The rather obscure emission nebula catalogued as Sharpless 2-261, at top, but commonly known as Lower’s Nebula after the father and son team of amateur astronomers, Harold and Charles Lower, who in 1939 built an 8-inch Schmidt camera astrograph, one of the first, and used red sensitive plates and red filters to record these kinds of red nebulas. They noted this object on their plates, in northern Orion. They were certainly pioneers of this type of filtered astrophotography. At bottom is the small star cluster NGC 2169, also known as the X-Y Cluster or Number 37 Cluster as its two clumps of stars, just resolved here, resemble those letters or numbers with a little imagination at the eyepiece. At bottom left is the small emission nebula Sh2-269. The larger fainter patch above it is Sh2-267. The small nebula at the left edge might be Sh2-266 but charts are unclear and contradictory. This is a stack of 5 x 8-minute exposures unfiltered at ISO 800 with a stack of 6 x 10-minute exposures at ISO 1600 shot through an Optolong L-Enhance filter to bring out the nebulas, all with the old Hutech filter-modified Canon 5D MkII DSLR and the SharpStar HNT150 Hyperbolic Newtonian astrograph at f/2.8. What the Lowers would have given to have such technology in their day! Taken with some haze in the sky toward the end of the shoot for the unfiltered shots, adding the star glows. Taken from home February 22, 2020.
The globular cluster M2 in Aquarius, taken Dec 5, 2020 from home with the object low in the southwest, so the image is soft with poor seeing. This is a stack of 6 x 8-minute exposures with the 130mm f/6 AP reffractor and Canon 6D MkII with LENR on and with 6x7 field flattener..
M2, a Messier globular cluster in Aquarius. This is a stack of 4 x 6 minute exposures with the Canon 6D at ISO 800 and TMB 92mm refractor at f/5.5 with the Hotech field flattener. Taken from New Mexico, from Silver City, Nov 11, 2014.
