appearance when photographed. This wavelength is not scattered in the sky by Moonlight and so you can do perfectly good “deep sky imaging” when the Moon is out. In fact, this particular wavelength is also great for light polluted areas.
I love the Moon too though, and every time I find myself using one of these filters because the Moon is up, I also turn the camera towards the Moon for a shot. These kinds of filters produce a monochrome image, but that’s fine for the Moon. In addition, they are very much in the red end of the spectrum and these wavelengths are slightly less perturbed by a turbulent atmosphere, which can result in a sharper image.
The “Seeing” (amount of turbulence) was very good this evening (very still air), and I rather think I got an exceptionally sharp image of the Moon here. The only processing I did of this image off the camera was curves for tonal adjustments. I did no sharpening at all. The optic was a Sky-Watcher USA Esprit 150 with their 0.77 reducer. This is one of my top scopes and on this evening it did some of it’s best work under exceptionally good skies. The camera was a monochrome Player One Poseidon-M, and the filter was a Chroma 3nm Ha filter. The exposure time was 0.1 second.
Yes, I have some deep sky images from this evening too, but I’m still collecting light for those images before they are finalized.
A well known and often shot emission nebula in the constellation Cepheus is the “Elephant Trunk”. Cropped in on just the trunk people see all sorts of things. One day by chance my wife saw the image rotated in a such a way, that she said it looked like “Smaug the dragon” (from the Hobbit). I thought, it REALLY DOES. So, at least to me for now on, this object is forever more “Annies Dragon” (my wife’s name is LeeAnne).
Annies Dragon is an emission nebula that is a part of IC 1396.
This particular image was just shy of two hours of hydrogen alpha exposures with a Player One Poseidon-M camera and Chroma 3nm Ha filters. Normally, these monochrome Ha images are grayscale but I did add just a tint of redish brownish to give it a sepia-tone type treatment. It’s a photo of a dragon after all, and one day it will be an old photo of a dragon š
One of the biggest problems with telescope ownership is many people often get a scope that is suitably impressive and capable but takes a bit of time to setup for use. The best telescope you have is the one you actually use right?
The Virtuoso GTI anniversary package comes with everything you see here and is ready to go.
I have a pretty impressive collection of telescopes myself, various optical designs, several different mounts, some even small, portable, and easy to setup. Yet, I will very often find myself taking out the trash or coming home from an evening engagement and noticing that the sky is clearer than I expected it to be that night. The Moon/Jupiter/Saturn/etc. looks fantastic tonight, itās too bad I donāt have scope setup and ready to go. This happens more often than it should. Years ago, I bought a simple small tabletop Dobsonian, mostly for my children at the time, but unlike my current 14ā dob, it didnāt track, didnāt have GOTO, and was unsuitable for astrophotography. I ended up giving it to my daughter when she got married and moved out. Occasionally, when my favorite visual target the Moon surprises me one night, Iāve missed that little scope. Well, I used to.
For Sky-Watcherās 25 anniversary, they have released a limited number of SkyMax 127 telescopes with the Virtuoso GTI mount. They sent me one for review, and itās a keeper. The included optic is a 127mm Mak-Cassegrain with a focal length of 1,500mm and a focal ratio of f/11.8. I love the Mak-Cass design and own the larger 180mm version myself. The optical design has many advantages for visual astronomy as well as astrophotography. In the many years Iāve had the larger one and transported it around, Iāve only had to tweak the collimation one time, and the truth is, I probably should have left it alone. Itās not quite as good as a refractor (sorry, Iām a bit of a refactor fanatic), but itās close in terms of sharpness and contrast, itās far more portable and provides superior views of the Moon and planets to a Schmidt Cassegrain for its size. For the anniversary edition, the 127 OTA has a special insignia on it and each one is numbered as well. Fancy.
Quick and easy setup in my driveway on a tripod!
