Rick Evans Deep Sky Imaging: January 2023

Sunday, January 29, 2023

Orion Season Targets + Comet

I've been looking forward to the appearance of comet C2022E3 ZTF's appearance in the northern sky near Ursa Minor. The late January Maryland weather has been iffy at best with mostly cloudy weather forecasts. Fortunately, on 1/27 the skies cleared despite a partly cloudy forecast and around 10:30 PM EST the comet was just high enough and clear of a neighbor's north blocking tree to catch the image below. Some light pollution from a nearby, poorly shielded street lamp managed to invade an otherwise dark sky background. Several to be revisited Orion Season DSOs also follow.

Comet C/2022E3ZTF (1/27/2023)

NGC1579 Northern Trifid Nebula

NGC2264

M1-Crab Nebula

IC 410

IC 405 Flaming Star Nebula

Sunday, January 1, 2023

Happy 2023 from the Terrace

The condo association gave me an early Christmas gift cutting down the sky obscuring dying tree outside my terrace. Trees across the way still block my light polluted skies. Nonetheless, I now have a descent strip of sky between 20 and 45 degrees altitude to work with during Orion season. I'll still make trips to my favorite darkish site in Harvard, MA but this will cut down on my carbon footprint as well as freezing toes during winter months. An additional benefit is access to WiFi allows me to monitor the scope using Chrome remote desktop. I'm pleasantly surprised with NGC2359 acquired with 15s subs which I first imaged with 60s subs last April from the McCoy's landing darkish site. I'll definitely revisit NGC2359 between now and April from the terrace.

The experiment with finder only All Star Polar Alignment has worked better than expected. Typically, I have only needed the two alignment stars plus two calibration stars after rough alignment with Polaris which is not visible from my south facing terrace. Typically less than 2 degrees of azimuth and less than 1 degree of altitude correction have been needed to correct for axis deviation from polar alignment. Thus far the Celestron AVX GoTo puts targets in the NightOwl field of view (FOV). To center faint targets I just use Precise Goto which puts a bright star in the field which when centered in the FOV and centers the target with an offset. Below are targets acquired on 12/27/2022 using 60x15s or 120x15s exposures. Update: M42 reprocessed for reduced contrast and saturation.