Our Beautiful Universe - Photos and Videos

[Andy Resnick]

I couldn't see the moon this morning- I don't have a clear sightline to the horizon and the moon is too close to the sun (new moon).

Last night was (supposedly) peak Draconid meteor shower, so I tried imaging (using a non-motorized tripod) with my now trusty Vivitar 28/2.5 lens. I realized that if I stack the images 'normally', all of the stars (and planes and satellites and meteors) will end up being rejected as outliers. So, here is the accumulated image of outliers (lens shot wide open, 30s exposures, 4 hours total imaging time)

The bright star trail in the middle, passing behind the chimney, is Vega. I didn't see any meteors last night, so I'm not surprised there aren't any in this image- the straight lines are all either airplanes or satellites. The oddly colored trees around the edges are essentially a processing artifact.

 

[Andy Resnick]

Catching up with the backlog...

Currently my GM-8 mount is under repair- the quadrennial replacement of the declination gearbox- this is as much time on target (18 hours total) as I could get before the gearbox completely failed:

This is the full frame- the prominent galaxy is NGC 7331, there are easily a two or three dozen additional smaller galaxies scattered around; in the center is Stephans's quintet (100% crop):

At first I thought the faint smudge near the center was leftover noise, it's actually magnitude 15.6 Active Galaxy Nucleus candidate Z 495-7:

This is my first Z7 astrophotography attempt at 800mm focal length. For whatever reason, imaging this target was thoroughly frustrating. Other than the failing gearbox, the average image quality was poor. One reason is that because the Z7 pixels are smaller than the D810, my system is now much more sensitive to both mis-focus (read: focus drift during falling nighttime temperatures) and bad seeing. For a few weeks, I wasn't sure if the Z7 sensor exceeded the capability of the lens (which is not the case for astrophotography @ 400mm or 105mm). I think I'm just much more seeing-limited than I was before.

FWIW, this is the 4th time I am replacing the gearbox- not complaining- because it's easy to replace and the GM-8 is a fantastic piece of equipment.