I am pleased to announce that Van Macatee’s image of Messier 16, the Eagle Nebula, has been selected as the Charlie Elliott Astronomy September Image of the Month!  Van used a modified Canon T3i, an Explore Scientific ED80, and an Orion Sirius mount.  Van used BackyardEOS to capture the image data and PixInsight for post-processing.  Van has been a member for about a year and a half and is currently serving as Secretary for Charlie Elliott Astronomy.  Nice work, Van!

We reached out to the community in offering Comet watch events at Lake Varner in covington on Saturday and Sunday. The events were announced in 5 local news papers. Saturday evening was clouded out but on Sunday there were some clear skies in the west. However, despite a number of binos scanning the sky and the horizon we were not able to locate the Comet through the Atlanta air polution. Despite this I kept shooting images, a total of 48. And guess what? My camera caught the comet on about 9 images, so the session was not a complete waste. Click here for a link to the animation of the comet setting and click the image for a larger version.