After a couple rainy weeks I got 2 clear nights which I spent imaging the IC1396 region in Cepheus with the famous Elephant Trunk nebula. The nights are getting shorter and at my latitude we’ve lost astronomical darkness now for a while. Still plenty of good time to image though.

This image is the result of 7.5 hours of integration time. It needs some more work, I’d like to double the exposure time and add RGB stars. I don’t always bother with RGB stars but seeing the star Erakis (top right of the image) in a white color due to the narrowband filter is definitely not cool.

With summer upon us I hope to capture some of those lower objects too (such as the Lagoon nebula) but let’s see what’s possible.

The bright white star in the lower middle of this image is HD162826 located in Hercules. There’s a special story behind this star, which looks like just another random star in a sea of trillions with some faint galaxies deep in the noisy background. HD162826 is believed to be a sibling of our own sun born in the same stellar nursery and drifted apart through time.

This discovery was made in 2014 based on the composition, age, orbit and backwards tracking of the star. For now there are no known exoplanets around this sun but who knows what we might find in the future. HD162826 is now 110 light-years away from us.

This galaxy, NGC3718 is in my opinion one of the prettiest galaxies in Ursa Major.

I tried imaging this one last year under a near full moon but I wasn’t really satisfied with the result. Here is another 13 hours under new moon conditions. Much better!

This image makes me appreciate my 130 PDS telescope. I keep thinking about upgrading to something bigger and better but sometimes I wonder if I should just continue modding the scope a bit to fix the focuser issues and replace the metal tube with a carbon one.

I do have some new gear coming, a 135 mm Samyang lens for some widefield imaging. Hope to test it soon.

We’re deep into galaxy season now and by 3 AM the summer triangle is already visible. Conditions are typical for April, lots of high clouds and some pockets of clear sky mixed with rainy days.

I’ve decided to add another item to my collection, the Samyang 135 mm lens. This is a true classic among astrophotographers and I’m looking forward to use it. I should get it on time to start imaging some targets in Cepheus hopefully.

At the same time I’m also wondering about finally getting a true galaxy scope. I’ve been thinking for years about this and for a moment I considered getting a proper refractor or even a C8 but in the end I might settle for a bigger newtonian. It comes with a lot of babysitting and tweaking, but I don’t think you can beat the aperture & speed for the price of a newt. We’ll see, it’s something for next year.

In the meantime, my 130 pds is still going strong. Here’s is the Cocoon galaxy, about 5 hours of data.

I find one of the most striking features to be the star formation regions withing the stellar stream that connects these two interacting galaxies. It’s mind boggling that we can see this bridge of light between two galaxies located 25 million light-years away.

Last year I had a quick look at M3, one of the best looking globular clusters in the Northern Hemisphere. I knew i had to revisit and here’s the result of about 6 hours of integration time.

These balls of light are fascinating. They’re extremely old, have all types of exotic stars in it and might be the remnants of older galaxies.

Globular clusters reveal a lot of interesting stars too. M3 in particular has a very large population of RR Lyrae stars, these are variable stars with very visible pulsation periods.

The video below is a compilation of multiple 1 hour stacks. It still needs some work but you can see multiple stars appearing, disappearing and even changing color due to their variable nature.

Another set of clear nights under very pleasant temperatures for the time of the year.

I managed to get +/- 12 hours on two targets. The first one is the interacting pair of galaxies NGC 4656 & NGC 4631. The second one is the very faint NGC 4236 – of the bigger galaxies (in angular size) in the Northern Hemisphere, but extremely faint so it’s often overlooked.

I’m very happy with both images as they fit nice in the field of view of my scope and even if I’m still not perfectly collimated, the end result is just fine.

Clouds are back now and the moon is up, so it’s time for a little break I guess.

I had a couple clear nights in a row but the weather behaved very unpredictable with a mixture of high and low clouds coming and going and some fogg to top it off.

Over three nights I struggled with collimation and by the time I had it right my subs got plagued by windy conditions. In the end I managed to get about 5 hours on the Leo Triplet and I was really surprised by how well it came out. This shows again it’s always worth setting up, worst case you learn something about the sky conditions.

It’s getting a bit warmer now so let’s see what that means for imaging conditions in the next few weeks.

I like watching stars so here’s a little journey to the brightest stars using the OBAFGKM spectrum.

From Alnitak (the hottest and bluest) to Betelgeuse (the coolest and orangest).

First galaxy of 2025. I’ve always struggled with this one. The challenges are to bring out the detail of the core, getting some structure in the outer arms and battling the bright stars outside of the frame. But I really like the final result.

I also think I have some collimation issues but I hope to solve these in the next few clear nights under the full moon.

The last few weeks I’ve been pondering about getting another scope with more focal length but in the end I’ve decided to stick with my 5 inch newt for now. I do plan to perform some upgrades, so I’m looking for a better focuser and I might even replace the full metal tube with some carbon material.

This should be an interesting project, let’s hope I don’t break the scope in the process.

In the meantime, the SQA55 did some work on the Orion Nebula. This has been an amazing purchase and now it will get some well deserved rest.