I imagine this was a particularly dirty explosion, throwing dark dust clouds and obscuring large patches of a dense starfield. If you look closely, there is a gritty quality to the image.
Iris Nebula
Well, the moon.
My telescope isn’t ideal for taking a picture of the moon, but I gave it a shot anyway. Not much processing, though I did try to sharpen it a bit. Kind of a bleak, burned-out cinder look here.
Markarian’s Chain, #2
I managed to frame it better this time. Here’s an annotated version:
IC342, an invisible object
IC342 is a large, bright, nearby galaxy that would be “naked to the invisible eye” if it weren’t for the dust in the way.
Here’s a five-minute exposure, with a gratuitous satellite:
Do you see a galaxy? Maybe if you squint and sacrifice a pint of Haagen-Dazs?
But curiosity — perhaps more exposures could tease out something?
Here are 41 images like the above, stacked up and combined:
It looks like a galaxy! I should note that these images were taken on a night with excess moonshine, in hazy suburban skies.
Three of the 41 exposures had satellite trails, but they disappeared in the average.
There is an overall red tint to the photo. It’s probably not natural, but rather an artifact of the anti-pollution filter I am using.
Markarian’s Chain, most of it
The cluster extends widely past this field of view. Poor framing — if I had tilted the camera I could have included more of it, and the “chain” moniker would have been more obvious.
The Leo Triplet
Here’s an annotation of a less-processed version:
The dust in NGC3628 is more evident in this version; in fact, details are better throughout. I haven’t quite figured out why.
NGC2903 first try
I collected all of the sub-images during bright moonlight. Maybe in a week or two, I will post a better rendition. This picture has just a hint of whispy spiral arms at the edges, which I might be able to capture.
Pacific Rim
Was this deliberate? I don’t remember. Something was moving, and something wasn’t.
Yosemite Valley Dreams
The grain in this grayscale image is an accidental discovery, and it reminds me of pictures shot with Tri-X many years ago.
I used to push Tri-X to ISO 800 or 1600 in my little Olympus OM-1. I liked the grain, and more, I enjoyed the freedom of taking pictures in dim light.
I took this picture a couple of weeks ago — my first visit to the Valley since before the pandemic. It’s winter, and it is a little threadbare and worn. But there are still climbers on El Cap:
Snow by the Merced:
My wife says sometimes that she would like to be reincarnated as a rock. I’m not sure about the mechanics of that, but here is a nice rock:
One could let the fever dreams of twisted humanity flow by; in a few hundred thousand years they will resolve.
Deep dive into M81
Usually, I photograph M81 and M82 together, but here I concentrated on M81. This image is a composite taken through separate RGB filters, and took a long time to process — a deep dive through some of the complexities of PixInsight. I learned a lot.
It is a beautiful galaxy, well worth the trouble.