Exploring the Suffolk Virginia Night Sky – Astronomy, Astrophotography, Telescopes, EAA – Planets and Stars and Nebula and Galaxies – Looking, Learning, Sharing… Let's see what we can see…
After a couple weeks of a whole lot of clouds, Sunday was a nice night. Temperatures in the mid-50s, clear, and only a little sliver of a Moon. It has been a bit since I collected any light in the SV503 (been…
GraXpert is a free opensource tool which can use Artificial Intelligence (AI) models to perform background extraction (gradient removal) and denoising (noise removal) on astrophotography images. I have been tinkering with this tool using a FITS image saved from a live stack…
It is galaxy season! It was a nice night for observing. A crisp clear sky and temperatures in the mid-to-low 50s F. Not a lot of humidity in the air, so seeing was nice and dew was at a minimum. Last nights…
Nice clear night. A little cool, but still a nice clear Moonless night. I was setting up more to make sure everything was ready for the Solar Eclipse, but decided to have a quick go and capturing some light since it was…
It’s been a bit since we have had a nice Moonless clear sky. Monday night, 3/11/2024, was a very nice night for looking up. Cool, but not too cold, with temperatures in the mid-to-low 40s. Very clear, no Moon, and only a…
Earlier in the day it was windy, stormy, and we even lost power for a little over an hour, but as it got later in the afternoon the wind died down and the skies cleared up. It was a bit cooler than…
A nice cool and very clear Moonless night. I was able to capture a little more than 3 1/2 hours of light from the planetary nebulas PK 136+05 and PN G136.1+04.9. The planetary nebula PK 136+05, aka Hechathorn-Fesen-Gull 1 of HFG1, is…
Clear and cold night with no Moon! Great night to collect some light from Hechathorn-Fesen-Gull 1 (aka HFG1 or PK 136+05) a planetary nebula located in the constellation of Cassiopeia. HFG1 is the SkyWatcherUSA Target of the Month (TOTM) for February 2024….
Siril is a powerful freeware astronomical image processing tool. One of the features of Siril which I find very useful (and fun to tinker with) is the ability to automate image pre-processing and processing tasks using scripts. Automating things like creating master…
Another very cold and clear night so I took the opportunity to capture some more light from the Dolphin Head Nebula (Sh2-308/LBN 1052) I was able to add just over an hour and half to the just over an hour and a…