Although, the Virtuoso GTI is a tabletop mount, it also has a 3/8ā threaded block on the bottom for mounting on a tripod if you want it elevated. I found this to be a surprisingly useful feature. The whole thing weighs just 21 pounds too. The Virtuoso is an Alt-Az mount with a Vixen style dovetail clamp. You could easily remove the SkyMax OTA and put on another telescope as long as it was short and lightweight (10 pounds or less). A small refractor for example would do nicely here. The GTI creates its own WIFI hotspot and can be controlled with Sky-Watcherās free SynScan app, which is available for both iOS and Android mobile devices. If you have or purchase separately a SynScan hand controller, there is also a port for that as well. I do confess, I sometimes prefer to have that tactile feel of real buttons while I float above the Moon with my eye glued to the eyepiece, and Iām pleased this scope offers that option.
Like most Sky-Watcher mounts, the Virtuoso GTI sports a hand controller port, power port via batteries or an AC power brick, and has a snap port for controlling a camera.
It’s a tracking mount, which means it needs power. Thereās the ubiquitous 2.1mm power port for a 12v power supply, or you can add eight AA batteries for a more cord free experience. I found alignment to be trivially simple. There are clutches on both axes you can loosen for easy OTA positioning. Just level the mount, point the OTA north, and connect with the SynScan app or hand controller. I most often use it for a single target opportunity, and the one-star alignment gets me close enough to the Moon for example that I can find and center it up well enough with the included 9×50 straight-through finder scope. Tracking is good, and there are options for setting both lunar and solar tracking rates (be sure and use a FRONT MOUNTED SOLAR FILTER). I appreciated the 2ā diagonal and back on the 127 SkyMax as I can use it with my entire eyepiece collection.
Some of my finer scopes I keep indoors, but I canāt just take them outside and use them on a spur because in Florida the optics will immediately gather condensation in the warm humid air outside after being in my air-conditioned home. This setup however, I keep in my shed and have been up and running and exploring the Moon in literally under 5 minutes. There is an included 28mm eyepiece in this package, but I also found the views are quite nice with my Takahashi and Brandon eyepieces, and when seeing conditions are good, Iāve pushed the magnification up to over 300x. Yes, I know that exceeds the maximum recommended for an optic this size, but your brain is an amazing image processing device too, and youād be surprised what you can see sometimes.
Another reason Iām so fond of this setup is that thereās very limited sky from my back yard. When the Moon is behind the neighborsā trees, I can pop this on a tripod in my driveway, spend a few minutes lost in the Moonās terrain, and then put it away quickly before bed. I can even extend setup time to a whopping 10 minutes<g>, by grabbing my laptop and a high-speed camera to do some lucky imaging since itās a tracking mount.
Some quick lucky imaging has never been more convenient than with a ready to go system that I can plop down anywhere.
I really have no critique of this package. Itās small, light, fast to setup, and itās bringing me back to my favorite target the Moon when the opportunity strikes. Sure, I can do a little better with one of my larger scopes, but āmore frequentā is also a pretty compelling feature! Itās also a great scope for the planets, and brighter deep sky objects, but for me itās going to primarily be my āMoon Shipā. I name all my scopes, and this one Iāve christened as āArtemisā. You can probably guess why.
Richard S. Wright Jr. does not have more telescopes than he needs, no matter what his friends and family says. He also does not have too many books on the Moon, and is always looking for more at used book stores.
The weather for astrophotography in Florida is so dismal in the summer, or rainy season as I call it. Even when it’s bright and hot outside, there’s a haze of moisture and thin clouds most days, and the nights are quite opaque. We had a break the other morning and I had a chance to get out some new gear I’ve been curating. I think my solar rig is “almost” as good as I can hope for, and I captured a nice view of the Sun the other morning (7/26/2024) and Active Region 3762.
The Sun in Hydrogen Alpha light and my rig used to capture it.
I have a DayStar Quantum 0.5 Angstrom Ha filter. This is a very specialized filter for capturing light just from glowing Hydrogen in the Sun’s atmosphere. It reveals an amazing amount of surface details, and it works on the back of most any refractor as long as it isn’t too big. I will be honest, it’s an advanced piece of astro-gear, and I struggled a bit to get the tip top performance out of it for a while. Focal ratio matters, sort of. What really matters is nice parallel rays of light coming into it, and certain optics technically change the focal ratio, but don’t necessarily produce the most parallels rays. I also have found, despite my earlier confidence, that a front mounted energy rejection filter helps a great deal (ERF). I bought an 82mm Lunt ERF second hand in a custom 3D printed cell that fits my Astrophysics Stowaway telescope. I use a TeleVue Powermate or a Baader 4X Telecentric on the back to get the focal ratio/parallel light rays going.
