Clear night last night. Removed focal reducer and changed cameras to capture Jupiter and Saturn with C14 and 2x barlow lens. Ralf Stoeckeler.

NGC 2626 is a seldom photographed, spectacular reflection nebula in a sea of hydrogen emission clouds.
Total integration 19 hours 15 minutes. Focal length: 1980mm. Adam Lundie.

Tolerated the winter cold to get these pictures of the milky way using my Canon EOS 450D Rebel with no star tracker and a 55mm lens. Took a series of 10 continuous stacked pictures for 6 seconds with a exposure of 800 at F3.4. Geoff Partridge.

Cat's Paw Nebula - NGC 6334

One for the cat lovers out there! This is an emission nebula and star forming region located in constellation Scorpius and is around 5500 light years away. The whole gas cloud is around 50 light years across and is one of the most active nurseries for massive stars in our galaxy. One gigantic space paw print :)

This is the first time I've put together a multi night photograph. Quite a learning curve involved in being able to frame up the same target on different nights. The more images you can put into the total pool of data the better with astrophotography. Allows you to bring out more detail and reduce noise.

Technical Information for those interested :
Total exposure time of 5 hours of images stacked in DeepSkyStacker. Also added in dark frames, bias frames and flat frames from each night for further noise reduction. Skywatcher 72 ED telescope, Skywatcher HEQ5 mount, Astro modified Canon 1100d camera, ZWO 120mm-s Guide camera and mini guide scope. Astrophotographytool used for target locating, framing and image capture session. Sharpcap software used for polar alignment. PHD2 software used for autoguiding. Final processing done in a mixture of Pixinsight and Photoshop.

Looks like a lot of cloud for the next week, and with no moon at the moment that's frustrating. In the interim I'll keep reading, watching, learning and planning my next target. Until then, stay safe and hopefully clear skies sooner rather than later!

Murray

#skywatcher #astrophotography #astro #catspaw #nebula #deepsky #dso #apt #phd2 #sharpcap #nightphotography #stars #ipswich #queensland #Australia #murrayfox #evostar

Not far from home there are these awesome old weathered timber gates. I know there are some timber gate lovers on here, lol. I finally got around to photographing them about 10 days ago. The major light pollution is courtesy of Brisbane, but if I want this shot of the gates I have to just put up with it. You can see why the Milky Way core has to rise a certain amount above the horizon to see it in some locations. Still all in all not a bad image. A sunrise shot of these gates are on the agenda for one weekend hopefully in the not to far distant future. Feel free to share this post with family and friends.

Settings;
* Sky Images. X 10
- ISO 4000
- 14mm
- f/4.0
- 13 secs

* Foreground. X 4
- ISO 100
- 14mm
- f/5.0
- 8 secs

* Lake Clarendon, Lockyer Valley

* Any likes and especially shares are greatly appreciated

Comet LEMMON remains quite bright in the Western sky. It's visible in binos/small telescopes. When the weather clears it should make for some good photo opportunities. A camera with 50mm lens on a tripod aimed just above Sirius should get you an image of it. It is bright, so it will show up on short exposures. (Tel Lekatsas, 10 June).