Smoke Clears

Nearly Perfect Conditions

September 2nd was the first night in several weeks without clouds, wildfire smoke, or a bright Moon. It was nice to see dark sky between stars instead of milky whiteness illuminated by moonlight. In addition, the 63 degree temperature was pleasant and wind was calm. Total perfection was too much to hope for, however. Four of my five light polluting neighbors had miraculously turned off all their troublesome spotlights. Only one remaining neighbor, the one next door, left one backyard spotlight on. Even though this annoying spotlight pointed away from my Seestar telescope, it lit almost the entire back of the neighbor's house. The glow of this reflected light ruined sky darkness toward the southern horizon where I had hoped to get images in the constellation Sagittarius.

My first target was a closely spaced galaxy group called Stephan's Quintet located near spiral galaxy NGC7331 in Pegasus. Stephan's Quintet turned out to be too small to show up well in Seestar's image scale, so I tried to center on larger NGC7331 instead and produced the first image below with a 20-minute exposure.

I should have taken more time to move NGC7331to the left because I might have captured tiny Stephan's Quintet in the same field of view. Nevertheless, there are at least six tiny dim fuzzy galaxies in the same image with NGC7331 which you can see labeled in the next image. (Click on the image to enlarge details.)

Next, I moved to the Helix Nebula, NGC7293, in Aquarius. This colorful planetary nebula showed up nicely in a 20-minute exposure with Seestar's nebular filter engaged. The colors seem kind of dull, however.

At this point Sagittarius was beginning to dip closer to the horizon, so I quickly tried to image some targets there. First, I took a 5-minute exposure of open star cluster M18 whose unimpressive portrait fills the next image's center. 

I also found open cluster M25 to be unspectacular as you can see in the next 5-minute exposure.

The previous two images required special processing to remove a glow in one corner coming from the spotlight reflection on my neighbor's house. With Sagittarius sinking I tried one more target, globular cluster M22. M22 looked nice in the following 10-minute exposure.

It was time to swing north from Sagittarius to Andromeda which had now risen high enough to put giant galaxy M31 in a good position for imaging. Since M31 is too large to fit entirely within Seestar's limited field of view, I hoped to create a mosaic by assembling three neighboring galaxy sections together into one complete image. Next are three separate 20-minute exposures moving across the galaxy in steps.

Unfortunately, Photoshop could not successfully merge all three previous images. Apparently, there was too much image rotation during the hour long period while exposures were taken. Also, inexplicably, the color of the first image in the series above did not match colors of the next two. I had partial success, however. Photoshop did manage to patch together the second pair of sections to produce the following nice two-panel mosaic.

M31's dark dust lanes show nicely in the previous mosaic. The two companion galaxies M110 (top) and bright compact M32 near the right edge also fit within the field of view.

At this point, more than four hours beyond my normal bedtime, fatigue was increasing. My final target was the Western Veil Nebula, NGC6960, in Cygnus. This segment of the larger Veil Nebula supernova remnant showed up well in the following 20-minute exposure made with the nebular filter engaged.

Now I ran out of gas! I quit imaging at 2:30 am and staggered off to bed. In the future I'd like to capture more separate pieces of the Veil Nebula. I'm also thinking of taking Seestar images of all objects in the Messier Catalog.