Season Finale

The end of another astrophotography season has come and passed. I managed to shoot two more targets on the last night of astronomical darkness of the 2012-2013 imaging season. The moon-lit astronomical darkness lasted for a whopping 14 minutes, the next few dark minutes are due in late August. The moon was at 70% full, but as most of the snow had melted the sky bacground brightness was pretty OK, it stayed level for about an hour on both side of proper midnight.


 

Season Finale
Originally uploaded by Mickut

The comet C/2011 L4 PANSTARRS has moved way up north. It was roughly half way up between Shedir and Caph (the two "right-most" stars in Cassiopeia's W-shape).

Due to it's northern position and the poor visibility north, I was able to image this only for half an hour in the waxing twilight before the comet was obscured by trees. With an hour or two more I might have been able to get a bit better stars on the background as the comet would have moved further during the stack.

LRGB 9x 1 minute per channel, double stacked (comet + stars).

Messier 13
Originally uploaded by Mickut

The very last deep sky image on the 2012-2013 astrophotography season was the Messie 13, a large globular cluster in Hercules. The image is stacked from six 5 minute exposures with LRGB filters. This does kill a bit of the interesting bits in the center, but brings out a lot of background galaxies.