It looks like there are not too many clear sky nights in Seattle in winter time.

This was pretty expected for me. But at least the winters are warm – it’s pretty confortable to spend a few hours outside during night time (we usually get around 40-45 degrees Farenheit).

On top of the lack of clear sky nights is dew… Even with a regular dew shield, I had to pause or stop my astronomy sessions because high humidity in the air. Some nights we end up with fog…

But enough about the weather in Seattle.

If you look outside every evening, we can still get some astrophotography opportunitied here, too.

The easiest object for astrophotography is the moon.

 

 

The real problem of picturing the moon with my Deep Sky Imager Pro is the limited field of view.

But we can see quite a lot of details:

 

Actually, the moon can be shot without using any telescope at all. There is a lot of light and expossure time is pretty limited.

We can get very good moon pictures with a Digital SLR camera on a tripod (maybe not so many details as we got through a telescope but still pretty good pictures).

The real chalange is to picture the deep space objects: galaxies, nebulae, star clusters, etc.

M51 “Whirlpool Galaxy” – this is actually a picture of 2 galaxies (M51 is the big one). According to astronoms, what we see here is the result of a collision between the 2 galaxies.

I was pretty happy that I get enough details – see the spiral arms of the galaxy. And this picture was done by stacking a few pictures with 15 seconds exposure time (each):

I tried to get a picture of M31 “Andromeda Galaxy”. I got a few picutes of the bright galaxy nucleus but no spiral arms – that was again due to the limitation of the limited field of view.

So, I ended up getting pictures of different galaxies.

M82 “Cigar Galaxy” – edge on galaxy, we see it from its side:

M64  “Black Eye Galaxy”. It looks like a drop of water in space:

 And a galaxy from Leo Constellation, M66:

Maybe I should add more comments around these images.

I think this is the real interesting part of astronomy. Even if we don’t get the beautiful pictures we’re used to see in astronomy books or magazines, we can see objects which are millions of light years away… The light we see in some of these pictures was created by the time the dinosaurs were living on our planet.

Now, let’s see some pictures closer to us – from our own galaxy “Milky Way”.

M42 from Orion is one of very well known deep sky object in the nothern hemisphere. M42 is a “star nursery” – a cloud of gas illuminated by “baby stars”:

And the astro gallery is incomplete without adding a picture of a globular cluster.

M3 is pretty nice, se here it is:

A lot of these pictures were done in the same night. I spent a lot of time performing a lot of tests and using different software to process the pictures.

But, in the end I’ve decided that Meade Autostar suite is pretty good for what I need. Photoshop is pretty powerful but it takes time to get used with it.

I got very limited noise – hot pixels on some pictures. Sure enough, I’ve used median filter in Meade Image Processing of magic brush in Photoshop… But I’ve decided it’s too much overhead.

It was just way more efficient to use paint (!) to get rid of the hot pixels.

I’m pretty sure that with more experience and a better tracking system, I can get even better pictures. But I’m pretty happy with my results so far.

I’m going to end up by sharing some more pictures of the moon.