Also during this time, I acquired some new gear. Some of it planned - a new ZWO ASI2600mm camera and new 36mm Chroma filters, and some of it not planned - A buddy of mine bought an almost new Explore Scientific ED152 CF
So you can imagine how bad I've been itching to get out the last six or so weeks with the new toys. This past Thursday everything started to align. Almost no moon, no clouds, no wind, time off work! I headed out to a favorite winter spot south of Las Vegas knowing the temperatures would be a bit uncomfortable but I have been wanting to image the Helix Nebula,
On my first night, I managed to acquire 200 minutes of 10-minute subs in
With the imaging system running on autopilot, it was great to just lay back in my zero-g chair and truly enjoy the night sky turning above. For the first couple of hours, it was just too hot to sleep so I watched satellites pass overhead along with a surprisingly light amount of air traffic. This area is near one of the normal flight paths for the Vegas airport but this evening it was extremely light. I did see a string of Starlinks pass nearly overhead and I even caught on a very bright satellite that reminded me of a favorite pastime a few years ago, it looked like an Iridium flare, brightening up almost as bright as Jupiter for a few seconds before finally fading away.
Multiple meteors were spotted also over the course of the evening but nothing that I could nail down to a radiant, probably just random bits of dust whose existence ended in a fiery demise.
My second evening in a row was a repeat of the first except on this evening I acquired 200 minutes of 10-minute subs in OIII and again 30 minutes of 2-minute subs in ea.
Since this evening was my second night in a row I was very tired and planned this evening a bit better. I brought along an air mattress and a small USB-powered evaporative cooler to blow cool air in my face. That combination allowed me to get a bit of sleep, only waking up to monitor the
So two successful nights of imaging and I've managed to capture 3 hrs of
I must say I'm very happy with the individual subs that I've reviewed so I'm really looking forward to working with the new gear on future projects.
As my evening was wrapping up this morning around 3 am I looked east to see an old friend rising, Orion. It's my first sighting of him for this upcoming season and I can't wait to spend some time on the Horsehead again.
But before packing up for the night I decided to capture a single 120-second Luminance sub of my next project, a galaxy that I've wanted to image for a while now. Here is that one image with nothing but a histogram stretch done to it.
I leave you with NGC253, the Sculptor Galaxy, aka the Silver Coin galaxy.
