Hank’s Astrophotography Blog – Black Hills Astronomical Society

October 2024

Welcome to Hank’s October 2024 Astrophotography Blog. The Black Hills Astronomical Society has added a new page to their website at https://sdbhas.org/blogs/members/bhas-imaging-project-blog/. This page highlights a new endeavor for our club. One thing that we know about astrophotography is that with more hours of capture, the more detail that can be brought out. That’s because the light that reaches us from distant night sky objects, like M101, is not even visible with the naked eye. Even with hours of capture, sometimes only a few stars show up…. until the images are processed using special software that can bring out those faint details. So, the idea is that if we get a group of us gathering light, we can put our images together to have an image that shows more detail than just what one of us can do. But to complicate this, everyone has their own equipment, and those who put the final image together have had several issues to deal with in planning and producing the final photo. This is a huge undertaking, and thanks to the experience and expertise of our club members, we have pulled off our first product—The Pinwheel Galaxy (M101). This post shows the final project, lists all those who contributed, how many hours, and the telescopes and filters used. Many of the images taken used special filters, and what each of those filters contributed to the final project is shown. Congratulations BHAS! This is an amazing feat! It took over 6 months to put…

Welcome to Hank’s September 2024 Astrophotography Blog! The last day of August found Marianne and I traveling west to see family and friends for a couple of weeks. One of our stops was Flagstaff, Arizona, home of the Lowell Observatory. It was established in 1894 by businessman/author/mathematician/astronomer Percival Lowell, who built it to pursue his interest in astronomy. He speculated that there were canals on Mars and that there was a 9th planet in our solar system, Planet X. Lowell Observatory is one of those storied places where astronomical history has been made, and we were there! Today its primary mission is educational rather than research, and it is open to the public in the evening for viewing the night skies. Our first stop at the Observatory was at the telescope where the discovery of Pluto was made. Lowell had died in 1916 without finding his Planet X, so the discovery was left for a poor farmer’s son, Clyde Tombaugh. Clyde became interested in astronomy early on but was not able to attend college due to a hailstorm that ruined the family’s crop at their Kansas farm. Clyde read about discoveries being made about Jupiter, and began building his own telescopes by hand grinding his own lenses and mirrors. With a pick and shovel he dug a pit 24’ long and 8’ deep to shelter his telescope from the Kansas wind and weather, as well as provide his family with a root cellar/tornado shelter. Here’s a photo I found of…

Welcome to Hank’s August 2024 Astrophotography Blog! The cloudy nights and smoke have continued to plague us for much of the month, but with a forecast for the BHAS-Custer State Park Star Party coming up on August 30th, it looks like our spell of bad skies may be lifting! We will be traveling so I’m getting my blog out just a few days early this month. Here’s what’s been going on in August… Supermoon Blue Moon—This month saw the Moon reach its closest approach to Earth while it was a Full Moon (called a Supermoon), making it as big and bright as it gets for us. There are two types of Blue Moons. The first type refers to the third full moon in a season that has four full moons. The other type is the second full moon that occurs within one month. August only had one full moon, so it’s not that type. The other thing about blue moons is that they aren’t blue. Go figure. This image was taken with my SeeStar telescope. Also, this month the Moon, Mars and Jupiter were in the same neighborhood early on the morning of the 28th. I got up about 3:00 am and took a photo of the three in the East. In fact, Neptune, Uranus and Saturn were also in the sky, that morning, but I didn’t want to drive out to a spot where I could photograph them all. In a crowded star field it’s hard to know exactly…

Welcome to Hank’s July 2024 Astrophotography Blog! The nights have been few to get out taking photos, but I’ve been busying myself with updates to my observatory software/hardware and calibrating the back focus for my focal reducer, learning a little about how our most skilled BHAS members process image data, and the NEW TELERSCOPE I got for my birthday. So let’s dive in…. The Observatory: BHAS member Chris got me set up with a nifty add-on to my CCD Ciel software, that will automatically evaluate the focus of the telescope to determine if a refocus is needed, and if so, it instructs the software to do a refocus. This comes in handy when I set up the telescope to take images throughout the night unattended. It keeps the telescope on its toes! Below are a couple of images that I took of M 27 and M57 (and a couple of zoomed in photos to get a closer look) to test out how well my automatic sequence of going to an object, focusing, doing a capture of a specific length of time, with a designated exposure and gain settings, monitoring the focus and making adjustments, then going to the next object and do it all over again and again, until it gets to the end when it automatically parks the telescope and waits for me to go outside and put the roof back on the observatory and turn everything off. It worked! I also decided to build a stand to hold…

Welcome to Hank’s June 2024 Astrophotography Blog! The weather has been a mixed bag as is usual for this time of year, but the big news for me has been the help I have been getting from Black Hills Astronomical Society (BHAS) Chris, in getting set up for long exposure Astrophotography. Muddling my way through these past six months has resulted in photographs that show promise, but what I’ve needed is someone to basically spend the time with me, and help put the pieces together. We have been meeting over the internet, where we can share my screen, and walk through the set-up of the software, discuss the sequence and fine tuning of capturing these faint fuzzy specks in the sky, and talk through my questions. My big take away from this month is that without that kind of support, it would never come together for me. If you are interest in doing astrophotography, my suggestion is to find someone who can guide you through it! So here’s what I’ve settled on: My telescope. My Celestron 8” SCT Evolution has a focal length of about 2000 mm. What that means is that the field of view is almost the width of the Moon, or about a half of a degree of sky. The other accessory I have is a HyperStar lens, that turns the telescope into about 400 mm of focal length, and about 3.5 degrees of sky. What I’ve realized is that at least for now, I’d like something…

Welcome to Hank’s May 2024 Astrophotography Blog! The night skies have been a mixed bag of stormy to startling, so let’s get into it. The month started out on May 4 with our local Custer Library sponsoring a May the Fourth Be With You Day, where they invited my astro-buddy Jim and me to help our library patrons look at the Sun. We were using protective eye gear and looking through a couple of different solar viewers: solar binoculars, solar telescopes and telescopes with solar filters. Very Cool! I brought the same telescope I used in April for the Total Solar Eclipse and the Library was able to round up a Coronado Solar Telescope that looks like this: The image was taken with my iPhone looking down the Coronado eyepiece barrel, and to tell you the truth, I was not that impressed. For me the ZWO SeeStar telescope that Jim brought was the standout! The telescope costs $500, and once he set it on the ground, it was controlled by Jim’s iPad. The telescope was able to easily find the Sun on its own, focus it, take photos of the Sun and save those to his iPad! Check out these images of the SeeStar, Jim’s iPad with a solar photo on it, and the image it saved to his iPad. Very cool! Seestar is also powerful enough to capture some deep sky objects, the Moon, and Planets. If you are thinking you’d like to have a small telescope to do…

