fealeybob14

Of course, the Dean Johnson Memorial Observation Field!
Bob

Oh my. I should have asked where DJMOF is at Tuesday’s meeting. Can someone tell me. I cannot attend until after 6 pm.
Thanks

I might have the wrong key Duane. I’ll have to check with John A. as I got it from him at our meeting on Tues.

Hi all. I went to Root River Park on 5/14 to observe and photograph galaxies. Unfortunately, the key I had did not fit the lock box on the parking lot light!! So I went home to enjoy the ‘Realm of Galaxies’. I’ll post a photo in a bit.

On 2/24/2026 Jupiter was observed and photographed. Stellarium indicated the Red Spot would be visible. I just had to get out to a picture (shown below). A 10 in. SCT was used and a composite image was made.

Observing tonight with the 10 inch Meade SCT. Saturn and its moons was the target.  While the eyepiece appearance can nicely reveal the planet and moons together, imaging often means exposing the planet and moons separately and combining them when processing the final image as below.

The moons (I think) left to right, are Rhea, Tethys,…[Read more]

A smaller version with better dark frame subtraction:

Comet C/2025 A6 Lemmon is very photogenic.  I used my 6 in Quattro reflector last night for the image below as the comet was near the star SAO 83647 in Boötes.

Truly beautiful pics Mike.  Took another one last night at Keller.  Not as elegant as Mike’s but was fun to find and capture.

Thanks Dwayne. I was out from 11 pm to midnight trying to photograph with my cell phone attached to my refractor. Orion was coming up over the trees in East and just then I saw a meteor streak by. Didn’t stay as I was going in at the time.

Jeff and I were at Keller WMA last night to observe Comet Lemmon.  Jeff obtained beautiful images with his telephoto lens camera. (Hope he posts some here!)

I had my refractor/camera setup (as in my previous post) and located the comet near the star SAO 63911 in CVn.  Image below is a stack of 12 frames each 5 seconds long.

The RAC StarB’Q 2025 was held at the newly dedicated Dean Johnson Memorial Observing Field on August 22-23 at Jerome Taubel’s farm.  Many RAC members came and skies were cooperative. The zenith dark sky recording (NELM=6.3) an image of M31, M32 and M110 taken during the night of 8/23/2025 are shown below.  It was a glorious night for sure!

Saturn with Titan’s shadow about 3 am, 8-3-2025.  Again skies were hazy, humid with less than ideal seeing.  I used a 10 inch SCT and a short video processed with Registax6.

Lovely images Duane! TcorBor refuses to budge from mag 9 to mag 10 according to SpaceWeather.com. A new forecast suggest either Nov 10th 2025 or Jun 25th 2026 for the star to nova. I missed both Eagle Bluff and Frontenac but was out observing in my backyard.

Just wondering if other members got out to see Titan’s shadow on Saturn. Perhaps Josef?

It seems the Stellarium online view of the event today doesn’t show Titan’s shadow on Saturn’s disc (see Forum topic area on home page). I have Stellarium on my laptop and the shadow does appear.
For the image above seeing conditions were not the best with very high humidity and atmospheric turbulence and I went to bed thinking I did not see the…[Read more]