Orion through the clouds

Having broken my HEQ5 mount by connecting it to the wrong side of the 12v supply and frying the mother board I have had to resort to using my old home made Barn Door Mount.
The new board costs around £109 so it will be a few months before I can use my Skywatcher ED80.
This image started out as a timelapse but the clouds rolled in and left me with just a few images covered in cloud. So this image is a single shot only 10 seconds duration using my nifty fifty Canon f1.8 prime lens. The camera was my old Canon 40d with an Astronomik light pollution filter inserted. The image has turned out to be quite popular on twitter being seen almost 700 times so far, so I'm quite pleased that what looked like a poor evening for astrophotography produced this image.

M42 combining RGB and HA images a year apart.

I really like this image of the Orion Nebula. Using images shot in 2015 before my camera was astro modified with images from 2016 after the Canon 40d was modified allows me to add some blue oxygen colours back into the image that are missing in the HA image. On my wish  list is an Astronomik OIII- CCD clip filter which block light pollution and lets on blue oxygen light. The new filter should allow me to shoot say 30 subs using each filter then combine them in post processing.
This image contains 7 minute subs and 2 minute subs as the very bright central region is blown out in the longer exposure for the faint clouds.

Tadpole nebula IC410

The Tadpole nebula IC410 is a faint dusty emission nebula (magnitude 7.8) over 100 light years across.
Its found in the constellation of Auriga (the Charioteer) some 12,000 light years away and 4 million years old.
In order to get this image I shot 35 exposures of 6 minutes each (That's 3.5 hours).
I chose a moonless night so that the sky was as dark as possible.
The longer the exposure the more detail, and I wanted to pic up the two Tadpoles which name the nebula.
If you look closely just below the centre of the picture you can see the enormous tadpoles (10 light years long) where new stars are being born.

The Crab Nebula. Messier 1

On July 4th 1054 Astronomers in China Reported a star so bright it could easily be seen during the day for 23 days.
We now know that they were witnessing a Supernova which could be seen with the naked eye for almost 2 years. The exploding star is today still travelling outwards at over 3 million miles an hour creating the beautiful Crab Nebula in the constellation of Taurus. Its now 10 light years across and 6,300 light years away. What remains of the star that exploded is called the Crab Pulsar and can be found at the centre of the nebula. Spinning at 30 times a second its now a tiny Neutron star, 1.5 times the mass of our Sun crushed into an object just 6 miles across. Can you imagine that!!!!!
I find it hard.
No longer visible to the naked eye, binoculars will reveal a small smudge but a telescope and a dslr sensor can reveal some of its beauty.
The image was taken using only 36 minutes of data with poor seeing (that's when you look up and can only see the bright stars because of the moisture etc in the air) so I will be revisiting this object when conditions are better.

The California Nebula

The California nebula is in the constellation of Perseus and is an emission nebula that is supposed to resemble the state of California. Its glowing red due to the large star at the top of the image named Menkhib, which is one of the hottest stars in the night sky at six times the temperature of the Sun. Its relatively close, between 1000 and 1500 light years away and only just fits in the frame.
I use an ASTRONOMIK CLS VISUAL Light pollution CLIP-FILTER in front of my Canon 40d astro-modded sensor which blocks light pollution like street lights but allows H-Alpha wave lengths which are red in colour such as ionised hydrogen.

M33 Triangulum galaxy or NGC 598

M33 Triangulum galaxy is sometimes called the Pinwheel galaxy. Its a spiral galaxy 3 million light years away in the constellation of Triangulum. It contains some 40 billion stars and is about 60,000 light years across.Triangulum is the third largest galaxy in our local group after Andromeda and The Milky Way. It is just visible to the naked eye but only with very good vision and  very dark skies.Its currently interacting with Andromeda and in a few billion years may collide with it and us.

NGC 891 (Caldwell 23) Edge on Barred Galaxy

Whilst the Andromeda Galaxy is only 2.5 million light years away, this little gem is 30 million light years away (so the light hitting my telescope has travelled for 30 million years to reach me). Scientists believe that this galaxy closely resembles our own galaxy The Milky Way.
Discovered in October of 1784 by William Herschell its found in the constellation of Andromeda and is part of a group of galaxy's called NGC 1023. Its very faint with an apparent magnitude of 10.8, so cannot be seen with the naked eye.
This image was taken at ISO 800 with a total exposure time of 1hr 44 minutes.

Moonrise at Knowlton Church Ruins

 Knowlton Church is a ruined Norman church built within a neolithic henge monument. Its a beautiful place a short distance from Wimborne. Supposedly one of the most haunted places in Dorset with stories of a galloping horse and rider as well as a praying nun kneeling within the church.

Andromeda Galaxy M31

It was a moonlit night so I decided to aim the scope in the other direction and chose this beautiful Galaxy. I always shoot deep sky at ISO 1600, normally around 240 seconds but on this night I thought I would change the ISO to 800 and extend the exposure time accordingly.

After a few test shot I decided 6 minutes (360 secs) brought the histogram peak to just past a third of the way along the base line.I normally expose like this at the start of the session.

As the sky gets darker the peak moves slightly back past the third point.






Reducing the ISO value reduces the sensitivity of the sensor and decreases the noise in the image.
As the scope was guiding accurately and the wind was minimal, tracking a star for 6 minutes was easy. After stacking 16 x  6 minute sub together with Flats, Darks and Bias frames there seemed to be more data in the image for stretching. This could be because my camera has been astro modified and has a light pollution filter but I will definitely be using ISO 800 again.