March 2026

Welcome to Hank’s March 2026 Astrophotography Blog. I thought that going into March we’d have some great night skies, but things just didn’t seem to work out. On the 3rd there was a total eclipse of the moon early in the morning. I set the alarm for 3:00 am and peeked out the window, but all I saw were clouds. Marianne got up and told me to go outside—and the Moon was high in the sky, bright and starting to be eclipsed by the Earth! I quickly got dressed, took my Seestar S50 outside, and was able to get a few photos before the clouds rolled in, blocking it from view for the rest of the night.

Also, this month I was a guest speaker at the Custer High School Astronomy class, and set up the Seestar outside the classroom windows, found the Sun and took my iPad back in the classroom to show the students what was going on with the Sun that morning. The telescope is controlled by the iPad, so it makes a cool way to show what the telescope is looking at. There were a few clouds passing by, but the students were able to see a number of sunspots, as you can see below. Sunspots are dark, planet sized regions on the sun that are intense magnetic storms. They are dark because they are cooler (6,300 degrees F) than the Sun’s surface (10,000 degrees F). The Sun has an 11-year solar cycle, where the number of sunspots increase and decrease. We have been in a Solar Maximum for the last couple of years, which has brought us some Aurora Borealis activity here in South Dakota.

Sun

The big news in Custer this month was the Qury Fire. It started a couple of miles from our home and this morning it’s 9,168 acres were 90% contained. With the rains and snow this afternoon and tonight it will be probably be totally out, I’m guessing. Anyway, it really got in the way with finding clear skies. I’m thinking that with the intense drought and unseasonably warm weather we have had this fall-winter-spring, that fires will be more common this year.

So when the skies give me lemons, I’m looking to make some lemonade. I have been looking to acquire unprocessed, raw, astronomical images from telescopes in clear sky areas of the Earth, including regions that have views of the Southern Hemisphere (an area I will probably never see). I looked at processing images from the Hubble and James Webb telescopes, but those images are so huge, my tiny computer and skill set don’t make that a very good fit. So, I’ve found a business, Telescope Live, which has telescopes all over the world, and by being a subscriber to their service, I can download the files of objects I want to process. The telescopes and cameras that are taking these pictures are to drool for. I’ll never be able to afford a telescope worth that kind of money, located in a Bortel 1 dark sky area. It just ain’t happening! But I can get their images!

The software I have been using to process data from my observatory is not as robust as what I really need, so I took the leap and purchased PixInsight, the software that NASA images are often processed with, along with a number of add-on scripts and processes to do some magic stuff. The learning curve is pretty steep for this shrinking brain of mine, but with the help of members from the Black Hills Astronomical Society, I am starting to get the hang of it. A big shout out to BHAS member Chris, who has not given up on me yet!

Here are two images I’ve worked on. The first is M2, the Trifid Nebula. It’s pretty cool, but I think I’ll come back to it later when I have a few more bumps on my head. I see some thinks I can improve on it.

The second one was taken on a 24” Planewave Telescope with a giant camera down on a remote mountaintop in Chile. NGC613 is an interesting galaxy in the Sculptor constellation, and PixInsight really helped bring out the details here, given that its light took 67 million years to reach Earth.

Until next time, Clear Skies! -Hank