The constellation Virgo is home to the Virgo galaxy cluster, the largest in our vicinity (if you count millions of lightyears as vicinity). The image above are individual crops from an image taken with a 60mm refractor telescope.
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I used the 127mm f/8 refractor together with a Nikon TC20EIII teleconverter on the Nikon D750, resulting in a focal length of about 2m. The picture is a combination of 24 exposures of 1/20s. First I aligned the pictures using PIPP to be able to stack them in AutoStakkert 3. Sharpening was done in Registax 6. In Photoshop I followed Dylan O’Donnell’s process for HDR moon images by combining the stack with a single 20s exposure using a layer mask in Photoshop, some final touches were added in Lightroom.
After a few very quiet months the sunspot AR2736 grew to a considerable size and shows quite a bit of detail in this close-up image. The image was taken on 22.03.2019.
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Yesterday I took out the 200mm reflector in a very cold wind to take some close-up images of the moon. I am quite happy to have captured the rille in the alpine valley quite distinctly.
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After a long spell of clouds, snow and rain, clear skies have returned. Apart from the streak artefacts in the background I like this image a lot, this is my first properly focused image with the Baader h-alpha filter.
When my wife noticed the beautiful thin crescent moon in a gap in the clouds I rushed to the deck on our roof, to take a picture of the conjunction of the Moon and Jupiter. At first I went bare-footed, but after a few seconds I couldn’t stand the snow under my bare soles, and put on some slippers. But I was still only wearing my sleeping attire, boxer shorts and a worn-out T-shirt. Temperature was -5°C.
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On December 26th we were invited to christmas dinner at my sisters place. I brought the Vixen Polarie, the Takahashi FS-60CB and the Nikon D750 to do some astrophotgraphy during the evening.
The image above records some faint nebulosity across central Orion. From the horsehead nebula B33 silhouetted against IC434 to the flame nebula NGC 2024. In the upper left, the M78 nebula with its surrounding NGC objects is also visible. In the corner a hint of Barnards loops is discernible
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