A portrait of the pairing of the Owl Nebula, M97, with the edge-on spiral galaxy M108, below the Bowl of the Big Dipper. The Owl is a magnitude 9.8 planetary nebula in our galaxy about 1700 light years away, while M108 is another galaxy about 32 million light years away, and shining at magnitude 10. There are many very tiny 15th to 18th magnitude galaxies in the field as well, carrying PGC designations. North is to the left in this framing. This is a stack of 20 x 6-minute exposures with the Canon EOS Ra camera at ISO 1600, through the Astro-Physics 130mm EDT apo refractor at f/6 with the 6x7 field flattener. Autoguiding was with the MGEN3 stand-alone guider which controlled the camera shutter and performed a 5-pixel dithering move between each exposure. The mount was the AP Mach 1. No dark frames or LENR was applied. Aligning and stacking, with a Median blend mode, was with Photoshop, which worked perfectly on this set. Taken from home on a very clear night on April 13-14, 2021.
Stack of four 10-minute exposures with Canon 20Da at ISO400 and with 5-inch AP scope at f/4.5. Taken April 25.
The galaxy trio M98 (at right near the star 6 Comae), M99, the Coma Pinwheel (at bottom), and M100 (at upper left), captured in a deep blue twilight sky on June 4, 2019. The pair of NGC 4602 and NGC 4298 are left of M99 at bottom left. Images taken later under darker skies were plagued by haze moving in. Despite the bright sky galaxies as faint as magnitude 14.5 are recorded. This is a stack of 6 x 2-minute exposures at ISO 1600 with the Canon 6D MkII and Astro-Physics Traveler 105mm apo refractor at f/5.8 with the Hotech field flattener. Shot for a book illustration.
