The maximum of the C / 2018 Y1 (Iwamoto) comet is approaching at a rapid pace, and with the squirrel, the skies opened just now that the moon is not yet ruining everything. I exposed the comet for well over a few hours, and compiled the pictures below. The comet is now moving really fast, I followed the movement of the comet on a tripod and in the two minute exposures the stars became clear streaks. The comet is stacked separately in the first image and is connected to the stars depicted at the beginning of the series. The second image is a false color image made of a stacked image, according ...

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While waiting for the Iwamoto comet to rise, I took a rap from a local light pollution disturbance. For the first time, I tried to take a color picture of the moon with a black-and-white camera, and a bit of a soap arose when the color channels didn’t want to hit anywhere due to varying atmospheric vibrations. The end result was good, but the handling was pretty forcible.

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It was very cold outside, so before going to work I had to quickly shoot the moon with a remote tube while sitting comfortably in the warm :-). 3x10s RGB.

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This cosmic seahorse is an interstellar cloud of dust that is so dense that it covers all the stars behind it. Dealing with such dark objects is always very challenging, as it is in practice an attempt to separate a dark cloud from a black background anyway. The job is not made any easier by the very dim clouds of dust that cover practically the entire field of view. But the picture went well and I am quite happy with that. For this image, I exposed the area less than ten hours during November-December before snowfall.

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The elephant's snout IC1396A is one of the most iconic objects in the sky. Intense radiation from a nearby star has carved a cavity in the gas cloud itself, but this denser formation still persists against the radiant pressure. Intense radiation also causes the gas to ionize and continue to irradiate at wavelengths characteristic of different elements, which we can then describe from here on earth with suitable filters. Data for this image were filmed on five nights in October-November. There were plenty of coils available in October with more or less full hearings, so I only collected mor...

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M31, The Great Andromeda Galaxy, or more familiarly “Antsa”. The king of the northern sky has many names. My own star photography spark can be said to have struck 7.5 years ago when I tried to make a galaxy visible with a SLR camera. As skills and equipment evolve, the Andromeda Galaxy has come back again and again every couple of years. There has been a trip from a fairly familiar tripod to the Leppävaara light pollution observatory in Kirkkonummi. I photographed the subject with a 10-centimeter lens telescope for six nights during September-October for a total of 14 hours. The image, photogr...

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The weather eased on the cottage trip, and the partial eclipse was handsome. No sunspots were visible.

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I really couldn't wait for the kind of crowd rush to fill up the Malminkartano filling hill. I myself thought I was on time when I arrived half an hour before the moon rose, but there were already several dozen people present and adding your hood to the scene with a constant feed. The warm summer evenings, Friday, the holiday season and the news coverage of the event had mobilized people in large numbers. During the evening, several hundred people crammed into the hill, which means that the mood was like in any folk festival. The moon let itself wait behind the cloud board, the first decen...

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Last night we watched the sunset near the Road Observatories. Visibility to the horizon was almost unobstructed except for the cloud layer below and the island of La Palma that glanced from there. After sunset, it was the turn of the moon a couple of hours later, which fell exactly behind La Palma. Exactly when you look, then on the right side of the moon there is a small lump on the horizon, which is a common Nordic NOT telescope. The distance between the observation site and the telescope is more than 142 kilometers! Other observation equipment from the Roque de los Muchachos area is also vi...

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On the last night of the Tenerife shooting tour, we parked ourselves near the Tenerife observatories to watch the sunset. Our altitude was about 2280 meters above sea level, and visibility to the horizon was limited only by the cloud ferry significantly below. As the sun set, Mercury clearly stood out of the cloudy sky with the naked eye. When, according to the star map, Mercury reached the horizon, it was still well above the cloud board. Eventually, it disappeared behind a distant cloud board while being about 55 minutes of arc below the horizon. In the last seconds, I was able to describe a...

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Another of the main targets of my trip to Tenerife was this IC 4592, known as the dim blue horse head. It is located in the vicinity of the colorful fog areas of Antares just above Scorpio, so it often gets a little less attention from photographers. However, the subject is quite wide, my image field is about eight degrees in diameter, roughly the width of an outstretched palm. The dark skies of the Road National Park came in handy, and in less than three hours of exposure, those dark clouds of dust came out quite nicely!