Other luxuries in this photo. A Paramount MYT with absolute encoders, which is an absolute joy to use. Already aligned and ready to go, you just flip a switch and go. The scope is an Astro-Physics Stowaway refractor, there’s a waiting list and/or lottery to getĀ these fine refractors. I really think Roland Christen is the modern Alvan Clark. There’s a top of the line Feather Touch focuser on the back, and an Optec QuickSync motor on it. Finally, a Player One Apollo Max on the back is taking the images. One further improvement is a cooled camera. There’s some debate as to if this really helps with solar imaging, but I do find that the fact that the temperature is regulated does make a big deal. Not so much that it’s “reducing noise” in the raw images, but calibration frames need to be at the same temperature if you you want the flat frames to work properly. Nine times out of ten, it doesn’t seem to matter, but occasionally, I’ll end up with flats that won’t work, and this is the reason why. Some helpful advice… “Just keep your optics clean”… makes me laugh.
I think this is just about as good as it gets for a high quality solar rig for myself. I might have to get a 3D printed cell for that ERF to fit my Esprit 150 though. It’s only taken some 30+ years of wheeling and trading up to get here. As Ferris Beuler says, “If you have the means“… maybe you won’t have to wait 30 years š
Montes Apennius bisects Mare Imbrium and Serenitatus
As a child, my family would visit the Great Smoky Mountains in Tennessee, often multiple times a year. I imagine future lunar citizens might vacation in the Apenninus mountains, a beautiful chain of mountains that curves along the edge of Mare Imbrium on the left side of this image. Named after a mountain range in Italy, it has a small gap (perhaps analogous to the Cumberland gap of my childhood home) that opens the way from Imbrium to the sea of Serenity to the right. Were the lunar maria actual oceans, there would for sure be a vibrant trading city located here as the most practical passage between these two great seas.
Alas, this is the Moon, and the Maria are indeed not waterways, but vast plains of cooled lavaā¦ wellā¦ a sea of frozen lava is still a sea, isnāt it?
Taken on the night of May 16, 2024, the lighting here is really quite outstanding for great views of a number of prominent features in this area of the Moon. At the upper left we see the crater Plato, which often looks quite shallow and flat. Due to the Sunās angle at this time however you can see the highly detailed walls of the crater rising high above the smooth surface of Mare Imbrium. To the upper left of Plato, you can see a small ring of light that is the crater Fontenelle. Through the eyepiece this night, that ring was glowing in the darkness of the terminator like the lights of a great city in the night.
Midway down and to the left of the Apenninus mountains is another flat and smooth crater Aristarchus. Like Plato this crater appears to be older than the Mare Imbrium as its floor is flooded with the same cooled lava that surrounds it. A younger crater at the southern tip of the mountain range is Eratosthenes. There is no smooth floor here, and in the center, you can see a tiny dot of light that is the central peak of a mountain of material that was rebounded when the impact crater was formed.
While the Moon is not quite as dynamic as the Sun, it is different every night, and even every hour you can see changes in the surface as the light and shadows dance across the lunar day. Even the smallest telescope or binoculars will reveal this world to you, and I encourage you to go take a look as often as you can.
The August, 2024 issue of Sky & Telescope has an article by me about shooting star trail images. It’s too bad I didn’t have this shot before because it’s my favorite star trails image to date. I setup my camera behind an equatorial mount (I was shooting M106 at the time), and set my canon EOS Ra to take 30 second exposures repeatedly. Then, as I describe in my afore mentioned article, I loaded all the images as layers in Photoshop and set the blend mode to “Lighten”. I did paint out a few airplane trails in the individual layers, but otherwise the image is accurate. There are even a few short meteor bursts if you look carefully for them.