Welcome to Hank’s March-April 2024 Astrophotography Blog! The skies these last two months were again a challenge, and we were in Texas for the eclipse, so I have not spent too much time at my telescope. But I have a few things to show you, and of course the Total Eclipse of April 8th! To start off with, I was able to capture two images from my backyard observatory. NGC 4565, is an edge on galaxy in Coma Berenices constellation. If we could turn it on its side, it would most likely look like our own Milky Way spiral galaxy. Can you spot the smaller fuzzy galaxy in the corner, NGC 4562? Then, the Moon. It was a very clear night on April 13th, and I was able to get some good surface detail here. I also took a photo of M 101, the Pinwheel Galaxy. I’ve taken photos of this one many times, but I wanted to get ready for a project that our Black Hills Astronomical Society is doing. We are planning for several members (right now there are about 8-9 of us) to capture as many hours as we can of this galaxy, with a goal of 8 hours each. With a goal of 70+ total hours of capture time, we will process all data from multiple telescopes and cameras into one Master image of M 101. What we are looking for is to see how much more detail we can acquire by really bumping up the…

Welcome to Hank’s February 2024 Astrophotography Blog! The skies this month only gave me two short nights to get any viewing in. I spent those two nights fine tuning my capture and processing strategies and have four images to share. The first is Thor’s Helmet that I showed last month, but I’ve been able to clean it up, by plugging some light leaks on my telescope and learning more about how to do calibration frames better (Thanks to the NEW BHAS OBSERVATORY DIRECTOR Rick for his spot-on advice!): The second is a planetary nebula in Puppis, NGC 2438: The third is a trio of galaxies, M15, NGC 3384 and NGC 3389 that sit in the constellation Leo: The last is an image of M51, the Whirlpool Galaxy. These photos were captured on my 8” Celestron Evolution Telescope and iOptron CEM40 mount, using my Mallincam DS10c camera. I’m using 2 minute exposures for an hour’s worth of capture on Thor’s Helmet and 30 minutes on the others. Processing was done with Siril, Photoshop Elements and Topaz DeNoise: Last month I read “The Last Astronomers,” a book that gives a history of how the life as astronomers has changed over the years. The past was all about sitting in a cage high up on a telescope and manually moving it to keep the target centered in an eyepiece while collecting the light on glass plates. The future is all about robotic telescopes, where astronomers never have to get their hands on telescopes…

Welcome to Hank’s January 2024 Astrophotography Blog! In December I was taking photos with the HyperStar lens, that gives a wide field of view and has a focal ratio of f1.9. What that means is that the photos cover about 3 ½ degrees of the sky (a big view) and the camera can capture a great deal of light in a hurry (it’s fast!). This month I switched over to a setup that lets me move in much closer, where the photos only cover about a half of a degree of the sky, and the focal ratio is f10. What that means is that I’ve zoomed in to see smaller objects in the sky and it takes longer to get the light needed to take the photo. The focal ratio is found by dividing the length of the telescope by its aperture, or the size of the opening that lets in the light. Both setups have the same aperture, an 8” diameter hole, so by lengthening the telescope and the path that the light travels in the telescope, it allows me to zoom in, but it takes longer to capture the amount of light I need. With the HyperStar lens my focal length is about 390 mm. With this month’s set up, my focal length is about 1860 mm. With the change in setup this month and using the new post processing software and the Off Axis Guider I talked about last month, I was busy experimenting with my exposure…

Welcome to Hank’s December 2023 Astronomy Photos Blog and HOLIDAY BONUS! You may or may not know, but I not only enjoy taking photos of the night sky, but a big part of my life is playing, writing, and recording music. My songwriting partner, Jeff Sweet, and I have been writing and recording tunes for a few years under the band name DustUp. We just released our 5th album, and we are celebrating by letting you and any friends you think might enjoy it, the chance to download the album FREE from our site. Just go to https://dust-up.com/freebies and click on Download, follow the instructions, and the 10 songs and album cover will end up in your Downloads folder! Easy Peezee! You can also listen to the songs at that website as well. And while you are there, check out our other 4 albums…. This is a limited time offer, so don’t wait too long to download or it won’t be free any more. And don’t miss the last song on the album—you guessed it, an astronomy tune! Happy Holidays! Three and a half years ago I started this journey of photographing things in the night sky. My strategy has been to capture images using a technique called “Live Stacking” or Electronically Assisted Astronomy (EAA). What that means is that I use a color camera and a telescope to look at objects (nebulas, star clusters, galaxies…) and capture a series of short exposures (a few to maybe 30 seconds long)…

Welcome to Hank’s November 2023 Astrophotography Blog. About a month after I dropped my telescope and shattered the corrector plate, Celestron returned the repaired OTA and all looks good! I put a belt around the telescope and secured the belt to the mount, so hopefully I’ll not repeat that particular trick again. What could possibly go wrong with a complex piece of very fragile equipment, run by software that defies explanation where you generally use it in the dark? That’s astrophotography! During the “break” I got some advice on purchasing an Off Axis Guider (OAG) and camera. Chris again came to the rescue and by the end of November I had the OAG in place, the camera focused (there’s another story….), and after about 5 hours of phone calls with Chris, everything was almost ready to go. Early December will find me doing the final calibrations and I should be up and running…. So, what’s an OAG? Basically, it is a small prism in the telescope’s optical train, that catches a bit of the sky, sends it to a separate camera that locks on a couple of stars, with a piece of software called PHD2 (Press Here Dummy, Too) that sends a message to the telescope every time the telescope veers just the tiniest bit from those stars, and tells the telescope to move to get back on track! So, why would you want an OAG? It’s all about getting long exposures. For the last 3 years I have been…

