A selection of four images I took with my two main telescopes on the evening of the 24th March 2021 with The Moon at 78% waxing gibbous phase to the South in the constellation of Leo.First up below is a main disk taken with TEC140 refractor.  I shot RGB through those filters on my ASI174M camera and I took the luminance through a 7nm Ha filter.  My field of view with the TEC140 and this camera is only half the disk and so I have to take sequence runs, one for the north and the other for the south and then combine them in Photoshop.  Lunar Disk I then moved on to use my C925 SCT telescope again using the ASI174M in RGB mode.  I did not capture a specific luminance channel this time and just used RGB and made a pseudo-luminance.  The weather conditions were too windy to get…

I have owned my Celestron C925 SCT telescope for many years but have only ever used it for visual purposes. I have always preferred the use of refractors for imaging. However, I have started to want to get much greater detail in my lunar images, having been bitten by the lunar imaging bug. I had some significant issues getting the C925 properly collimated, accurate enough for imaging purposes, a story I discuss here. After successfully collimating the scope these are my first two pictures taken with The Moon quite low down in the East with some slight mistiness. Mare Nectaris Region Above is the best 15% of 5000 frames in each of Red, Green and Blue. I collected the data with Sharpcap with ASI174M camera with Baader RGB filters. I created the master R,G,B files with PlanetarySystem Stacker and then used PixInsight and Photoshop to develop. Copernicus Above is Copernicus…

Easily visible with the naked eye, M45, The Pleiades – sometimes referred to as The Seven Sisters, is a well known and famous Open Cluster in the constellation of Taurus.  IT has been known since ancient times due to its prominence.  The cluster is located between 450-500 light years away and contains several hundreds member stars.  The cluster is quite young by astronomy standards and the cluster is moving through a cloud of gas which is easily visible in images and can been seen visually in a dark sky as well. M45 – THe Pleiades Technical Details Imaged from my backyard in Nottingham on Saturday 9th January 2021 when high to The South.  A meridian flip occurred half way through the data acquisition.  I used my Takahashi FSQ85 refractor and QHY268C One Shot Colour camera.  The image was created with quite a small data set of only 38 x 180s…