Looking North

Another Beautiful Night

A waxing crescent Moon graced the early evening sky on March 13th. I was curious to see if my Seestar telescope could capture earthshine on the Moon. It did. After raising gain high enough, the lit crescent was overexposed while dim earthshine appeared on the rest of the Moon as you can see in the single snapshot below.

I returned gain to a default value and recorded a 90-second AVI video of the crescent. Then I stacked and wavelet sharpened the best 100 video frames from the approximately 1,000-frame video to produce the following image of the properly exposed crescent.

Although it was interesting to see how well Seestar performed with lunar imaging, image quality was far below what I can achieve with larger telescopes.

It was then time to turn the telescope north and try long exposures of two galaxies. Face-on spiral galaxy M101 in Ursa Major is shown in the next image, a 90-minute exposure.

It was disappointing to see how even a 90-minute exposure was insufficient to raise faint details above background noise. Maybe my somewhat light polluted suburban sky is just too bright.

Then I moved to the other side of the Big Dipper's handle to find galaxy M106 in the constellation Canes Venatici. In the 60-minute exposure that follows a faint halo extending on either side of the brighter swirling center is barely visible above background noise.

In the same field of view as M106 above you can see a 13th magnitude galaxy, NGC4248, in the upper left corner.

Tonight's last target was globular Cluster M5 in the constellation Serpens. This globular showed up very well in the 15-minute exposure shown below.

March 13th was an unusually fine night with all five light polluting neighbor spotlights miraculously off.