Welcome to Hank’s October 2023 Astrophotography Blog. Black Hills Astronomical Society had a private star party on the 6th at Sylvan Lake Lodge for a wedding party, and about 10 of us with telescopes showed up to brave the cold and show about 60 in the wedding party the night sky. October is normally past the time we’d set up for star parties due to the cold temperatures, but the skies were clear and I had on enough layers to keep from getting too cold. I ended up showing folks some old favorites, M 27 (Dumbbell Nebula), M 2 (a globular cluster in Aquarius), and Saturn. We got to talking about Saturn and its moons, and because Saturn is much brighter than its moons, in order to see them, I raised the gain on the image, enough that Saturn was a fat bright splotch, and the moons began to pop out. When I got home, I used an app that Sky & Telescope magazine posts online https://skyandtelescope.org/wp-content/plugins/observing-tools/saturn_moons/saturn.html to enter the date/time and telescope type I was using (some telescope set-ups reverse images in different ways) and there it was, showing these brightest moons and their names, which I show here. The next day was warm and pleasant, and I put my telescope back on the mount in the observatory at home. I wanted to take images to again try out the new post-processing software I featured in September, Siril, so that evening I captured images of M 45 (Pleiades), M…

Welcome to Hank’s September 2023 Astrophotography Blog. It’s an exciting time to be an amateur astronomer who is taking photos of objects in the sky, as the technology and opportunities are evolving rapidly. For example, NASA makes some of the image data taken by the Hubble and James Webb telescopes available to anyone to process on their own! That’s almost like having your own 10 billion dollar telescope! Well, almost. You can also rent time on large telescopes and use them to capture images you want to capture….or simply download the images they have taken previously. This has intrigued me, as I have never seen the skies of the southern hemisphere, and I’d like to be more familiar with those skies, constellations, and mysteries. This month I was able to get out a few nights, when the skies were clear. Of particular interest is a star I read about, Pegasi 51 (Helvetios Pegasus) and photographed. In 1995 this Sun-like star was the first star discovered to have an exoplanet—or a plant that is circling its own sun. The exoplanet is designated 51 Pegasi b (officially named Dimidium). The discovery was made by two Swiss astronomers, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery. The difficulty in spotting exoplanets is that they are so far away. This one being 50.6 light years from us. But the exoplanet can be detected by measuring how much the light of the star dims when the exoplanet passes…

Welcome to Hank’s August 2023 Astrophotography Blog. I decided last winter to spend the summer putting up an observatory of some kind and get a more reliable telescope mount. My goal has been to easily do astrophotography all year long, so I made the jump. Controlling the old Celestron mount over WIFI or a USB connection was just not very reliable, and hauling out the telescope every night was getting to be a drag. So I bought an iOptron GEM40 mount; I did a little research and put up a hunter’s blind to house my telescope; I updated my Windows 10 laptop to Windows 11 (my advice is….DON’T); I purchased a small mini Windows 11 computer that sits in the observatory and controls the mount, focuser and camera; I installed an ethernet cable from the house to the observatory so the laptop in the house could control the minicomputer in the Observatory, and started using a new piece of software, NINA, to control everything. Without BHAS member Chris to walk me through the connections, settings, and set-up, I would have given up. A big shout out to him and THANK YOU!!!! I’m still working through getting my head around the new software and procedures I need to use to make everything work, but it is slowly coming together. A Tale of Two Star Parties… This month I set up my telescope for two Black Hills Astronomical Society star parties. The first happened during the busiest tourist week of the summer—The…

Welcome to Hank’s July 2023 Astrophotography Blog. I am a member of the Black Hills Astronomical Society (BHAS), and one of our main goals as an organization is community outreach, where we put on public star parties. It really is a thrill to look through your first telescope, find named stars in the sky, and see objects in near real time on a monitor. It’s what we do! Members bring their telescopes and have them available for the public to look through the telescope eye piece at the Moon, planets or other bright objects. Other members are really good at knowing the sky and can point out the visible stars, and what is really cool is when they can show you how to “star hop” from one to the next using some easy to remember clues. For example, if you want to know the angular distance between stars, you can hold your arm outstretched in front of you and your fingers and hand can help you estimate the distance. For example, your pinky is about 1° wide, whereas your fist is about 10° across. If you hold your pinky up to the Moon you can see it is about a half of a degree wide. Check this out: For a public star party in July I brought my telescope and camera to our Hidden Valley Observatory, outside of Rapid City. Over the course of a couple of hours I showed folks 9 different globular clusters, nebulas and galaxies on my…

Welcome to Hank’s June 2023 astrophotography blog. The big news this spring is that I have been working on putting a shelter over my telescope pier, with the goal of having an observatory where my telescope could be set up full time, out of the weather, and I wouldn’t be dragging out the equipment every night I want to do observing. I had been researching what my options might be, when I ran into a Dakota Starry Nights video that our BHAS Observatory Director, Richard, posted about his re-purposed hunter’s blind set-up. Check it out here! My Astro-Buddy Jim and I visited Richard’s observatory, and it looked like the ticket. I picked up a hunter’s blind at Farm and Fleet in Rapid City, added some pavers around my existing pier, and Jim helped me put it together. Here’s Jim holding the first panels together, and a little later when he took a nap. The top of the blind can slide off, and I put up a stand to hold it in place, making it easy to get on and off. With my new iOptron CEM40 mount, I am able to control the telescope from the observatory or from inside our home, which makes observing in the winter possible. The mount remembers it’s polar and other alignment data, so it makes getting set-up each night very easy. So for the rest of the summer I’m working out the bugs and further discovering ways to improve my Electronically Assisted Astronomy (EAA) photography…

Welcome to Hank’s May 2023’s astrophotography blog. This was a month of poopy skies, but amazing new things to see! I was reminded that astrophotography isn’t just about trying to take great photographs, but being there for great moments. You just need to keep showing up, and stuff will show up for you! The skies were not only cloudy, but smoke from the fires in the west and in Canada made their way to the Black Hills. I was out when I could be, and here’s what I found: Planetary Nebulas are the remains of old stars that cast off shells of cosmic dust and gas. They sometimes look like a donut, with an old star somewhere in the middle. I also caught a few globular clusters—old stars that hang out together, like the guys down at coffee at the Our Place Café in Custer. Spring is a great time to see galaxies, as the Milky Way moves out of the way in the sky and we can see things beyond our own galaxy. The first photo, M51, the Whirlpool Galaxy, was the first deep sky object taken with our new iOptron CEM40 mount. The last two photos are the same galaxy, taken one right after another. The night sky had so much stuff in the atmosphere that the galaxy was a red color. After taking the photo I lowered what they call the “saturation” of the photo, and it cleaned it up considerably by taking out the color. An…

