Tonight was as nice as last night, but again, quite cold. I decided to do some more wide-field imaging with my Nikon D50 using the 2″ Orion SkyGlow Imaging Filter that I got a while back. I think it does a good job of lowering the overall sky noise that I’ve seen, particularly with this camera. I love wide field shots because they show context and this one is no exception to that. The Sculptor Galaxy fills my DSI-II camera almost completely and is neat to image with that, but it’s also neat to see the context of this galaxy.
October 20, 2009
December 30, 2008
C65-Sculptor Galaxy on 12/29/08
Tonight I continued to add to the total imaging time on C65 – The Sculptor Galaxy. This is really a neat target to image, particularly now that I’ve got autoguiding working well. Unfortunately, tonight was a bit windy, which meant that I could only do 1 minute sub-images. I’m hoping to have a bit less wind in the next couple of days so that I can get some really long exposures.
November 25, 2008
C65-Sculptor Galaxy on 11/25/08
Here’s the Sculptor Galaxy image I was working on this evening – over an hour of image data on this wonderful object found in the constellation Sculptor. It’s really one of my favorite targets for my camera. Through the eyepiece, it’s easily visible as a cigar-shaped smudge, but I can’t make out much, if any, detail.
I’m now working on an image of Merope one of the stars of the Pleiades which has a wonderful nebula around it. I’ll post that next.
September 6, 2008
C65-Sculptor Galaxy on 9/6/08
I stayed up WAY too late, but as I was about to pack things up, having spent a lot of time figuring out some technical stuff with my scope, I thought I’d take a look at an object near where I’d been looking and I pointed the scope to C65, a Caldwell Object, called the Sculptor Galaxy. I had never seen this through my scope or camera before. Through the scope, I could make out a cigar shaped blur, but with the camera, WOW! I couldn’t resist and started imaging it. An hour later i finally put everything away, but I was so anxious to see the results that I stayed up to do some quick processing. I’m going to reprocess it when I get the chance, using only the very best frames, which I think will improve it even more, but I’m really excited about this object. I’m planning on returning to it to take a lot more images. It’s a really interesting galaxy where the dust and spiral arms have much more definition than most of the galaxies I’ve imaged. Anyway, very exciting!
