M78

The Last of California

 in Blog  tagged Barnard's Loop / conjunction / M20 / M78 / M8 / Moon/Mars / occultation / orion

No, California isn’t going away, this is just the last photo from my recent trip down there.  This is M78, captured with the SVX80T at f/6, and the ASI1600 camera.  I shot the same target last year with the WO Star71, which has a significantly wider field of view, and also got it from the remote observatory in Australia with a somewhat narrower field of view.  I’ve repeated the effort because none of these captures has been entirely satisfactory.  This one is better than I expected given that it was captured in just 6 hours or so, over the last […]

M78 From the Other Side

 in Blog  tagged Barnard's Loop / dark nebula / M78 / Messier 78 / orion / reflection nebula

As mentioned earlier, I have been waiting (not so patiently) for better weather in Australia to finish collecting image data from M78, a bright reflection nebula in Orion.  It has finally happened, although there were issues with the quality of some frames.  I haven’t yet been able to figure out what caused the problem, but did find a reasonable work-around for it. This was captured from the other side of Earth, but also makes me curious about what M78 would look like from its other side.  In the upper right it appears that there is more bright blue light behind […]

M78 and a piece of Barnard

 in Blog  tagged ASI1600 / Barnard's Loop / M78 / Messier 78

Messier 78 is another target that I’ve wanted to shoot for years, but is only visible in the Winter.  I’m currently collecting data on this target (very slowly) from the remote observatory in Australia, and I hadn’t planned to shoot it during this trip to California because it’s a rather small object for the wide-field telescope I brought here.  But I decided to try it anyway, hoping there would be some interesting stuff in the background.  Well, there sure is!  The red band on the left and upper left corner is a small portion of Barnard’s Loop, a huge semi-circle […]