This was a busy sky on an October night! This was October 15, 2020 with Mars at centre just two days past its opposition, and so at its brightest, at magnitude -2.6, in Pisces. In Cetus below, the long-period variable and red giant star Mira (which reaches its maximum brightness only every 332 days) is just past its brightest as well, making it bright enough to be easily naked eye (about magnitude 3.4 here) — it is usually too dim to see naked eye. The name Mira means the “Wonderful”, a name given by Johann Hevelius in 1662, though Mira’s variabilty was discovered in the late 1500s by David Fabricius. Mira is also catalogued as Omicron Ceti. Also in the frame, though faint, are the outer planets Uranus in Aries and Neptune in Aquarius. Both are also near their brightest for the year as both are near opposition as well. Some streaks from geostationary satellites are also visible south of the celestial equator in Cetus, as they flare in brightness for a few minutes near the opposition point as they reflect sunlight back from the point opposite the Sun. The geosats are streaked (even though they are stationary in the sky) because the sky is a stack of tracked exposures, with the camera on a tracker to follow the stars and capture fainter stars and the dim outer planets. Geosats flare in brightness like this only in semi-annual seasons around the equinoxes. The sky is a stack of 4 x 2-minute tracked exposures; the ground is a stack of 4 x 2-minute untracked exposures to keep it sharp, with the two stacks blended and masked in Photoshop. All were at f/2.8 with the 24mm Sigma Art lens and Nikon D750 at ISO 800, and taken from home in southern Alberta. The camera was on the Star Adventurer 2i tracker. Haze and clouds moving in added the star glows. Half an hour later the sky was too cloudy to shoot this.
This is a wide field image of the region of Perseus and Cassiopeia containing the bright Double Cluster at bottom left, and the large emission nebulas known as the Heart and Soul Nebulas at top. The Heart Nebula at right is IC 1805; the Soul Nebula (aka Embryo Nebula) at top left is IC 1848. The bright detached nebula at right is NGC 896. Also in the image to the right of the Double Cluster is the large scattered star cluster, Stock 2, the Muscle Man Cluster, barely standing out from the Milky Way background here. The compact star cluster above the Double Cluster is NGC 957. Despite the poor sky conditions, the small, reddened Local Group galaxies, Maffei 1 and 2 are visible above centre amid the dark lanes of interstellar dust. This is a stack of 9 x 8-minute exposures at ISO 1600 with the Canon EOS Ra through the William Optics RedCat 51mm f/4.9 astrograph. This was on the Sky-Watcher EQM-35 mount as a test of the combination, and guided with the ZWO ASIAir and ZWO guidescope, which worked fine until the cold killed the iPad (despite it being plugged in). Placing the iPad inside worked for a while but the weak WiFi from the ASIAir made the iPad lose the connection and revert to my home WiFi, again stopping the guiding. However, the small mount guided quite well when the autoguider worked! Clouds were also coming and going and prevented more images and any taking through a nebula filter — these are all unfiltered. Some light cloud in some frames add the star glows, and so I added a mild Orton Effect with Luminar 4 to purposely add a further soft glow “look” to the image, and which also punches up the nebulosity. North is to the top right here, in this image framed at an angle from the usual N-S, E-W orientation to take in the nebulas and clusters. The graduated scale on the RedCat’s camera angle adjuster helped in the framing. Taken from home under duress (equipment and sky issues!) October 12, 2020. Indeed, I was surprised to get even these frames to make a passable image.
