The Dutch Observatory

After a rainy evening on Monday, we went to Charlie Elliott’s Dove Fields.  This place has a 1.5 degree horizon and is an ideal place for watching the Comet.  We had 6 CE members showing up.  First we located the moon and from there it was a snap to find the comet.  Everyone saw it through binos and even through Marilyn Edwards Dob.  A great evening.  Here my image of tonight and an animation of the moon and the comet setting in the west. Click the image for the larger version and the animation.

Saturday evening when trying to image for the first time a deep sky object with my DMK, I ran out of power on my laptop.  Sunday evening I gave it another try.  Here an unguided image of NGC7662, a planetary nebula in Andromeda, also called the Blue Snowball.  The nebula is 2200 light years away and is 28×32 arc seconds in size and has a magnitude of 8.3.   Last year I did the same object with my Canon.  The image is a composite of LRGB images with each filter 25 frames of 23 seconds each for a total exposure time of approx. 45 minutes (The L component was made with a UV-IR block filter).  Because of the long exposure and not being guided the image does not show too much detail, but the double shell and the center star ar visible.