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.