Two weeks before the moon will eclipse the sun, the moon was partially eclipsed by the Earth’s shadow
I had to turn around, when the road to my observing location was blocked, then I rushed to another spot, to find clouds on the horizon blocking the view for quite a while. But finally the still eclipsed moon emerged from the clouds and I was able to take some quick shots.
I used my 80mm refractor and a 300mm lens for the images.
Read MoreEven though we are heading for a possibly deep and long solar minimum, a huge sunspot is visible on the sun right now.
Jupiter gets lower and lower each night, while Saturn is nearing Opposition.
Saturn, Astro-Physics 127mm f/8 refractor, Televue 3x Barlow, QHY5L-IIc, 60% of 2259 frames.
Processed with Autostakkert (Stacking) , Registax (Wavelet Sharpening), Fitswork (de-noise and iterative Gauss sharpenging) and Photoshop (Color and Gamma adjustment).
Due to a cold front that just had passed earlier today, the air was quite unstable. Therefore today’s shots turned out quite unsharp.
Astro-Physics 127mm f/8, 2x Vixen Barlow, QHY5L-IIc camera. Read More
Last night at 1:15 A.M. I decided, that I cannot let this beautifully clear night pass without some astrophotography. I drove up to Farnach, which is only 7.5km away, but provides some nice dark skies above the brightly lit Rhine Valley.
I set up the Vixen Polarie and took pictures using 20mm, 85mm and 300mm lenses.
The summer milky way and the multitude of nebula and clusters hidden in it, never cease to impress me. When I went to bed some hours later, dawn was already breaking. Read More
Only minutes before I started my first video, apparently an asteroid slammed into Jupiter, as far as I can see, no trace of damage can be seen on my pictures.
Today the Great Red Spot was prominently visible:
Supernova 2017eaw, discovered by Patrick Wiggins is located in the so-called fireworks galaxy. The supernova is the tenth supernova in this specific galaxy to be recorded during the last 100 years.
This is the third supernova discovered by Patrick Wiggins, overall he searched 1051 nights and took about 500000 images of galaxies for his finds.
7x60s at f/4 using ISO 1600. Nikon AF-S Nikkor 300mm 1:4E PF ED, Nikon D750, ISO 1600, SkyWatcher StarAdventurer, crop
Software used: Autostakkert 3.0, Registax, Fitswork. This version is a bit softer, shows much less artifacts but still more detail I think.
I also updated the animation with reprocessed frames Read More
Yesterday evening I was able to use the stable seeing shortly after sunset for some images of the moon:
