Michael‘s Astrophoto Blog

After the galaxy frenzy of the previous months I was planning to take it a bit slower for some time. Usually I had not been observing around the summer solstice with its short and not entirely dark nights. Over many years I developed the habit of picking up visual astronomy again sometime during August. However, this year, concentrating on astrophotography, I really felt the itch to make some photos even shortly after the summer solstice.     With the short nights and moon coming up as well I didn’t feel comfortable going after some dim nebula, so I picked globular clusters as targets.  While some are at their best visibility right now, a few of them were at lower altitude, so I am not entirely satisfied with the results in all cases. However, it is still a nice collection of objects I believe. (M11 is not actually a globular cluster, but it still fits nicely in this series)

Last week we had a couple of beautiful winter days with reasonably clear nights. Unfortunately, it was almost full moon with the moon lit to 80-90%. However, with the enthusiasm that is typical for beginners I didn’t want to use the night exclusively to test equipment - I wanted to get a few pictures as well.  Star clusters are an object type that I used to observe visually at such nights as they are usually reasonably bright and have good contrast. So that ist what I try first.  NGC457, The Owl cluster 30x10sec, C9. 25 with reducer 1/6.3, ASI 294MC Pro on EQ6-R Pro M35 (right) with NGC 2158 (left) 30x10sec, C9. 25 with reducer 1/6.3, ASI 294MC Pro on EQ6-R Pro I think these came out quite nice. With so much moonlight it is hard to take longer exposures to get deeper. However, the brighter stars are starting to saturate anyhow, so these settings are probably ok. Most deep sky objects are looking way more impressive on a photograph than visually. However, while I like...