Astronomy Images and Video

“These are the last days of the waning year;
High in the west now stands Deneb,
Great Star of the Cross…”
– Robert Burhnam Jr., Burnham’s Celestial Handbook, vol. 2.

An icy blast of cold and snow landed across the western Canadian prairies this week, but it wasn’t quite cold enough to keep me from having a long last look at the stars of northern summer now fading fast in the western sky. Scanning slowly with a pair of wide-field ‘constellation’ binoculars, I took in the stars of Lyra and Aquila, Delphinus and Sagitta, and the open star cluster IC 4665 near the asterism of Taurus Poniatowski that spells out a contradictory “HI” as it heads below the horizon until spring. But I reserved my final gaze of the evening for one of my favorite patches of sky near the star Deneb at the top of the Northern Cross and the adjacent glow of NGC 7000, the North America Nebula, about 3^o to the east. [Read more…] about Going Analog with the North America Nebula

While awaiting the appearance of the Milky Way, not to mention astronomical darkness which won’t come again until July at my northerly latitude, I’ve been having fun snapping photos of galaxies with a 50 mm smart scope and other instruments of modest aperture. I recently tested another diminutive telescope, the Takahashi FOA-60 to see what it could do. While primarily intended to be a visual instrument, this telescope features superb optical quality, but it has a relatively slow focal ratio of f/8.8 which is not ideal for astrophotography. Nevertheless, I hooked up a small camera, the monochrome and highly sensitive ZWO ASI533MM-Pro and a Tele Vue 0.8x focal reducer to coax the optics of this little telescope down to a more reasonable f/7. Then I aimed it up out of the plane of the Milky Way into intergalactic space and snapped some photos of galaxies in and around Ursa Major to see what I could capture [Read more…] about Galaxy Hunting with a 60 mm Telescope