One hours worth of star trails show just how much the stars appear to move in such a short amount of time.
This image shows why we use an equatorial mount for long exposure astrophotography. As the Earth spins, the stars move considerably, and in this case you can see exactly how much in only an hours time. An equatorial mount works by aligning it’s axis of rotation with the Earth’s, and then rotating in the opposite direction of the Earth’s motion. It’s like being on a merry-go-round, and you have to turn your head to keep looking at someone or something off in the distance. Without an equatorial mount, objects zip by in the eyepiece or camera pretty quickly. There are also alt-az mounts that track objects in the sky without having to do much alignment work, however, because of the way they move, objects in the camera will rotate in place as you track them across the sky. This makes long exposures a bit more challenging š
For context, I’ve added just a single 30 second frame as well. As a stand alone image, it’s not too bad either IMHO.
Richard
Here’s just one of the 120 frames used to create the star trails image.
Youād think given my years of astrophotography (if not just my age!) that by now Iād have seen a total eclipse. The total eclipse of April 2024 that crossed North America was not my first attempt at a total eclipse, but it was my first successful attempt at witnessing a total eclipse! I can now tell you; the hype is real.
The Diamond Ring at the beginning of totality during the 2024 total solar eclipse.
I went to the Texas Star Party, which was moved both in location and time to coincide with totality and we were nearly right on the center line for nearly four and a half minutes of totality. That was the fastest four and a half minutes of my life. I can now understand why people tell you that you should not āfocusā on astrophotography at your first totality. Of course, that advice is lost on me (and probably some of you) because photography is in our DNA. I did not however completely ignore the advice. My photography rig was 99% automated. All I had to do was remove the front white light filter at totality and put it back on after totality.
My gear choice was pretty much ideal. I used an equatorial mount to keep the Sunās orientation constant throughout the eclipse (Sky-Watcher Az-EQ6 in EQ mode). I polar aligned it on a previous evening using the integrated polar scope. For optics, I used an Astrophysics Stowaway 92mm refractor with the f/7 flattener. I had made a front mounted white light solar filter from Baader solar film for the 2017 eclipse that I reused this year. I
The Sun and Moon during totality. Note that bright prominence at the bottom just peeking through low areas on the lunar limb.
removed it during totality, and thus got nice safe images of the partial phases, and when it was safe (for the camera) I got Baileys Beads, the Diamond Ring, and some great prominence and corona images during totality. The camera was a Canon EOS Ra mirrorless full frame camera. The āaā means astronomical as it is slightly more sensitive to the hydrogen alpha wavelengths of emission nebulaā¦ and as it turns out, solar prominences!
Finally, the software the drove the sequence on my MacBook Pro was āCapture Eclipseā, which is a great program I canāt recommend enough. I rehearsed at home of course, and I focused using the @focus3 algorithm in TheSkyX Professional (which I wrote btw) on the sunspots right before the eclipse started. The telescope was already at equilibrium, so there was no focus drift during the eclipse.
Prominence’s on the Eastern limb of the Sun. Note the rather large triangular prominence at the bottom. This was visible to the naked eye during the eclipse.
I must say, I really lucked out. Sure being prepared helps, trying repeatedly helps, but the weather forecast shifted from seasonal norms to mostly cloudy for eclipse day. We got fortunate that the clouds parted for us and although we had a few thin clouds and the occasional thick cloud, we were rewarded with a glorious view of totality. While Iām very pleased with my images, there is absolutely no comparison to the view naked eye. If you can possibly make it to center line for a total eclipse, I highly recommend you make the effort. I know my passport will be ready for some future eclipsesā¦
Additional and larger versions of these photos are available in the Sun gallery. My favorite shot of Baileys Beads is below!
Baileys Beads just before totality ends. These are caused by sunlight filtering through gaps in the lunar terrain like mountains, valleys, and craters.
Youād think given my years of astrophotography (if not just my age!) that by now Iād have seen a total eclipse. The total eclipse of April 2024 that crossed North America was not my first attempt at a total eclipse, but it was my first successful attempt at witnessing a total eclipse! I can now tell you; the hype is real.
