Activity

This morning at about 4:45 AM I was able to see comet C/2023 P1 Nishimura from Root River Park by binocular 10×50. Comet was left from M44. See Stellarium.

The night of 8-15 was pretty good for observing and with the moon absent good for some astrophotography. I obtained a fairly good image of M17 the Omega Nebula in Sagittarius. I rotated the image below to approximate the orientation of many images online. At the eyepiece M17 was fairly easy to see at low power as a tilted, whitish rectangular…[Read more]

The bright core of the Andromeda galaxy (M31) with hints of its spiral disc appears in this live stacked image below. The dwarf satellite galaxy M32 is at the upper right. All foreground stars are from our galaxy, the Milky Way. Photo taken with an 80mm refractor on July 21, 151/5 sec. stacked frames using the ASI 183MC camera.

Thanks, John. When you get the chance, how can I submit future newsletters to the list? Please e-mail me.

I’m working on this. In the meantime, a very clumsy list of the newsletters has been restored here:

https://rochesterskies.org/club-newsletters/

Summer is here and so is the summer triangle and one of our favorite Messier objects, M 27 The Dumbbell Nebula. In photo below I used a 3.1 in refractor, the ASI 183MC camera with Orion skyglow filter and 64 5sec live stacked images. I was happy to see good color and the central white dwarf star.

Thanks Josef. Seems like it may be at magnitude 11 based on your links above for May 29. I also wanted to be sure I was pointing to the supernova in my picture so I did a blink comparison with an online photo from Sky and Telescope and show that below.

Great picture of the supernova 2023ixf! Looking at stars around like at Stellarium-web  supernova could be brighter than 12 mag. According to https://www.rochesterastronomy.org/sn2023/sn2023ixf.html it could be around 11 mag.
See also AAVSO chart and labeled stars or brightness reports.

The supernova (arrow) in the Pinwheel galaxy (M 101) is amazingly bright compared to the rest of the galaxy. I finally got a good look and fair image early this am (5-28).

Some sun pictures from last two days. Starblast 4.5 with Orion filter.

New supernova in M 101 now! see https://spaceweathergallery2.com/indiv_upload.php?upload_id=196139

The Pleiades (M 45) have just come into view on the SOHO C3 camera.

There is just now Kp 7.67 – storm, higher probability to see aurora, see https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/news/update-g4-storm-observed-sunday-april-23-2023

Thanks Josef. I had quite a bit of edge of fov brightness in the above and I did get separate images of each galaxy. I combined the latter two images in the picture of M81 and M82 below.

Great picture of the M81 and M82 with 80 mm (3.14 inch) aperture with total 16 minutes exposure. Thanks!

An April 12 image of M81 and M82 taken with the AT80ED and ASI 183MC camera. (Minor touch ups of the FITS file, saved as a PNG file and converted to a JPEG in Photoshop Elements). No darkfield taken. About 200 5 second images stacked.