Quick Pics

Spur of the Moment Images

As I've mentioned before, one of the best things about the Seestar 50 is how quickly it can be carried outside and set up for imaging. On March 29th the sky was unexpectedly clear and all my neighbors' lights were off. I made a spur of the moment decision to hop outside and get some pictures. The first target was galaxy M64 in the constellation Coma Berenices. This galaxy is called the "Black Eye Galaxy" because a dark dust lane is prominent near the galactic center. After some initial focusing difficulty I was able to capture M64 in the following 40-minute exposure.

Many of my Seestar galaxy images don't seem to show much improvement after the first 20 or 30 minutes of exposure. The 40-minute exposure of M64 above worked fairly well for my suburban sky conditions. An even shorter 20-minute exposure did a good job on the "Leo Triple" shown next below. These three galaxies happened to be well positioned to fit within Seestar's rectangular field of view.

Edge-on galaxy NGC 3628 is at top left, spiral galaxy M65 is on the right edge, and spiral galaxy M66 is at bottom center.

Continuing with relatively short exposures, I moved next to globular cluster M3 in the constellation Canes Venatici. This globular showed well in the following 15-minute exposure.

Galaxies in the Coma Galaxy Cluster were very dim and small. They were not showing up well in my next attempt, so I decided to delete the image I had been accumulating and move to another target. Giant globular cluster M13 was an obvious choice nearby. Unfortunately, Seestar's battery was beginning to run low, so I did the shortest exposure of the night - a 12-minute exposure of M13 shown next.

With battery level well below 20 percent I was too tired to dig out an extension cord for real time recharging. So I shut down and quit for the night.

About two weeks later, on April 15th, another opportunity for quick imaging arose. The Sun was covered with a bunch of modest sunspots. It only took about 15 minutes to set up, grab a 90-second video, and bring the telescope inside again. There were at least 22 sunspot umbras, large and small, spread across the Sun this day which you can see on the imperfect image below. Enlarging the image by clicking on it will help in the sunspot count.

In the absence of a permanent observatory the Seestar is hard to beat for convenience and ease of use!