Welcome to Hank’s August 2026 Astrophotography Blog. The Black Hills Astronomical Society holds public star parties each month in the Summer. They happen about the time of the new Moon, when the Moon’s light isn’t blocking us from seeing galaxies, nebulas, star clusters, planets and fainter objects. This month the star party was on the 7th. The skies were not great, and there was some smoke in the air, but we were able to show folks a variety of objects. I had my Seestar S50 set up and here are a couple of the images I took.
The big event this month In South Dakota was the partial lunar eclipse that covered about 96% of the Moon. Lunar eclipses happen because the Earth is between the Sun and the Moon and we are shading the Sun’s light on the Moon. Solar eclipses happen when the Moon is between the Sun and the Earth, and the Moon blocks the Sun’s light on Earth’s surface. Earlier this month, on the 12th, there was a solar eclipse that showed up in parts of Alaska, Europe, Greenland, Spain…. Typically, about 2 weeks after a total solar eclipse there is a partial lunar eclipse, and ours happened on the evening of the 27th. We get partial eclipses because the plain that the Sun and Earth are on is about 5 degrees off from the plain that the Moon and the Earth are on…so the 3 celestial bodies don’t always line up for a total eclipse.
I like to look for two things during these lunar eclipses. First, as the Moon gets dark, the light that shines on the Earth bounces off and illuminates the dark part of the Moon that is covered by the eclipse. It is red, and this time, because the fires in the west have been putting lots of smoke in the air, I was guessing it would be a deep red color, and I was not disappointed. Second, as the Moon gets dark during the eclipse, the stars all pop out and really put on a display. This year the Milky Way was parading across the sky and the stars put on quite a show. It helps to be in a dark sky location, and my go to place near my home is on the hills above Jewel Cave National Monument, overlooking Hell’s Canyon, on the Mud Springs Road. Here’s a photo of the sunset on Mud Springs Road and what my telescope looks like, pointed at the Moon.
Here are my eclipse photos. Shortly after the ecliipse reached maximum, the clouds moved in and I headed home.
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Emily Berry of the Badlands National Park Conservancy sent me this image taken with her Google Pixel 11 smart phone taken with a 10x zoom. It really shows the red on the Moon during the eclipse. My iPhone 13 didn’t capture any of the reds….Maybe it’s time to upgrade! Thanks for sharing, Emily!
Matt Fridell was in Sioux Falls, SD, during the eclipse and sent these photos showing the Moon paired with Dale Lamphere’s Arch of Dreams in downtown Sioux Falls. Thanks, Matt! Love it!
This month I downloaded a set of M52 data from Telescope Live. M52 is an open star cluster, about 4,600 Light years away in Cassiopeia. It was discovered in 1774 by Charles Messier, a French astronomer. It has over 100 stars in the cluster and spans about 19 light years. This image also includes a neighbor, the Bubble Nebula, NGC 7635, which was discovered in 1787 by William Herschel.
This image was taken in Spain and consists of 79 x 5-minute exposures. The exposures all taken of the same spot in the sky, and are divided into three types depending on the filter used: Ha (Hydrogen), OIII (Oxygen) and SII (Sulphur). Each of these elements displays a different wavelength of light, and the filters are designed to capture just one specific wavelength. The light is so faint, that without “stretching” the light, or increasing the gain, our eyes cannot see anything. Below shows the Ha, OIII and SII light that was collected and stretched using tools in the PixInsight software. Notice how the different images show different features.
What I did with the three filtered light images, since they appear as black and white images, is assign a different color to each, that we can see. So, the Ha image appears Red, the SII Image appears Green, and the OIII image appears Blue. This assignment of colors is called HSO. Other configurations can be used, but I thought this one looked the best. These are false colors, because we cannot see Ha, OIII or SII light, but it does show us something of the makeup of these physical objects.
The telescope that took these photos is a Takahashi FSO-106ED telescope, a wide field telescope. The Camera is a QHY 600M, a camera that has 61 million sensors capturing light (In comparison, my observatory camera has 10 million sensors capturing light. The native size of the image that this telescope and camera capture is about 30 inches x 20 inches at 300 dpi. Which all means that it is BIG, and it allowed me to zoom in on details of M52. Below shows close up details the M52 image, including the Bubble Nebula.
Until next time, Clear Skies! -Hank
