Hersey – The Suffolk Sky

01/15/2025 – Horsehead Nebula SeeStar Mosaic

January 16, 2025 by Hersey

Nice, clear, and very cold night. The bright Moon rose in the east a little after 7 PM. Since it was clear I had a go at another mosaic from the SeeStar using SeeStar Alp. This time on the area around the…

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01/11/2025 – SeeStar Mosaic of M 42 and Orion’s Sword

January 12, 2025 by Hersey

Friday night it snowed. Not too bad, a couple inches and a lot of it melted in the Sun on Saturday afternoon. Saturday night was cold and clear, the nearly full Moon was super bright. I set up and leveled the SeeStar…

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01/09/2025 – SeeStar Alp First Light – An Owl, a Crab, and a Monkey’s Head

January 10, 2025 by Hersey

Very cold, very clear, and a very bright 80% waxing Moon high in the sky. Didn’t want to fight the Moon with any long exposure light gathering so I decided to do a bit of EAA observing with the SeeStar S50 to…

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Simple SeeStar Controller with SeeStar Alp on a Raspberry Pi

January 7, 2025 by Hersey

I stumbled upon this open source project, seestar_alp, which allows remote control of a SeeStar S50 using a web interface called the Simple SeeStar Controller (SSC) running on a Raspberry Pi (there are options for Windows and Mac as well). The Simple…

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Learning NINA – Lightbucket Session Tracking Plugin

January 6, 2025 by Hersey

Lightbucket is a Nighttime Imaging ‘N’ Astronomy (N.I.N.A. or NINA) plugin which logs information about NINA imaging session. When enabled and configured details about NINA imaging sessions are automatically sent to Lightbucket each time a sequence image is saved. The Lightbucket website…

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01/04/2025 – The Horsehead and Flame

January 5, 2025 by Hersey

Another nice clear cold dry night. The waxing Crescent Moon was up a bit longer in the West, but was not very bright. The sky was really stable and clear, a nice night for collecting some light. I framed up the Horsehead…

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01/02/2025 – A Piece of Barnard’s Loop

January 3, 2025 by Hersey

Another beautiful clear night. A bit cold with temperatures dropping down in the low 30s once the Sun set, but it did not seem to be as damp out as the night before. The Moon was just a small sliver and set…

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01/01/2025 – First Light of 2025 – Galaxies M 81 and M 82

January 2, 2025 by Hersey

Happy New Year!!! First light captured in 2025 on a cold clear night. A thin waxing crescent Moon in the west set shortly after the Sun. For this session I swapped out the ZWO Duo-Band filter for the SVBONY SV240 Multi-Narrowband filter…

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12/30/2024 – The Rosette Nebula

December 31, 2024 by Hersey

A nice clear night with no Moon. A bit humid and the temperature dropped to the upper 30s after the Sun went down. I set up framing in NINA and created a sequence to collect 6 hours of light from the Rosette…

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12/22/2024 – The Christmas Tree Cluster

December 23, 2024 by Hersey

Merry Christmas!!! NGC 2264 and the surrounding area seemed like a very appropriate target for this time of year. Very cold (24 F), mostly clear, night with a waning last quarter Moon which did not rise until after midnight. A few high…

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