Exploring the Suffolk Virginia Night Sky – Astronomy, Astrophotography, Telescopes, EAA – Planets and Stars and Nebula and Galaxies – Looking, Learning, Sharing… Let's see what we can see…
A nice cool and very clear Moonless night. I was able to capture a little more than 3 1/2 hours of light from the planetary nebulas PK 136+05 and PN G136.1+04.9. The planetary nebula PK 136+05, aka Hechathorn-Fesen-Gull 1 of HFG1, is…
Clear and cold night with no Moon! Great night to collect some light from Hechathorn-Fesen-Gull 1 (aka HFG1 or PK 136+05) a planetary nebula located in the constellation of Cassiopeia. HFG1 is the SkyWatcherUSA Target of the Month (TOTM) for February 2024….
Siril is a powerful freeware astronomical image processing tool. One of the features of Siril which I find very useful (and fun to tinker with) is the ability to automate image pre-processing and processing tasks using scripts. Automating things like creating master…
There are countless (thousands, 10s of thousands, millions, billions) objects in the night sky. There are many object catalogs (NGC, Messier, IC, Caldwell, Barnard, LBN, PGC, UGC, Abell, etc…). Not all of these objects and catalogs are available in every planetarium program,…
Another very cold and clear night so I took the opportunity to capture some more light from the Dolphin Head Nebula (Sh2-308/LBN 1052) I was able to add just over an hour and half to the just over an hour and a…
Clear and cold… very cold. I uncovered the scope a in the late afternoon. One thing about the cold is it doesn’t take long for the camera to cool down 🙂 After dark I ran the Ekos Auto Focus and Polar Alignment….
It was clear and cool, mid-40’s when I started out and low-30’s by the end of the night. The Moon is new, so no issues there. I uncovered the scope early in the afternoon and was ready to start capturing light at…
I am upgrading the Raspberry Pi 3B 1 GB which is currently running the my all sky camera to a Raspberry Pi 4 4GB. The Pi3 has been working fine but I had the Raspberry Pi 4 freed up from another project…
A cold clear night. I uncovered the scope just before dark. I started my polar alignment as soon as it was dark enough to get enough stars to plate solve, which was just after 6 PM. I had the ZWO Duo-Band Filter…
The Hubble palette is a color palette made famous by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). It is also known as the “HST” or “SHO” palette. The Hubble palette is made by loading SHO or S-II, Hydrogen-alpha (Ha), and O-III as red, green,…