Rosette

Old Jupiter Animations

I wanted to put up two animations, but blogger will not let me at this time. This animation was taken about 5 years ago. Over 5 hours worth of images combined into one animation. If I remember correclty I took still frames one after another with my ST-2000XM and 10" LX200 at f/20 for 3 minutes, then waited two more minutes before shooting another 3 minutes worth. So, each individual video frame is a separation of 5 minutes for a total duration of over 5 hours. It was tedious work, but very rewarding. Things start getting fuzzy toward the end as I was trying to go as long as I could while starting to shoot through a tree. My old house used to have a huge tree in the backyard that took up the sky from the zenith to the western horizon. We built our new house in a new subdivision with young trees, so I won't have that problem again anytime soon.

Horsehead & Flame Nebulae

This image was shot the night of December 5th. I was able to capture 3 hours and 20 min of hydrogen alpha data before clouds rolled in. As always, more data is desired. This is my first long exposure image with my new mount, my newly acquired Losmandy G-11. Image was taken through a Takahashi sky 90 with focal reducer, with an SBIG ST-2000 XMI, with CFW8, and astrodon 6nm Ha filter, guided with remote guide head. Sub exposures were 10 minutes in duration for a total exposure of 3 hours and 20 minutes. Images registered and stacked in CCDSoft and further processed in Photoshop.