Welcome to my April 2023 astrophotography blog post. I was only able to get out for a few evenings (and days!) this month with my telescope and camera, but a lot has been going on here, so let’s get to it. April 9: The following deep sky images were taken on the 9th using a .5 focal reducer on my camera which allows the camera to take a wider field of view. With the focal reducer I get about a half of a degree of width of the sky, or about the width of the Moon. Without the focal reducer I photograph about a half of that width. I was most interested in a pair of galaxies, NGC 4038 and NGC 4039, that are undergoing a galactic collision 45 million light years away. The Antenna Galaxies have two long tails of stars and dust that are the result of the galaxies moving closer and closer to one another. The tails are pretty faint, so I had to boost the gain (and background noise) to really see them. The phase they are in is called a starburst, where clouds of dust, gas and entangled magnetic fields are causing rapid star formation. The densest regions of the collapsing and compressing clouds are believed to be the birthplace of star clusters. I love checking out nebulas, and removing the stars that surround them to get a closer look at what the nebulas actually look like. Here are a pair: C 31/IC 405, the…

Welcome to my March astrophotography blog post. This month I was asked if I’d share information about the photos I take, specifically how long the exposures are and the configuration of my telescope. I took 38 photos of astronomical objects over 4 days this month, and rather than detail the specifics of each photo, I’ll try to summarize that information at the end of this blog. Let’s get started. In February my last photo was taken with my phone camera of the Moon, Jupiter and Venus lined up just after sunset. This month started out with Jupiter and Venus in conjunction, taken from Hwy 16A just east of downtown Custer in the early evening. The other pair of celestial objects I captured was galaxy M 100 and the dwarf planet Ceres. Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Discovered in 1801, it was classified as an asteroid for years, but it was reclassified a dwarf planet due to its size in 2006. It makes up about 25% of all the mass in the asteroid belt. It is believed to have large amounts of water and ice and may have liquid water under its crust. It is 588 miles in diameter and is massive enough to be shaped by its own gravity. On the 18th I took a photo of galaxy M 100 so I could compare it with when Ceres did the transit on the 26th. Ceres was about 13.3 light minutes from Earth,…

Welcome to my February 2023 Astronomy Blog photos. These are images I took in February: the shortest and longest month of the year. I took photos several times of comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) this month. It is the green comet that has been in the news lately. The “C” in its name means it is not a periodic comet and will not visit us again anytime soon. The “2022 E3” means that it was the third comet to be discovered in the first half of 2022. The “(ZTF)” means that it was discovered by the Zwicky Transient Facility, which is a telescope at Palomar Observatory in California that looks for these kinds of things. This comet is about a kilometer in size and if we could see the full tail it is leaving behind, it would be millions of kilometers in length. The last photo shows the comet when it appeared near to Mars. The constellation Orion is a constant source of amazement for me, so I was on it! First up are images of the Orion Nebula and the Running Man Nebula nearby. Then the Flame Nebula and the Horseshead Nebula which are close by in Orion. Also nearby these more well-known nebulas were some others in Orion. M 78, HIP 26816, two unnamed nebulas, a variable star, and two of NGC 2174 (the Monkeyhead Nebula. I think I can almost see the monkey’s head if I flip the image, but it’s a bit of a stretch. Here are…

January 2023 Happy New Year! The weather has been a little crazy, but I was still able to get my telescope out a few times. Let’s kick off with a part of one of my favorite star clusters with nebula—The Pleiades. Alcyone is the brightest of the “seven sisters” in this cluster and it really shines blue. Love it! I was able to spot three planets this month, and depending on the lens I was using, I got different views. Here are two of Jupiter showing its rings. The largest Jupiter was taken with a Barlow Lens, which can be inserted between the telescope and my camera and allows the image to be 2.5 times larger. The other two Jupiter shots show four of its moons circling the planet. Here is Mars using the Barlow Lens. Uranus is pretty small in my telescope. One measure of distance in astronomy is the Astronomical Unit (AU). One AU is the distance between the Earth and the Sun (93,000,000 miles). Mars is about 1.5 AU, Jupiter is about 5.2 AU, Saturn about 9.5 AU, and Uranus is about 19.1 AU from the Sun. The farther things are apart, the smaller they appear. So, I feel pretty good about spotting Uranus and a few of its 27 moons, shown in the insert. I’m looking forward to seeing if I can spot Neptune, which is about 30 AU from the sun, when it gets a little higher in my sky later this year. The Constellation…

Welcome to Hank’s December 2022 astronomy photos! December was a month of weather and traveling, both of which got between me and my telescope, but I have a few images to share. I also wanted to point out that several planets are in the early evening skies now, and so get out your smart phone, load up an Astronomy app that shows the night sky and get a look at Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. With a telescope you can also add Uranus and Neptune to your list. I have four-night sky apps that I use. Stellarium, Sky Safari Pro, Star Walk, and Sky Portal. They all do things a little differently, but for all of them, you just point your phone up to a section of the sky and the phone screen shows you a map of where you are looking and tells you the names of the objects. It takes a little practice to hold your phone “just right” to line things up, but it’s easily mastered. These apps all have settings where you can change the time that is shown and also show the constellations. First up, I was taking photos of the Moon using my new Moon filter and got curious about a cool looking crater that turned out to be the Copernicus Crater—Named after Nicolas Copernic, the Polish astronomer and mathematician. He wrote the book on the heliocentric system in which the Earth and planets spin and rotate around the Sun, which revolutionized Astronomy. Prior to…

