Hersey – Page 2 – The Suffolk Sky

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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Learning PixInsight – Create and Use a Synthetic Flat

December 12, 2024 by Hersey

I have been going through some of my old data practicing with different tools and processing in PixInsight. I had a stack of 18 x 300 seconds of the Leo Triplet which I captured in early April 2024. There were a lot…

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Learning PixInsight – Just Getting Started

December 9, 2024 by Hersey

Recently I requested and downloaded the free trial from PixInsight. Wanted to give it a try to see what I could do with it and see if it might be worth the price. In this post I’ll jump around PixInsight a bit…

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12/07/2024 – The Flaming Star Nebula

December 8, 2024 by Hersey

A little warmer, but still a cold (low 30’s) and mostly clear night. There were a few high clouds early on, but these cleared up around 7:30 PM or so. A bit more of the waxing Moon, but still not enough to…

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12/06/2024 – The Jellyfish Nebula, IC 443

December 7, 2024 by Hersey

Nice clear, cold night. Little bit of a waxing Moon (30% or so), not yet bright enough to cause to many issues. Uncovered the scope in the early afternoon and cooled down the camera. After the Sun set I did a quick…

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12/03/2024 – Two Nights of Tadpoles, a Spider, and a Fly

December 4, 2024 by Hersey

Continued collecting some more light from the Tadpole Nebula, the Spider Nebula, and the Fly Nebula through the AT66ED with the ZWO Duo-Band Filter. Ended up with 3 hours of light from 12/02 and 7 hours from 12/03. A total of 10…

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Quick Peek – Some Tadpoles, a Spider, and a Fly

December 3, 2024 by Hersey

Just wanted to share a quick peak at some light I collected from IC 410 (the Tadpole Nebula), IC 417 (the Spider Nebula), and NGC 1931 (the Fly Nebula) on 12/02/2024. I plan to collect more photons from these objects over the…

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Learning NINA – Custom Mount Park Position with GSServer

December 1, 2024 by Hersey

A buddy and fellow amateur astrophotographer suggested this method of parking the telescope with the OTA facing down to help keep dust, dew, and frost off the primary objective of the telescope. This can be accomplished by setting a custom park position…

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