Locomotoring

Galaxies look so well organized that it feels like a crime referring to them as chaos! From 11-12 million light years away, they look tidy with our 300mm telescope, unlike the nebulas in our Milky Way galaxy.

Since the shooting of Flaming star and tadpole nebula, two things have happened. The first is transitioning the mount to MLAstro SAL-33. The gear arrived late in March. The SAL-33 has also allowed us to add our filter wheel (more weight!) to the imaging train. And after we put the system together, we had to wait for clear skies. Before astrophotography, I used to maintain that the CA skies are nearly always blue. During day time, the white fluffy clouds look cute and don’t take away from the generalized blue of the sky. But when you are wanting to get your astrophotography gear out, CA night skies appear full of clouds – low, medium and high, making it hard to find a 3-4 hour window of good visibility.

Right now, Ursa Major (aka Big Dipper, aka Saptarishi Mandal in Sanskrit) is directly overhead. And nestled close to them are the duo M81 (link) and M82 (link). With our 300 mm telescope, if you aim for one and you get the other as bonus. The above image alone is cropped, nearly 2x the zoom.

This image uses two filters. The first is the Hydrogen-Alpha (HA) filter, an Optolong filter that allows a 3nm bandwidth of light centered on a wavelength of 656nm to pass through. The primary filter is a UVIR Baader Luminance filter, designed to cut off UV and IR emissions, while maintaining 98% transmission for any visible light emissions (420 nm to 685 nm). The image is total integration of an hour of H-Alpha (30 frames with 120s exposure each) and 75 minutes of UVIR (140 frames of 30s exposure each) from our Bortle 6 skies.