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The first nights on a photo tour of Tenerife were photographed from the roof terrace of our accommodation. In the morning the orbit shone high, and I took this picture of the barrel mist. The light only accumulated for 40 minutes before the only obstacle on the terrace, the lamp post, began to hit the picture. Nevertheless, the end result was quite wonderful!

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Foxes are cunning creatures. This individual is hiding in the dark mists of Sagittarius constellation, can you find it? The star photography holiday to Tenerife was really successful, during the week we were able to shoot almost every night so the material is stored in many constellations. I photographed this dark fox from our accommodation in the village of Vilaflor, the cabin had a large sun terrace where the filming and lounging on the sun lounger went well. Vilaflor is reasonably high at an altitude of 1,500 meters, so most nights the clouds covered the coast, hiding much of the urban ligh...

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When the full moon shines, the number of possible destinations is quite small, especially when the narrow-band destinations of the Milky Way no longer want to be seen behind the trees at this time of year. However, it’s already so long in the spring that Hercules rises slowly during the morning, so despite the short 410mm focal length, I ended up filming this classic subject. A total of just over four hours of LRGB exposures were captured on Friday and Saturday nights (Figures 1/3). I also dropped the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram from the constellation, although the small size of the tube limit...

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M63 "Sunflower galaxy" and tidal tails Spring winter is a challenging time for a star photographer focusing on extensive mists. The Milky Way targets sink to their lands early in the evening, so the well-served targets are mostly galaxies that don’t get their rights in the short term. Thinking about the next subject, I remembered a lecture a year ago at a CEDIC conference in Austria about the dim tidal tails around many galaxies. They were born in ancient encounters of galaxies, when their mutual gravity has so-called messed up the pack, i.e. thrown a wild number of stars out of the galaxy'...

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Stellar photography once again offered its best, as piling up this image was quite a struggle. The low location near Orion’s Rigel meant the site was visible above the tree line for only a few hours at night. Snowy winters were also not a very ideal starting point for photographing such a dim subject. In addition, I still got a bunch of problems with flat images and the starting point for image processing was quite a bit of color fireworks. Well, luckily they were overcome with hard work, which also makes this hobby quite rewarding. The 9.5h exposures taken for the picture had to be taken alre...

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Returning from a business trip in Milan, I (of course) chose a seat from the plane on the sunset side. As we approached the Alps in the direction of the sun, an eye-catching stack of lenticularis was visible in an otherwise empty sky, so the next step was to dig the camera out of the backpack. There is also a glide of apparently emerging clouds next to it. However, for whatever reason, it was not possible to stay to observe the situation.

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#bongaalinnunrata This year, due to a commute, it wasn’t until Saturday that I got to rumble towards Täallikallio for a DS meeting. The weather forecasts looked good, so I suddenly improvised from home with the iOptron's small tripod, jitter and 135mm lens with spatulas. After ten minutes of driving, I still had to turn back to pick up a small dovetail rail to get the camera attached to my tripod. This was worthwhile, as the stars of the Star Rock looked their best during the night. When I arrived, the lectures were in full swing and the observation deck was full the night before the pedes...

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Once we were in Yellowstone by the dark skies, with the last forces before handing me over to fatigue, I photographed a little more of the Milky Way. The Milky Way has been exposed on a tracking stand for twenty minutes, and the foreground is attached to the image from a single exposure. The lights of the property illuminated a bit of nearby trees, otherwise it was really dark. Even when there wouldn’t have been that mountain in front blocking the view even further south!

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On the eclipse voyage, the journey continued immediately after the eclipse toward Yellowstone. We stayed in a small cottage right on the east edge of Yellowstone. The location was quite secluded and the sky was dark with the Milky Way shining bright. Once the tripod was included in the trip for blackouts, I tuned the equipment to photo mode in the property's parking lot. Already the first frames caused confusion, as the sub-exposures did not have any extra color from the background sky, and they looked almost ready-made images already directly on the camera screen. Accustomed to the comput...

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