Welcome to Hank’s October 2026 Astrophotography Blog. Early this month I set up the Seestar S50 at home to revisit some old favorites. You’d think I’d get tired of imaging the same target, but it’s like going to the Cathedral Spires in the Black Hills. I can’t stop wanting to be there, to take a deep breath, a long look and snap a photo. Some places are just Amazing, and I just love photographing them! It’s the same for these heavenly objects up in the sky!
Of these five galaxies, nebula and stars shown below, it’s the Albireo stars that gets me to pondering. Albireo looks like a double star system, but actually they are not gravitationally bound, but lie along the same line of sight. The bigger one, Albireo A, is a bright golden-yellow, and the smaller one is Albireo B, a hot hydrogen-fusing main sequence star. For years astronomers thought they were orbiting each other. Nope. Leave it to Science to find out they are about 60 light years apart, beyond each other’s gravitational pull. It reminds me that sometimes, things that seem obvious, are not obvious at all. You operate in life like you know what you’re looking at, and then new evidence shows up and shows that you need to change your understanding.
The weather is sure to start changing soon, so I headed out with a half dozen Astronomical Society members for the dark sky site we had visited in Montana in July, in hopes of experiencing those Bortle 1 night skies again—free from light pollution and where the stars can be seen on the horizon. I used my Seestar S50 to take images of the Cave Nebula and the Bubble Nebula. It was a beautiful night to be out on the open prairie before winter sets in.
For the last months, I’ve been trying to get my head around upgrading my observatory telescope. One of the upgrades is a filter wheel and I’ve now got 3 filters. Filters basically block specific wave lengths and let other bands of light pass through. For example, one filter is an IR (Infra-Red) filter that cuts out some of infra-red moon glow, but it lets the other visible light colors come through. Another is called L-Extreme, and it is a narrow band filter that isolates Ha and OII light and lets those two frequencies pass through to the camera, blocking the other frequencies. The other filter is called Synergy and it just lets narrow bands of OIII and SII light pass through, blocking most of everything else. Different nebula emit different bands of light and these filters give me the opportunity to see what some of their light looks like. These bands are invisible to the naked eye, so I assign them different visible frequencies. It’s confusing, but all of this Astronomy stuff is. The first image shows the Wizard Nebula taken with the IR filter blocking light in the Infra-Red frequencies. The second image shows how the L-Extreme filter lets different Ha and OII light through, blocking most everything else. The different colors show the different light frequencies that are being emitted. It’s just a different way of seeing things. I’m reminded of the movie, The Wizard of Oz, where the movie starts out seemingly in black and white, and then suddenly Dorothy’s world is in color! Like being in Dorothy’s farmhouse, astronomy is telling us that we aren’t seeing all the colors that are out there. It’s confusing, but I just remind myself that there’s a lot I don’t know. Sometimes I just have to make up reality based on the best evidence, even if it doesn’t make sense. Anyway, here is the IR image, showing the visible light, and the L-Extreme filtered image, showing the Ha and OIII light. I like the Ha and OIII image, as it shows me that the nebula has more going on, than what’s in the visible light spectrum.
Finally, I got a set of images taken in Spain again, that used the same telescope and camera that was used to capture the Tulip Nebula last month. This telescope takes such a wide field of view with such detail, that I can zoom in to see different features, just as I was able to do last month. So here are three versions of the Heart and Soul Nebula using different processing techniques with the 3 narrow band filters, Ha, OIII and SII. I assigned the colors Red, Green and Blue to the different narrow bands of data, which gives the same image a different look. The last two images are close-ups from these Heart and Soul images.
I’ll let you decide which is said to be the Heart Nebula, and which is the Soul. It sounds like something that Science may refute in the future.
Until next month, Clear Skies! -Hank
