Ecliptic Voyage

During the night of May 26th, 2021, I didn't think I was going to be able to get a good angle on the full moon that was out since it wasn't supposed to get high enough to clear the tree line in my backyard. I decided to image a few other things instead. A little later in the night, I went outside to make sure the telescope wasn't going to hit the tripod legs and found that the moon was beaming its light through a hole in the trees, glaring right at the telescope. So I slewed the telescope to point to the moon and managed to take photos for about five minutes before the moon began to creep back behind the trees. The Moon: May 26th, 2021 The Moon peeking through the trees

It is almost that time of the year when the summer nebulae (plural of nebula) are high enough in the night sky for imaging, while some can even be seen visually. In the past month I have been spending most of my time imaging the Pinwheel Galaxy (M101) so I would have enough data to pull out some of the faint details against the background of light pollution. I topped off M101 last night leaving me with twelve hours of exposure data. At the end of the night I decided to take some samples of different nebulae rising in the eastern sky just to share. Each image is only a single five minute exposure and I did some very basic histogram stretching to make some of the gaseous structures noticeable. There are a ton of excellent and colorful nebulous targets in the summer. Night time on Earth is beginning to face inward toward the Milky Way more and there is a lot to see. I have a great eastern view of many of these objects and there are even more that rise in the South (that unfortunately tree...