Welcome to Hank’s November Astronomy Photo Blog. Fall departed and Winter is here in South Dakota, and I’ve been readying my telescope for the cold. I have a modified heating pad that I wrap around the mount where the batteries are stored to keep them from freezing, and I keep the batteries charged up by plugging in the charger while operating the mount. My telescope looks like it has a blue coat and a little plastic backpack on it! Also note, that starting this month you can cycle through the photos with your left/right arrow keys, or click on the arrows at the bottom of the photo. Here are a few nebulae I found while out roaming around the sky. I’ve posted a few photos of the Rosette Nebula here before, but it was just so big and bright I had to take another. And a few Open Star Clusters: I was on the search to see galaxies this month, especially, trying to find ones that are at the limit of my 8” telescope’s seeing ability. Some of them are over 100 million light years away. I look forward to November, as it is the first month I can catch the Orion Constellation, and not stay up all night. Here are photos of the Flame and Horse Head Nebula (with the L-Extreme filter) and without, and my favorite, the Orion Nebula. I’ll be loading up my blog this season with more from these two nebulas…. I just can’t resist! Here…

Welcome to Hank’s October Astronomy Photo Blog. It has been warm and mild this October, but distant forest fires made viewing a little difficult during some weeks. Darkness comes earlier and earlier this time of year, and I’m trying to take advantage of that. Here’s what popped up on my telescope this month…. “Nebula” comes from the Latin word for “clouds”. In the night sky, nebulae are giant cosmic clouds of gas and dust floating around in space. Some nebulae are formed by stars blowing up and throwing dust and gas out in the explosion. Others are areas where new stars are being formed. The Universe is not empty! There’s lots of stuff floating around. There are 5 types of nebulae. Planetary Nebulae are not related to planets. Back in the 1700 when they were first spotted in telescopes, they looked like they might be round planets, and somehow the name stuck! Planetary Nebulae are an expanding, glowing shell of gas ejected from an aging star. The core of the star becomes a white dwarf. C 63, the Helix Nebula, is the closest nebula to Earth. Emission Nebulae shine from their own light. They are clouds of gas where a star energizes the atoms in the cloud and causes it to glow. Reflection Nebulas are created when light from a star is reflected off a neighboring dust cloud. The last of the three is one of my favorites—the Pleiades. If you haven’t learned how to spot the Pleiades, it is a…

Welcome to Hank’s September Astronomy Photo Blog. Here’s what I found in the night sky this last month. The Local Group is a collection of galaxies that includes our own Milky Way. It is thought that members of the Local Group are close enough to one another to be gravitationally attracted. To start off, the largest member of the group is Andromeda. The second largest galaxy in the Local Group is our Milky Way. Sorry, but no photos have ever captured the entire galaxy, but astronomers say that the Milky Way looks a lot like Andromeda. If you look to the constellation Sagittarius (southwest on the horizon here in Custer), you are looking toward the center of our galaxy. The third largest is the Triangulum Galaxy, M 33. Here are a few more smaller galaxies in our Local Group: Another cluster of galaxies not associated with the Local Group is NGC 7331, the Deer Lick Group. There is one large spiral galaxy and a few others that are called its “fleas.” They are between 294 and 365 million light years away and while they look like they are together, the large one is not gravitationally bound to the “fleas.” And our last grouping of galaxies is known as Stephan’s Quintet. These 5 galaxies were in one of the first images photographed by the James Webb Space Telescope and was featured on last month’s Sky and Telescope cover. You can compare the quality of my 8” telescope photo with the $10…

Welcome to Hank’s August EAA Astrophotography blog. Even though it seemed to be raining a lot, I was able to get several nights of viewing in. But first, there were a couple of photos that I took last month at the Badlands Astronomy Festival that I forgot to add to the July blog….so here goes: These photos were taken with my iPhone 13 that was mounted on a tripod to keep it steady. The first shows the International Space Station in 10 seconds of flight, the second is there to check to see if you can spot these two asterisms: the Big Dipper pointing to Polaris, which is at the end of the Little Dipper. Find ‘em? I have not posted many dark nebula objects—where the dust in the night sky is not illuminated by neighboring stars. But if the background is lit up by stars, you can spot these dark spots. B 143 is in the constellation Aquila and it shows what looks like to me to be a big dark C. Often when I take a photo of a nebula, I’m trying to get the most striking part, such as with the Pillars of Creation in the Eagle Nebula that was in my June blog. But what I’ve come to notice is that often there is more nebulosity surrounding my featured image. So here are a couple of images of nebulas, where I took as many as eight photos around the center image to get a sense of…

July 2022 Welcome to Hank’s July EAA Astrophotography blog. It has been a busy month, with a number of good nights for viewing, a couple of interesting field trips and a new resource: If you weren’t already panicking about floods, fires, rising oceans, and what you see on the weather channel, then you might want to check out the Space Weather Woman’s YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkXjdDQ-db0xz8f4PKgKsag. Every week or so Tamitha Skov gives a look at what the weather is like in space. “What weather” you say? Check it out. There is stuff going on you’ve never imagined fretting over! Do you worry about dust storms on Mars? Do you want to know when an Aurora might show up? What’s this about solar storms? Here is this week’s forecast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3T4VI1VSPc On to the night sky. I love the Moon, and I hope you do, too, because I seem to give a steady diet of it here. I also love my new iPhone 13. It’s Night mode allows me to capture my second favorite thing—the Milky Way! This is a composite of 3 photos from my backyard that shows what we see on clear nights. And Globular Clusters! These old stars like to hang out together, like old guys at McDonalds drinking coffee in the morning, in the outer reaches of galaxies. We’ve spotted about 150 in our galaxy, but there are probably more. Check out a few of ours: M 3, M 5, and M 53. …

Welcome to my June EAA Astrophotography blog, hosted by the Black Hills Astronomical Society. EAA is short for Electronically Assisted Astronomy, which means that rather than looking through my telescope’s eyepiece, I mount a camera where the eyepiece goes and look at night sky objects on a computer monitor. I then use SharpCap software to collect several minutes of that light and save the photos you see here. Let me know if you have any questions! I had a great month of viewing from both at home and at remote sites, so let’s get to it. The Moon is one of my favorite targets, and this month I wanted to compare taking just a snapshot of the Moon to collecting several minutes of individual photos that are “stacked” on top of each other, to see if there is much difference in what I’d get. See much difference? Here are a few globular clusters. The first three are big ones, with M 13 in Hercules having hundreds of thousands stars all bunched together in a sphere with a diameter of about 145 light years. The last two, M 69 and M70 were the last two-star clusters I needed to photograph all the Messier Catalog clusters. This month not only did I get M 69 and M 70, but also M 24, the Sagittarius Small Star Cloud. With these three objects I have now taken photos of all 110 objects in the Charles…

