Category Archives: Astronomy

My Latest Astronomical Image – Core of the Cave Nebula – June 21, 2022

This is the second and last image from June 21, 2022. This core area of the Cave Nebula. The nebula is actually much larger than this image, but my field of view is focused on some of the core glowing red gas. There are many stars in this image since this is along the main section of the Milky Way galaxy. The individual image data was acquired from 2:23 am to 3:52 am. This was also shot with the Orion 8″ Astrograph using 3 minute exposures. More exposure time would show more of the red gas.

It was a long night – I didn’t get to bed until 5:00 am, but I was able to sleep until 11:30 am to make up for the all night session. The weather turns bad over the next few days and I’ll take a break from the imaging I’ve done over the last week or so. It has been really fun though and I’ve had much more success than I did a year ago.

Quote from Wikipedia

“Sh2-155 (also designated Caldwell 9, Sharpless 155 or S155) is a diffuse nebula in the constellation Cepheus, within a larger nebula complex containing emission, reflection, and dark nebulosity. It is widely known as the Cave Nebula, though that name was applied earlier to Ced 201, a different nebula in Cepheus. Sh2-155 is an ionized H II region with ongoing star formation activity,[1] at an estimated distance of 725 parsecs (2400 light-years) from Earth.[2][3]”

My Most Recent Astro Image

Color picture taken August 2020 – M27, The Dumbbell Nebula. I have taken this image several times before as one of my favorite objects (exactly a year ago with my 12″ telescope) and I decided to repeat it with my newer 102 mm refractor. This image shows more detail than last years version and a larger area of the surrounding stars with many more faint stars since I took much longer images. The night was beautiful and stable, and the refractor has the sharpest and stable focus of any of my telescopes. There were 28 images shot in 4 colors at 5 minutes exposure for each image. It was a total of 2 hours and 20 minutes of integration time.

This is 1300 light years away and is a gaseous remnant of a star similar to our sun that is at the end of its life. There is a white dwarf at the center that illuminates the exploded gas.

How I Currently Take Backyard Astronomical Pictures

This is an update to this post: Here are two images I took with my Astrotech AT65 refractor in the backyard. The article below describes my history of astrophotography in the back yard. 12/30/2018


This is NGC6995 or the Veil Nebula. This was taken from 12:20 am to 2:01 am. With 16 images at 6 minutes per image, combined of LRGB. This is a supernova remnant from between 3000 and 5000 BC and is about 1700 light years away. It is made up of emissions from glowing oxygen, sulfur, and hydrogen. This very large object is right in the middle of the Milky Way Galaxy leading to the large number of stars visible.

This is the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) imaged from 2:26 am to 3:58 am on Saturday morning. This image is made up of 16 subframes of 6 minute integration alternating between L, R, G, and B filters at -10 degress centigrade on the Sony imager (Trius 694). There is a gradient at the top of the image due to having the off axis guider prism positioned a little too far into the main camera’s field of view and a satellite came through a green filter pass creating a green line. The image was LRGB processed using Nebulosity 4 and the colors were enhanced using Photoshop CS 2017. 

The Andromeda Galaxy is the closest major galaxy to our Milky Way Galaxy and is about 2.5 million light years away. There are 2 other small galaxies (M110 and M32) shown above and below Andromeda which are dwarf elliptical galaxies. Andromeda is heading straight for our Milky Way galaxy and will eventually collide. The AT65 refractor was able to create a very sharp image of the galaxy and there were no guiding failures during the image acquisition. I have two more photos to process from last night’s imaging run.

I’ve been asked a few times how I take images that I currently post on Facebook. The process has change substantially since my first attempts in 2005. The biggest changes since my early days are the use of computer controlled telescope mounts with my scopes, open source software to control the mount and the availability of CCD astronomical cameras that have extremely low noise when I try to do long exposures. My favorite objects to photograph are really dim and I image in my backyard in a really light polluted suburb of St. Louis Missouri. It is very possible to take nice photos with all the constraints of backyard imaging, but the process requires extreme patience since everything conspires against the results – bad weather, the full moon, neighbors that leave lights on, a mount that fails for known and often unknown reasons, and the amount of time I have to stay up until 4:00 am in the morning and still do work the next day.

I’ve posted the results of my hobby over the years and the results have gotten better, but the learning process is never ending and I see fairly big faults in almost every image I post. Spending on better hardware has improved the process, but there is always something that that isn’t quite right, or a compromise. A neighbor on the next street over from mine (who I unfortunately have never met) has a dome in his backyard that allows the equipment to be left set up, and his equipment is first rate. In the past he did post an equipment list and results and he rivals the best photographs I’ve ever seen online. However, his equipment cost was the equivalent of a new Nissan Maxima! I don’t have those kind of resources so I make do with cheaper equipment (much of it of Chinese manufacturer) and have all the faults and compromises that choice brings into the hobby.

