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.
Markarian’s Chain, most of it
Oh Dear, NGC3718 yet again
Well, I managed to collect a few more photons from NGC3718, and the result is marginally better. Marginally: the black of space is a bit smoother:
I can skip over to Google and find a hundred images of this object with more color and detail, but the process of collecting light in the cold dark yourself makes it all real.
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.
Sunset from S&P’s balcony
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.
Black Eye galaxy
Here is a small target for my telescope. The “black eye” is discernible, but only on close examination can any other structure be seen. It’s sometimes called the “Evil Eye” galaxy; this Hubble View makes that case very well. The idea that there are two counter-rotating stellar populations is mind-boggling.
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.
M106 and some friends, redux
I managed to spend more time photographing NGC4248 and friends. NGC4248 is the tiny galaxy dead center; M106 is the larger galaxy above and left. I posted the same view a couple of weeks ago — that post integrates a fewer number of exposures. There is also an annotated version in that post that identifies several galaxies in the field.
Increasing the number of exposures will improve the clarity of the image, but there are limits. The rule is that clarity improves as the square root of the number of sub-exposures — 16 five-minute exposures combined should improve the clarity by about a factor of four over a single five-minute exposure. The above picture had about 40 five-minute sub-exposures; 80 exposures would show some improvement, though maybe not easily noticeable.