Thanks for checking out my May photos! I was gone for a week this month, but I got a few photos to share with you. To start off with, I was in Vernal, Utah on May 15th, getting ready for a 5 day trip down the Yampa and Green Rivers through Dinosaur National Park (a great trip–highly recommended!). I took my small 4” telescope, iPhone and holder for the total lunar eclipse. Just about sunset the Moon appeared already partially dark and I got a few shots. But clouds soon crowded out the Moon until totality, when it popped out into clear skies! You can tell how clear the skies were for the totality shot, by the sharpness of HIP 76106, the star sitting near the edge of the Moon. One thing I learned is that with the solar eclipse we saw on August 21, 2017, totality only lasted a few minutes. The lunar totality this month lasted about an hour and a half! All because the Earth casts a much larger shadow than the Moon. Thanks to Jim and Andrea for hanging in there with me for the Vernal photos. In my quest for Caldwell targets, I found a few to capture. C 37, the open star cluster, only has about 50 stars in it. C 36’s photo had much better skies than in April. In 1941 and 2019 astronomers observed supernova explosions in galaxy C 36! I’m keeping my eye…

Welcome to my April photos. Even though the night skies have been cloudy this month, there were a few nights where I was able to get the telescope out and take some photos. Here goes…. In April I put together a composite of photos taken in March to give a bigger view of an interesting area in Virgo and Coma Berenices constellations. This includes the Markarian’s Chain I posted in March, but also a bunch of Messier galaxies that make a loop near the chain. There are several Messier galaxies in the sky in April. As you may recall, Charles Messier was a French astronomer in the 1700s who created a list of things to ignore because they were not asteroids (he was pretty passionate about finding asteroids and didn’t want to waste his time on these fuzzy little objects). M 51 is a favorite, and to see what it looks like without the stars from our galaxy getting in the way, I removed the stars using the StarNet+ software I talked about last month. Here are a couple of Messier star clusters. When the stars are all bunched close together they are called a Globular Cluster, but when they are spread out but close enough to be gravitationally attracted, they are an Open Star Cluster. All are within our own galaxy, the Milky Way. The Moon is so cool to photograph. Seems like every…

March marks the month that my monthly emails containing astronomy photos to friends and family becomes a blog. Thanks to the Black Hills Astronomical Society for hosting this. My goal is to share the marvels I find with my 8” Celestron Evolution telescope and mount, Mallincam DS10c camera, Hyperstar lens, focal reducer, and a host of software to help me find, capture, adjust and connect everything together. I also use a couple of pieces of post processing software that includes Photoshop Elements, Topaz DeNoise, AstroSurface and StarNet+ to bring out image details. I hope you enjoy this journey of looking into the night sky. All the past emails I sent out are here too. Just go to the link above, Hank’s Astrophotography Blog, or go to https://sdbhas.org/, click on the BHAS menu, find Member Blogs, and you’ll find them. Click on the photos and they expand! I had a couple of great viewing nights, so let’s get to it. As the Milky Way moves toward the horizon, a number of Spring galaxies come into view. I was able to get some updates as well as new galaxies. Last month, using the wide angle HyperStar lens, I got a photo of a distant M 51, the Whirlpool Galaxy. Here’s a closer view. M 63, M 64, M 87, M 94, M 101, NGC 2841, NGC 3180, NGC 4535, NGC 5474, are all galaxies that we can see pretty much face on or slightly…

Welcome to my February photos of objects I found in the sky this month. Astronomers call this EAA or Electronically Assisted Astronomy. It is a little like looking through a telescope lens, but rather than putting my eye to the eyepiece, I put a special video camera, and display the camera’s image on a monitor, through a computer, so that I can capture longer exposures. With more light, I see more details, and snap a photo after about 10 minutes of fooling around. My word for the month is Pareidolia. Pare-ah-dol-ee-ya. It’s the word for seeing familiar objects in random images. Like Jesus in your toast, faces in clouds, or a dog in M 42, the Orion Nebula. In the lower left hand corner I see a puppy. Actually, two puppies in one. One puppy is looking at me, with a white blaze on its nose and droopy eyes. The other way I see this dog is that it is looking up the red shoulder of the Orion Nebula. It’s one of the fun things in looking at these images. When I did a little research on this word, of course early psychologists saw pareidolia as a sign of dementia or psychosis. I’m hoping that the current thinking that it is a sign of creativity is more accurate. I’ve posted the Rosette Nebula in the past, but this last time I was looking closely at the center and there seemed to be some veins and wispy clouds I…

Here are the astronomy photos from January. This month marks the end of my first year of sending out photos. Thanks for hanging in there with me. It’s been an interesting journey! So here we go…. IC 405. Flaming Star Nebula. The blue star, AE Aurigae, is thought to be so hot that it knocks electrons away from the gas that surrounds it, giving it the blue glow. As the electrons move away and cool they are absorbed by the surrounding gas which turns it red. It is about 1500 light years away and spans 5 light years. I love those blue lines! IC 410. The Tadpole Nebula is close to the Flaming Star Nebula in the constellation of Auriga. A star cluster, NGC 1893, lies in the center of the nebula, lighting it up. This is an area of active star formation. The “tadpoles” are suppose to be in the dark areas in the center, but to be honest, they have not revealed themselves to me yet. NGC 2264. Some nebula are just too big, but I hate to miss the details that a narrow field of view gives. Here are two photos. The first shows a dark “cone” near the bottom. The Fox Fur Nebula, is shown in the 2nd photo. When some clear skies show up again I’ll give it another try to pull a few more features out of NGC 2264, and maybe give my wide field of view Hyperstar lens a shot…

