Super Blood Wolf Moon

Eclipse Update:  I had time to go through the rest of the images and put together this short video.  The images are about 10 minutes apart until the moon is fully eclipsed.

We had a perfect night to watch the Super Blood Wolf Moon last evening.  It was eerie watching the shadow creep slowly across the moon's surface getting darker and redder with each passing moment.  We shot many images, that I'll process and post later, but this is the fully eclipsed moon at around 10:45 PM (CST).  Special thanks to Allison for helping record data throughout the duration of the eclipse.  

Photo Details

January 20, 2019

AstroTech 65Q on VX Mount

NexImage10 Camera

Image Acquisition iCap2.4

Y800 Codec @ 3872x2764
900 Frames @ 3 frames/sec
Image Stacking in AutoStakkert
Wavelet Filtering in Registax
Final Adjustments in Photoshop

California Nebula - NGC 1499

I first visited this celestial "geographic" wonder back in 2015 and was thrilled to come back a few nights ago when the skies finally cleared and we had a deliciously cold night.  This nebula is absolutely massive.  If we could see it with the naked eye, it would span about 5 moon-widths from tip to tail and about 2 moon-widths across.  However, since it is an emission nebula (think gas cloud lit by a nearby star) the light is very diffused and difficult to observe even through a telescope.  This one takes a lot of patience and faith that you're on target.  Total exposure time for this image was 2 hours.  

Photo Details

January 6, 2019

AstroTech 65Q on VX Mount

SBIG STF-8300C Camera

Skyglow filter

40 subframes at 3 minutes/frame

Total Exposure Time = 2 Hours
Image Acquisition in CCDOps
Image Stacking in Deep Sky Tracker
Image Processing in PhotoShop