One year in Astronomy

About a year ago I looked up for the first time with a pair of 7x35 bins as part of assisting my eldest with something he needed to do and that was it. I was hooked. Since then, I've bought several pairs of binoculars up to 15x70. A scope, a motorised mount, a bunch of eyepieces. I've spent many an hour studying the moon, been wowed by Saturns rings and the sheer wonder of drifting through the Milky Way with a pair of bins lost in the sheer immensity of the view and quantity of stars. I've found 43 of 88 constellations, 35 Messier objects, and 70 of the Lunar 100 objects. I've got a webcam and used that for imaging the lunar surface and Saturn (ok Saturn was a bit of a disaster). And since getting an SLR for my birthday earlier in the year, have been trying my hand at some Prime Focus astro imaging, and using the zoom lens for some Moon images. I also constructed myself a very simple tripod mounted device for helping me pinpoint satellite passes so that I could image them. This has allowed me to collect images of probably 30% of the Iridium satellite network as flares, and a fair few shots of the ISS. And finally almost as if it was a birthday present, I got an image published on the cover disk of the Sky at Night.

On Saturday night, there was an hour or so of clear sky from around 9pm. I setup as normal and had a second go at NGC7789. This time I nailed it. I shot 58 frames before the clouds moved in. I lost 3 to tracking errors, and took 10 darks, 10 flats and 10 dark flats. Processing in DSS, I saved 2 copies, one unadjusted, and one with the Histogram stretched with DSS. I then tweaked them in PS. The odd thing was that the DSS stretched image had no colour



But far more stars than the unadjusted one



I then combined the two images to get the detail and colour and it worked..



I really like that and that's my anniversary image.

I also managed to grab a couple of moon shots. One sometime after the above image when the moon poked her nose out of a cloud gap



And one last night through some misty cloud



I'm really pleased with how I've progressed over the year and I'm looking forward to the next year to come. Hopefully the weather won't be so bad.