Mars

I know it is pretty small, but shows quite a bit of detail. If you look closely, you can see the polar cap. I have always loved Mars, but never had much luck imaging it. This is the result of 114 images stacked with an LPI looking through my Intes Micro M500.

Moon and Mars Align

The Moon and Mars were in conjunction several weeks back while I shot this image. It is a composite of three short, medium, and long exposures done at F5 using a hand-held 200mm telephoto lens and my Canon 300D. Long exposure in this case, being something like 1/25 of a second. All shot at 800 ISO. If you haven't guessed, Mars is the small dot to the upper right of the Moon.

Another mediocre nebula image... This time the Rosette.

I know it is a bit off-centered, but I was doing good just to get this image. It was really windy, and about 10 degrees. The battery kept dying on my camera, and these three images were all that turned out. I tried M77 and the Cone Nebula too, but to no avail.

The Rosette is a large nebula located sort of between Gemini and Orion (sort of). It is a dusty birthplace for stars, where the center stars have blown the away creating a clear region. It is notoriously difficult to see in a telescope (even a large one), normally requiring a camera to get a good look at it.

A Tale of Two Clusters

Neat name, but there really is no story here. I was trying to shoot Supernova Remnant S-145 and ended up with this instead due to a misaligned camera. Works for me, dude. These are Open Star Clusters M36 and M37. M37 is a classic cluster, being very dense and almost Globular in nature. M36 is much more raggedy, and a bit more humble in appearance. They are very near each other in the Gemini region of the sky.

Here is a crop of M37.

Two Bubbles...

This did not turn out quite as well I wanted. Here is the Bubble Nebula, a large cloud of gas, where the central star has blown out a bubble with it's solar winds. It is a rather neat nebula. My camera did not do it justice. Feeling nostalgic, I did it with my oldest CCD, my SAC 8 II using some home made narrow band filters.

Here is the Hydrogen Alpha only image. I actually like it better. I used it for Luminance on the color image.

Flaming Star

It's not the greatest, but here is an image of IC 405, the Flaming Star nebula. I shot this through my Meade SN10 with my Canon DSLR. I originally planned on shooting a lot of images of this object, but ended up with only 3 after a pre-maturely dead battery. For what it is worth, here is the result of stacking 3 four minute images shot at ISO 1600. The Flaming Star nebula is so named because the radiation given off by the brightest star causes the nebula to glow and resembles a flame coming off the star. It is more noticeable with more exposure time. I will definitely have to try this again.