Last night it was “nacht van de nacht” (night of the night). Purpose of that is to dim as much lights as possible to get the “dark feeling” again when you’re out there. Dozens of activities were planned, observatories opened their doors and there was a “howmanystarscanyoucount” test to see if it actually had any more »
Originally planned for a high-resolution composite image I started to capture the Veil nebula this summer with my 10″ Ritchey Chretien. I never finished it though. Too many nice objects on the night sky but not too many clear nights. This is just a piece of the eastern part of this fantastic supernova remnant , more »
Yesterday, the moon was just 18 days old when the skies finally cleared up here. 4 Days after full moon, the light is still very bright and conditions are therefore not very good for fullcolor imaging. Narrowband filters however are very useful in those moonlit skies, especially Halpha filters. And since cloudless nights are not more »
We don’t see the Northern Lights or Aurora that often in The Netherlands, but solar activity is picking up rapidly. The last time I saw aurora’s over here is back in 2003, when the earth was attacked by a gigantic solar storm. That’s when we (with gf Ellen) took these pictures. On spaceweather.com there are more »
The Seven Sisters, Pleiades or Messier 45 has several meanings for different cultures. Maybe because they are visible to the naked eye. Long exposures reveal a blue reflected dust cloud. It’s an easy target for amateur astronomers an therefore often one of their first attempts in astrophotography. And if you expose long enough the picture more »
Some extensive PS techniques are used here! Because of the monochrome camera I had to use a LRGB filter set. That means a time-consuming process! And it did look so easy in Johannes’s tutorial….. I had some trouble removing the stars to be able to display the comet in a long exposure background image and more »
Although named a nebula, the Andromeda nebula is in fact a galaxy. Visible to the naked eye, but it’s still hard to get those subtle, faint outer regions captured. Again, Holland is not the ideal place to be at to get those “pretty images from abroad”, but we happen to live here….. Therefore I’m quite more »
Some very clear nights passed our skies for the last couple of days, giving me the opportunity to capture 103P/Hartley 2, a comet passing by at this very moment. But what to do? Capturing night after night a great diversity of objects, giving me less time to process them. So here you go! A single more »
It took me 12.5 hours of imaging. Some data collected in 2009 and some in September 2010. This nice colorful composite is the result of using 5 nm. narrowband SII (red), Halpha (green) and OIII (blue) filters from Astrodon. The same palet is often used by the Hubble Space Telescope to filter Sulfur, Hydrogen, and more »
