Patriot_Astro

12/03/2022

Here’s an image I took about a week ago. By far my favorite image I’ve ever taken thus far. It’s only five hours worth of data, and I’m absolutely shocked at how much I love this picture. Melotte 15 in SHO. I’ll post both stars and starless, that way everyone’s happy. :)

06/01/2022

Here is my AllSky Camera view of the meteor shower 2 nights ago. It was supposed to be clear all night, but as you can see... the clouds were literally forming directly over the house. AArgh! As a result, I only captured 1 good meteor around 25s into the video. On a typical night, I get up to 5 without trying, so this was a bit of a disappointment. :( The link to start building your own AllSky camera will be in the comments below.

05/16/2022

While you wait to see if any of my lunar eclipse pictures turned out ok… here’s some solar images I took last week. Enjoy!

03/10/2022

The Rosette Nebula is about 5,000 light-years from Earth. At about 130 light-years in diameter, it is quite photogenic. Radiation from the stars being formed here cause this emission nebula’s glow through the excitement of the atoms within the nebula itself.
I shot this one from my backyard with a SharpStar 61EDPHII and ZWO ASI1600MM with Narrowband filters on a SkyWatcher EQ6Rpro mount. Processed using a modified SHO palette within PixInsight.
Single night of imaging on 2022-02-17.
Enjoy!

02/24/2022

I’ve got a couple backlogged Galaxy images to post, so let’s get started!!!
Here is M 51, one of the most iconic galaxies that you can take pictures of. It’s actually a pair of galaxies that are interacting with each other. It’s about 55 million light years from Earth, so don’t forget to fill up the tank before you head out. 🙂
For those of you with “eagle eyes”, in the upper right hand corner you can likely see another galaxy that’s very small and narrow (since we are looking at it edge-on). This is IC 4263 and it is about 123 million light years from Earth. Ya…
I took this picture from my driveway over the course of 2 nights (2022-02-05 and 08). It is an LRGB image using a ZWO ASI2600MM camera attached to my Celestron C8 SCT. Processed in PixInsight. Enjoy and Share! 🙂

02/22/2022

Here is a quick cross-post from my Instagram feed. Another shot of the sun from last week. Enjoy!

02/21/2022

This is a picture I took of the Sun earlier this week. (I’ve got 2 more solar pictures coming over then next couple days, so be sure to follow my account!) The prominence’s on the edge are much larger than people realize. The larger one here is about 2.5 times the size of the Earth!! Most people don’t realize how big these can get (and this isn’t even a big one).

12/23/2021

Orion Nebula @ 275mm in SHO (Sii/Ha/Oiii) collected over 2 nights in December 2021 (3rd and 8th). It is made up of a total of 320x 45 second exposures split across the 3 filters then combined into an RGB image. Enjoy!

12/03/2021

The Soul Nebula (or Embryo Nebula) is a large star forming region in the constellation Cassiopeia. To give you some scale of the size of this in our night-sky, it would take about 10 full moons to block this from our view! Imagine if we could see this with the naked eye each night! [from 2021-10-18 using Narrowband filters]

12/03/2021

I finally have been able to publish updates to my Shared Advanced Sequences for NINA. Need a starting point to get you going in the Advanced Sequencer, or just some complete and tested sequences? Here you go! All imaging sequences here include best practice configuration and features like Center after Drift, Autofocus on HFR Increase, and Dithering. There are also some Startup Sequences and a few additional extras in there as well. Let me know if you have any questions!

NINA's new Advanced Sequencer is amazingly powerful and will take your telescope hobby and astrophotography to the next level! It can ensure you are taking a...

12/01/2021

Galaxies are fun to image because they take a lot less time… 😉 I can get 1-2 galaxies in a single night but a nebula can take 1-3 days. That’s not always true, but at least in this case it was only a couple hours of imaging. Zoom in and look around for a few more very distant galaxies hiding in the background. (This is another one from October 2021.) I pushed the black point a bit further than normal here because it felt like this edge-on galaxy wanted to pop. :)

11/29/2021

I had a little fun processing the Flame Nebula to make it a bit more "Flame-like" :) Enjoy! [picture from October 18, 2021]