Here is the December line-up of astronomy photos: This month the big event was viewing Comet Leonard. On the morning of the 6th I headed out to Mud Springs with my friend Mike, not sure what to expect. I was hoping to catch Comet Leonard, but with the weather in the single digits and a forecast with limited windows to capture anything, I had my fingers crossed. Mud Springs is considerably higher and more open than Custer, and on arriving on the ridge where I set up, there was snow, bitter cold and a breeze. I set up my generator to power the heating pad I use on the mount to keep the on-board battery from freezing up, plugged in the mount charger to keep the battery full, and also plugged in my laptop, as the USB3 connection to my Mallincam DS10c camera can drain the laptop in about 45 minutes. This was my first time at a remote setting where I set up my laptop in the back seat of the truck, with the heat going full blast. Sweet! To my amazement things went pretty well! Stellarium on my iPhone could find the comet, but my laptop version could not. So on the iPhone I saw that the comet was near galaxy NGC 5637, half way between Arcturus and Izar in Bootes. I focused on Arcturus, then found the galaxy and slewing a bit to the north found the little fuzzball comet. The forecast showed that high clouds were…

A great month of viewing, including a partial lunar eclipse! Here is the November line-up: The big celestial event this month was the partial eclipse of the Moon on the 19th. I didn’t think I’d get any photos as the forecast was not good, and when I got home about 10:30 I could see the Moon but not many stars. I got out our small 4” telescope and held my iPhone up to the lens and was able to capture the moment when the Earth’s shadow first touched the Moon. After taking a few more photos the stars came out and I rushed to set up the Celestron telescope and catch the eclipse as it was darkening the Moon. The last photo shows the minute when the eclipse was at its maximum. Notice how with the Moon so dimmed, you are able to see the eclipsed part of the moon, too! November really starts to show my favorite constellation—Orion. First up is a close-in shot of M 42, the Orion Nebula. This was taken with a focal reducer on the camera, that gives the image a larger field of view, a little over a half of a degree. To understand what that means, the Moon is about a half of a degree wide, so this image shows a little more of the sky than the Moon is wide. I love taking photos of M 42, and in the next few months I’ll probably have a few more to show…

Here are some of the October photos taken with my 8” Celestron Evolution telescope in Custer, South Dakota. Here is the October line-up: Last month I featured the large Andromeda Galaxy, and noted that there were two smaller galaxies in the photo: M 32 and M 110. I used a different lens to get closer to those two. You’ll note that they are about as far away as Andromeda, and they are also both in our local group of galaxies. As I noted, Andromeda is rumored to be the largest galaxy in our group, but I’ve been reading that our Milky Way may be closer in size to Andromeda than what had previously thought. Also in our local group is M 33, the Triangulum Galaxy. Andromeda, Triangulum and the Milky Way are all thought to be bound together gravitationally, and in a few billion years we may become one giant galaxy. Below are two photos taken of M 33, taken with different lenses with different seeing conditions in the sky. M 45 is also known as the Pleiades or the Seven Sisters. What’s cool about this cluster of stars is the blue nebulosity that surrounds them. You can see this “fuzzy smudge” in the east early in the evening now when the sky is clear. NGC 7009 or the Saturn Nebula is a small object for my telescope, but it does look a bit like our planet Saturn. The Helix…

This is an update on the photos I’ve taken in the last two months with my telescope here in Custer, South Dakota. Here is the August-September line-up: M 2 is a globular star cluster in our galaxy, the Milky Way. NGC 7380 is an open cluster of stars and nebula. I really want to catch NGC 7635, the Bubble Nebula, on a really clear night, so its bubble shows up better. This photo was taken with a special lens, called HyperStar, that gives the telescope a wide field of view—over 2 degrees!. It does not give as detailed a photo, but it is able to capture very large objects, such as M 31, the Andromeda Galaxy. This is our closest neighboring galaxy, and is only 2.5 million light years away. Also in the photo, above Andromeda is another galaxy, M 110, and below to the right is galaxy M 32. I love the dark “dust lanes” in Andromeda. Astronomers believe that our own galaxy, the Milky Way, looks much like Andromeda, but we only have about 300 billion stars compared to Andromeda’s trillion stars. NGC 6960 is part of the Veil Nebula. It’s in Cygnus, which is right in the center of our Milky Way galaxy, and that’s where our stars are most densely packed. Also in Cygnus’s Veil Nebula is NGC 6992. Love those colors! IC 5146 is…

This is an update on some of the photos I’ve taken in July with my telescope here in Custer, South Dakota. Here is this month’s line-up: Saturn: Seem’s like it’s almost everyone’s favorite planet. I was able to take images of Saturn last fall, but this is the most detailed one yet. If you expand the photo, you’ll see a band going around the body of Saturn and part of the black Cassini Division can be seen on part of the ring—a first for me! NGC 7000 & IC 5070: I was taking photos of IC 5070, the Pelican Nebula, when I realized that it was right next to the North American Nebula. These are pretty large images and they have a lot of Hydrogen light, so I used the wide field of view HyperStar lens and the Ha filter to bring out the images. It took two photos to get it all, and I put them together in Photoshop to make the mosaic. Galaxies NGC 4605, M 109 and M 102. Love those galaxies. I especially like M 102, which is seen edge on, with a dust lane going up the middle that you can see by enlarging the image. All have a magnitude of about my limit of 10, but if you look at their distances being millions of light years away, it’s pretty amazing I can even see them! The most distant galaxies NASA has spotted are about 13 billion light years away—I…

June was a great month of viewing. I’ve changed the labels on my photos this month. As in the past I show the common names of these objects, such as “Sunflower Galaxy,” if it has one. But I always include one of the catalog names, such as M12 or NGC 6946. These designations are easier to look up on the internet if you are interested in learning more. The M stands for Messier, an astronomer in the 1700s who documented objects that he saw that were not asteroids, which he spent much of his time looking for. NGC stands for New General Catalog, a catalog of deep sky objects from the late 1800s and early 1900s. There are many other catalogs. If it isn’t obvious, I also show what kind of object it is, such as an “Open Cluster” or a “Spiral Galaxy.” Mag. Stands for magnitude, or how visible the object is. In this scale, the larger the number, the dimmer it is. Objects with a magnitude of 6.0 or less are visible with your own eyes in the night sky, when the sky is clear and dark (very rare since the advent of electric lights) and you know where to look. The brightest objects, such as Mars, have negative magnitudes (-2.94). The number to the right of the magnitude indicates the distance it is from us in light years or “ly.” Mly stands for millions of light years. A Light years is the distance light travels in an…

