Whale Galaxy

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 […]

Celestial Critters

 in Blog  tagged Cat's Eye Nebula / NGC4631 / NGC6543 / Whale Galaxy

In addition to the wide-angle shot of the Milky Way (previous post), I thought I had captured 3 targets at the Maupin star party last weekend.  I can usually tell from an individual raw image whether I’ve got what I want, but when the object is exceptionally dim you sometimes have to just trust that it will show up when you stack multiple exposures.  Unfortunately, stacking doesn’t help if you don’t have the telescope pointed in the right direction!  I had planned to photograph the “Angel Nebula”, but when I googled that to get the coordinates I instead got the […]