March 16, 2016
The Lagoon Nebula and the Trifid Nebula. These are getting high enough in the sky by early morning to make it worth shooting. This is nine photos stacked, each one minute exposures, f4.5 @ 500mm, ISO 1600.
This is an area I want to work on some more. The orange star is Antares, a giant star in the constellation Scorpius. There are large stellar dust clouds visible in the image. If Antares was placed where our sun is, it would fill the solar system out to Mars. There are many colorful regions in this vicinity, I need to use a wider angle to capture it all. This was with a 500mm, f4.5, ISO 1600, 35 one minute exposures stacked in Deep Sky Stacker. The two star clusters are M4 and NGC 6144.
Another shot in the Virgo Galaxy Cluster. The problems I had with Deep Sky Stacker seem to have gone away. The face on galaxy at the top is the Blowdryer Galaxy (M100). At least seven galaxies are visible.
This is Omega Centauri, it looks more impressive through the binoculars than it does in a photo. A very large star cluster, it is about 150 light years in diameter and contains an estimated 10 million stars, located 15,800 light years from Earth. It can be seen low in the south in the early morning.