My Wife's New Blog

My wife just started a new blog about her favorite hobby, making cards. This is something she loves and does very well. It takes lots of talent and patience to be good at, along with having an eye for composition and color. One last attribute that is quite valuable is being a good photographer. At last we will all be able to see the products of hours of time and effort. Her blog can be found at:
http://lisalynncard.blogspot.com/

Check it out!

Crescent Nebula NGC 6888 Enhanced

I took the image below and boosted the information in the picture well above realism to make it easier to see all of the extra nebulosity that can be found around the Crescent Nebula itself. There are sure lots of stars, but there is certainly more in this image to see.

Crescent Nebula NGC 6888

We were very lucky to have a nice clear night to image, so I headed to my friend's Sheldon's house to image through a five inch Apo refractor from Explore Scientific owned by our good friend Scott Roberts. Sheldon and I thought that this nebula would be a good object to image with this instrument and an SBIG ST10 camera. We took seventy minutes of red and green and only thirty minutes of blue because of the mount stopping after the third sub in blue. The image was processed by Sean Walker, our friend who is one of the best people in the art of astro image processing. This collaboration has created this image. It again demonstrates how beautiful the night sky is.

Messier 81 and 82

Two of the most interesting galaxies are found in Ursa Major, better known as the constellation containing the Big Dipper. This image of these two bright galaxies was made with an 8" f/3.68 Faworski Astrograph mounted on a Paramount 1100S with a ST10XE w/CFW8. The moon was still up when my friend Sheldon and I started this image. As normal, this is the sum of a number of sub exposures that are put together in post processing. The final processing was done by our friend Sean Walker who is one of the best. There are a number of smaller, fainter galaxies visible in the image if you look closely.

M88

This is my first astro image in some time taken with Sheldon's 10 inch telescope. I'm still recovering from the removal of a renal cancer tumor in my spine which also had to be fused together with a metal clamp. It was the most difficult of my three surgeries, but once everything is done, I should be able to walk with less pain.
The taking of this image sure helps the healing process and would not be possible without the help of my friend Sheldon. Thanks also to Sean for a great job processing the image.
With everything that has happened in the past months, seeing this galaxy reminds me just how small we are in the whole universe.

Jasmine

Trevor's cat, Jasmine, is the alpha female cat in our house. She can be incredibly cute one minute and a sneak thief the next. Jazzy, as we call her, has the softest fur of all of our cats.

Snow Trees

This winter was not as bad as last year and produced beautiful scenes after a big storm. It sure looked nice until you had to go out and shovel it.

Casio and the sun

Our only male cat Casio loves to follow patches of sunlight that come through the windows in the family room. The sunlight makes his fur look a little different, but you can tell from his look that he loves the warmth of the sun. Taken at 24mm and F/2.0 with the Leica lens of the LX3.

October Galaxy

This is a faint galaxy with a strange name, IC342. It was taken the evening of October 20th, 2008 in one of my friend Sheldon's observatories in NW Illinois using an eight inch newtonian reflector and an SBIG ST10 CCD camera. The galaxy is in the constellation Camelopardalis, but is very near my wife's star in the constellation Cassiopeia. Thanks go to Sean Walker for the wonderful processing of the image files.

NGC7635 Bubble Nebula

This image was taken last Friday night at my friend Sheldon's home in Illinois. Taken with the 8" f/3.68 Faworski Astrograph and an SBIG ST8, it is a photograph of the Bubble Nebula. One look at the shape indicates its name.