Between 2024-07-30 and 2024-08-07 central Arkansas experienced an unusual period of clear night skies. This happened to line up with a new moon, a fully visible Milky Way, and my desperate need to do some more astrophotography. I took full advantage of the opportunity, collecting around 50 hours of exposures, and making myself severely sleep deprived. This is a showcase of every object I was able to image.
Many of these are globular clusters with minimal exposure times. A couple of the nights I made sure to hit a number of Messier objects to make significant process on the Messier Challenge.
Nebulae
Eagle Nebula
"New England" area of the North America Nebula
Lagoon Nebula
Western Veil Nebula
Trifid Nebula
Omega Nebula
M52 and Bubble Nebula
Dumbbell Nebula
Ring Nebula
My favorite DSOs to image, I can't get enough of how fantastic they look. Each of these makes me want to spend more time imaging every single one.
Andromeda
I know I had some focus problems, and I believe it to be mainly caused by how I had to set up my telescope. I have to use a 0.8x reducer/flattener to get it in frame, but I can only get focus on my camera if I remove the tube extension. The telescope was only designed to do this when using the 0.6x reducer/flattener, so while I got the focal length I wanted, I did not get it completely sharp. There is also some distortion towards the edges, but this is the best I can do for now.
Globular Clusters
M15
M71 Angelfish Cluster
M11 Wild Duck Cluster
M4
M9
M19
M62
M80
M107
M2
M5
M18 Black Swan Cluster
M23
Finally, I captured a bunch of clusters. These were mainly to tick a box on my Messier catalog challenge, where I image every single Messier object. This marathon brought me from 25 to 38, only 72 more to go!
I will be the first to admit that I didn't put much effort into processing these, each got a maximum of 20 minutes, and I threw out the worst exposure for a total of 18 minutes of integrations. I don't have the best rig for imaging them anyway, and globular clusters aren't the most exciting DSOs for me.