Greetings from the Tanglewood Observatory. For most of this month, my telescope was back in California getting repaired, but I didn’t miss much, as our evening weather has been filled with clouds it seems. But I did get in a few nights lately. Here to start off are a couple of globular clusters, M 13 and M 92. M 92, which is “only” 27,000 light years away, contains roughly 330,000 stars! M13’s stars are tightly packed, being more than a hundred times denser than stars that are closer to us, and occasionally bump into one another. Both are in our Milky Way galaxy. I just love galaxies! They are so far away, and it’s amazing that I can even spot them at all with my little 8” telescope. M 83, or the Southern Pinwheel Galaxy is a barred spiral galaxy that shows interesting “dust lanes,” as astronomers say. Wine drinkers, on the other hand, might say that M 83 has “good legs.” It’s about 15 million light years away. M 88, on the other hand and is a spiral galaxy. I also caught a pair of galaxies that were close to each other: M 81 and M 82. M 87 and M 49 look like red fuzz balls. These elliptical galaxies don’t have the well defined arms that the spiral galaxies have. A week ago I noticed that two other elliptical galaxies, M 84 and M 86, were close enough together to try to…

May marks one year since we got our 8” Celestron Evolution telescope! Amateur astronomy is not for the faint of heart or something that is easily taken on without a lot of support, but it has been a fun diversion during the pandemic. This month’s photos are from only 2 evenings of observations, as on April 6th, the mount that holds the telescope died and I had to send it in for repairs. Hopefully I’ll have it back soon! Spring is a time when you can look beyond the nebulosity of our own galaxy and see other galaxies, many of which are millions of light years away. Some we can see face on, such as M 101, the Pinwheel Galaxy, and M 51, the Whirlpool Galaxy (two galaxies that are linked together!). Others are seen at an angle to us, such as M 63 and M 64. Others are seen from their edge side, such as M 104 and NGC 4565. Also included are images from our own galaxy with globular clusters, M 3 and M 53, which are stars that are tightly packed together. I did include one nebula, NGC 3587, the Owl Nebula. I’ve also started labeling the photos with the constellations they are in, so we can all better learn about our neighborhood. Clear Skies! Hank

As the constellations march through the March sky I’m able to find new things to photograph! I’ve really enjoyed finding galaxies to photograph this month. The ones I can spot are typically tens of millions of light years away, which means those photons have been on a long journey to find me. The nebula and stars you see in the photos are within our Milky Way galaxy, which is “only” about 100,000 light years across. For those of you who might enjoy the history of an amateur astronomy association, I just helped complete our Black Hills Astronomical Society put together its history, which covers 1954 to 2020. It’s an interesting read about how a small group of folks have provided the community with the opportunity to view the night sky for nearly 70 years. Also included are the newspaper clippings and historical documents of the group. You can find it near the bottom of their History page at https://sdbhas.org/bhas-history/ Until next time….Hank

January and February have been hard on the Observatory on Tanglewood Drive. It’s been cold and the weather has not left many breaks in the clouds. The other problem is that when the Moon is out, the glow really lights up the atmosphere, making for miserable conditions for taking photos. So to deal with the moon glow, I picked up a filter that blocks out everything but narrow bands of Hydrogen and Oxygen emissions (Ha & OIII). I know next to zero about Ha and OIII, filters or how all this works, but I have seen photos taken with those filters, and they seem to let the light from stars and star forming areas pass through. Now I thought that when you’d buy a filter, you’d just screw it on to the front of the camera, but that’s not how it works. But when I got the Starizona HyperStar lens set up last fall that takes wide angle/low exposure images, the guy on the other end of the phone said, “get the filter holder,” I took his advice. Now I know why! Since I had the filter holder for HyperStar, the moon was up, the skies were clear, and the temperature was in the 20’s, I set up the telescope last night and started roaming the skies looking for something that might have Ha and OIII wavelengths. So here are the photos. In some ways they are not as detailed as photos from clear dark sky nights. But they…

In November the work outside was completed and we were able to control the telescope and camera from inside the house. Also, many of these photos were taken using the Stellarium HyperStar which gives the telescope a very wide field of view and a much lower F stop. The photo at the left shows the full moon near the horizon at our home in Custer, South Dakota. It is the only place where we can almost see the horizon.

In August we started working with the Mallincam DS10c camera. It changed everything. Work also progressed on being able to control the telescope and camera from inside the house as the weather turned cold. Enjoy!

For Christmas one year Marianne got me a tabletop 4′ reflector telescope. It’s like the one from Edmunds Scientific you’d give your child the year after you got them the chemistry set. For a few months I ignored it, then I began to play with it. I realized that I could hold my iPhone up to the eyepiece and if I aligned the two just right, I could take photos. Not only that but I could adjust the exposure and zoom in. I started going to the Black Hills Astronomical Society meetings in Rapid City and went to a couple of their star parties. While at the star parties I’d ask if I could look through their telescopes, and then ask “could I try and take a picture” while I pulled out my phone. Most often I couldn’t get the iPhone and eyepiece to align. But now and again, it worked! The 4″ reflector works to look at the moon. For other celestial objects–not so much. . . until Comet Neowise appeared.

I purchased my 8″ Celestron Evolution HD telescope with StarSense in the spring of 2020. About the same time I got interested in using a Revolution Imager video camera to take photos of the moon, planets and deep sky objects. The Revolution Imager was designed to be a night security camera and while the photographs were not very high quality, they sure got me interested in taking photos. By late summer I had a Mallincam DS10c video camera and Starizona Hyperstar that allowed me to take high quality images with a wide field of view. By the fall of 2020 I had an outdoor observatory set up close to our home in Custer, South Dakota, that allowed me to control the telescope and camera from inside our home when the weather turned cold. The telescope and camera are computer driven. I currently use a laptop computer and two monitors to run the telescope and camera. The telescope is aligned for each viewing session using StarSense; a special camera on the telescope that can locate where it is and align it with the stars. The telescope is controlled via WiFi using a combination of CPWI (Celestron’s telescope control software) and Stellarium, a free planetarium software that helps me find what I want to see and it sends the telescope to that location. I use SharpCap software to control the video camera over a USB3 cable. This software can take a series of video images and align them to create one image. …