Note slight discs around brighter stars. Skies were so hazy that only a few stars were visible to the eye. Made worse by the full moon!

Overall sky pollution index was 124. Fire & Smoke index was 54. Humidity reached dew point during session (dew heaters applied).

I tried to avoid all of these limitations by imaging only the SHO bands. However, the next night was amazingly clear of smoke and I performed another session in RGB and combined the two.

Shot and processed in BIN1. Final image reduced to BIN2, as there is no detail to be lost and it makes the stars a little sharper.


(thoughts logged during the session)

It's Nebula Season!

*cough, cough* It's also smoke season, as North America's wildfires layer on an image-ruining haze.

I was able to compensate some with this picture, which is filtered to reduce the offending spectrum. Even so, the brightest stars have a very slight disk of light around them caused by smoke diffraction.

Tonight's image is a detail inside of the Elephant Trunk Nebula, or IC1396A...a wonderful plume of dark gasses found within a large nebula in northern skies. It's located in an adjoining spiral arm of our own Milky Way galaxy, about 2400 light years away.

Gas from the surrounding nebula is rushing past this denser region...glowing red from hydrogen ionized by the stars within and made even brighter by the collision of molecules at the edges. The visible brilliant, young, blue stars suggest the there are others being generated within the mass. And the whole column appears to be backlit by one or more stars behind.

Then there's that curious hole in the top with a centered star. Either the star is repelling the gasses, or, in fact, this was a dense region that collapsed on itself to form the star. Judging by the reddish color of the star, this feature was formed a few million years ago.

As with most things, what is old is new again, with energy and mass constantly being rearranged & recycled.

Thoughts to ponder as I sip from a glass of soda water and wine.

Tonight's notes are compiled to Enrico Pieranunzi and Marc Johnson's whimsical jazz tune 𝘊𝘢𝘴𝘵𝘭𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘚𝘰𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘶𝘥𝘦.