My main setup has changed over the years and here are photos of my setups since 2005:

First attempts and learning – manual telescope control:

Meade LX50 With Meade DSI-Pro CCD Camera
Imaging in 2005 – Meade LX50 with manual fork mount, and Meade Deep Sky Imager

Globular cluster M13
Photo of M13 From 2005

Changing to a computer controlled mount (2013):

Deforked Meade LX50 With Orion Guide Scope and Orion Computer Controled Mount
Deforked Meade LX50 With Orion Guide Scope and Orion Computer Controlled Mount

Color image of M27 taken in 2013
Color image of M27 taken in 2013

Changing cameras to a modern ultra low noise 6 megapixel CCD in 2015

Current Setup - 2015 Trius SX-694 6 MegaPixel Camera With Color Filter Wheel and Prism Off Axis Guider
Current Setup – 2015 Trius 6 MegaPixel Camera With Color Filter Wheel and Prism Off Axis Guider

M27 Taken with Trius SX-695 Camera 2015

A new telescope (wider angle) with same mount and camera 2015:

Orion 8" Newtonian Astrograph with Trius Camera
Orion 8″ Newtonian Astrograph with Trius SX-694 Camera

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The very center of nebula NGC-2238 The Rosetta Nebula

Here is the list of things I currently use:

1. Computer controlled telescope mount:
This is the mount I currently use:

Orion Atlas Pro AZ/EQ-G Computerized GoTo Telescope Mount

It is very flexible and can mount just about any telescope with the right mounting hardware.  The mount has built in control software that can be used to visually find objects in the sky.  When I image I almost always hook up a laptop to the mount that has much more powerful open source software to guide the telescope, monitor the mount and control the camera and color filters that are attached to it. This allows me to do most of my imaging indoors in the light with a second laptop that connects to the outside laptop. I can watch late night tv in the comfort of air conditioning or heat while the numerous long exposures are taken and saved to disk.

2. Telescopes:

Meade 10″ LX50 Schmidt Cassegrain Optical Tube Assembly

Orion 8″ Newtonian Reflector Astrograph Optical Tube Assembly

I’ve had the LX50 since 2001 when I first used it for visual observing. I now use it for high magnification imaging with my cameras.  It is a heavy tube and has issues with holding focus over my imaging sessions, but also can get the most magnification.  It is comparable to a large telephoto lens in conventional SLR photography. It has an aperture of F10.

The Orion 8″ is a lighter/cheaper telescope that is much faster (aperture is F3.9).  It can image larger objects in the sky with less exposure time, but has to be collimated constantly over the night with a laser collimator to keep the stars and focus sharp. Since it is lighter, tracking accuracy is much better and I can usually get clean longer exposures.

3. Cameras

My main imaging camera now is the Starlight Express Trius SX-694 Monochrome camera.  It has a Sony 6 megapixel CCD sensor with an electronic 2 stage cooling device that can chill the sensor 40 degrees centigrade below the ambient temperature. This reduces the amount of noise in the images I take with it. This camera is fantastic and has changed the detail and resolution of images that I can take. The images can be easily blown up to 16 x 20 inches. Since it is a monochrome camera, I have to use color filters to take color images. The color filters are contained in a color filter wheel that is connected to the laptop. This allows the software to change which color filter is placed in front of the camera CCD while imaging.

Since the Earth’s rotation causes the objects i shoot to move in the sky, I use a smaller second camera that is also getting some of the light from the telescope through a prism arrangement. This camera tracks a star that I choose and sends commands to the telescope mount to keep the star centered over the many hours that I image. The camera is a StarLight Express Lodestar X2 Autoguider camera

Here are images of my cameras and storage case.

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Trius SX-694, Lodestar X2, and USB Color Filter Wheel
Trius SX-694, Lodestar X2, and USB Color Filter Wheel

Here is a closeup of the cameras hooked up to the Astrograph:

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4. Focuser

Since I use the telescope from inside the house, I also used a computer controlled focuser that allows me to automatically focus the camera and telescope over the night as the temperature changes and the telescopes mirror moves.

5. Laptop/Software

The images that I take are actually a series of long exposures from 30 seconds to 15 minutes or more long. The images are stored as data on the computer and are averaged together using software to reduce the image noise that you get from stray lights and the long exposures. A typical image can have 2 hours or more of telescope time to collect the data and then more time the next day to process and expand the detail, merge colors and crop to look good. To do this I use the following packages:

Open Source EQMOD telescope control software – for controlling the telescope mount and autoguiding
Nebulosity Imaging Software
Sequence Generator Pro for controlling the camera, color filters, and autofocus.

Astrotortilla for automatically finding my place in the sky after taking a single image. This helps enormously with aligning the telescope and finding objects to image automatically.

I also use Adobe Photoshop to do final color adjustment, contrast, noise reduction, cropping, etc.

This is a a list of all the stuff I’ve acquired to take sky photos. I made a video a view years ago that shows imaging in action on the laptop during the night. I did not have my current camera, but the process is still very similar.

Taking images with a telescope and CCD camera.

Heino Pull January 2016

M27 in Color – 2015 vs 2005

These are two color images of M27 the Dumbbell Nebula. The first was taken Thursday August 20th over a 3 hour period with my 10″ SCT and is made up of LRGB images shot at 5 minutes per image at -10 degrees centigrade. There were between 3 and 5 images taken per color and it was combined with Nebulosity 4 and Photoshop CS 2015. I have taken this before in monochrome and in color (2nd picture in 2005) on my old camera, and I can see that the color separation filters that I’m using now is giving much closer color to the greenish blue color that should be in the center. The image has come a long way since my first tries in 2005 with the same telescope.

This object is another exploded star collapsed into a white dwarf which lights up the gas causing the colors.. This is in an extremely dense region of the Milky Way with many older stars. The sky was somewhat hazy last night and the wind picked up making guiding impossible, otherwise I would have combined more images. The dumbell goes form lower left to upper right and the wispy sections at the top and bottom require longer exposures than my guiding would have supported previously. I’m extremely pleased with my new camera, filters, color filter wheel and mount/scope.

m27

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