SkyView Acres

The First (and hopefully, not last) Star Party of 2021

 in Blog  tagged Perseid meteor shower / SkyView Acres / star party

This past weekend (Friday through Monday night) I was at my favorite site for astrophotography, SkyView Acres, in Goldendale, WA in my first opportunity to attend a star party this year.  The first 2 nights were not expected to have good weather, and the forecast was largely correct, but this gave me some time to work out some ‘bugs’ that arose from new equipment and software – and from not having done any AP work for a full year! August 12(ish) is the peak of the Perseid meteor shower, so we were a bit early, but still saw plenty of […]

Astrophotography Video

 in Blog  tagged astrophotogrphy / drone / SkyView Acres / video

My favorite site for astrophotography is Skyview Acres in Goldendale, WA.  Because of the pandemic we had only 2 star parties there last year.  Konstantin Mos was at one of these events and made a short video about his interest in the hobby, using footage from both a drone and the ground.  You won’t see me in the video, but you might recognize my AP setup – or my motorhome.  And one of the astrophotos he included is from me as well.  The video will give you some sense of what these star parties are like, so have a look: https://youtu.be/4fGQny29Wjk

First Star Party of 2020

 in Blog  tagged comet NEOWISE / ion tail / SkyView Acres

It’s very strange, and more than a little sad that my first star party of 2020 was in mid-July!  I did some imaging in January, of course, from southern California, but that doesn’t really count.  Last weekend I and a record number of other astronomers and imagers met at SkyView Acres in Goldendale, WA.  Many of the folks there had already seen and/or photographed comet NEOWISE (C/2020 F3), but it was the first time for me, so I spent some time on it each of the 3 nights there. In it’s current location, this comet is not a great target:  […]

Bursting Bubbles

 in Blog  tagged Bubble Nebula / NGC7538 / NGC7635 / SkyView Acres

For the most recent New Moon I went to my favorite dark sky site, SkyView Acres, in Goldendale, WA.  Prior to that I had been capturing narrowband data of the Bubble Nebula (NGC7635) from home, so I thought I would add some RGB data from the dark sky site.  I had dreams of making a glorious multi-hued portrait of this popular object, but after playing around with it for hours, I have to say that my bubble has been burst:  I just couldn’t come up with a way to combine the data that looked any better than straight narrowband or […]

Do Whales Play Hockey?

 in Blog  tagged Goldendale / Hockey Stick Galaxy / NGC4631 / NGC4656 / SkyView Acres / Whale Galaxy

From the first dark site star party of 2018 this past weekend, this is the Whale and Hockey Stick galaxies (NGC4631 and 4656, respectively).  It’s also my first LRGB image with the new FLT132 telescope, and I’m happy to report that the L frames were just as sharp as the RGB (which was not the case with the previous ‘scope, due to residual chromatic aberration).  It might not have been a good test of chromatic aberration because less-than-ideal seeing made all frames less than perfectly sharp. I shot more than 7 hours of this target, but discarded about 2 hours […]

Star Party in the Round

 in Blog  tagged Goldendale / light pollution / panorama / SkyView Acres

Recently, a friend has been making 360 degree by 180 degree panoramas of the night sky in various locations as part of a light pollution study.  As you can see, this is a pretty useful tool to document and demonstrate what light pollution looks like, but it also makes a pretty nice picture, so I asked him how to do it.  Mike was very helpful.  Not only did he show me how to do it, he loaned me his fancy tripod head to capture the frames, and did part of the processing that requires some software I don’t have (yet). […]