Astrophotgraphy - As If I Need A New Hobby

I got the new Dwarf Mini smart telescope for my birthday this year. I never had a desire for a telescope before even though images of these remote places in our universe had always fascinated me. It also helps that I teach basic Astronomy for students wanting a GED science credits.

However, when I came across videos of the Dwarf Mini and saw how compact and stylish it was, I made a mistake of expressing my fascination to it to the people around me and voila! It showed up as a birthday present!

Ever since a month ago, I have been fiddling around with it and have really gotten into this astrophotography thing. I must say, it has been quite fascinating and educational, because I ended up reading about the stuff that I photographed.

Anyhow, here are a few pictures that I've taken so far. Mind you, we have not been getting a lot of clear skies so far, and on days that we do have them, they have been rather chilly except for a few days. I'm hoping this will change soon now that this is the first day of Spring.

The telescope came with a solar filter which allows me to take a snapshot of the Sun. Here comes the Sun, with a few sun spots!

 

Next comes the closest spiral galaxy to the Milky Way, the Andromeda galaxy (M31), which Edwin Hubble discovered to be at a location much further than the size of the Milky Way and thus, proving that this not not part of our galaxy. I've removed the stars in the photo, but you'll notice that the image kept two additional galaxies.

This next one is the one that was at the top of my list. This is the Orion Nebula (M42), a star nursery in the Orion constellation. This is a popular shot because it is one of the brightest nebula for astrophotography. I was quite impressed by what the Dwarf Mini was able to do.

Finally, this was obtained just last night. We had clear skies, and so I wanted to see if we could capture the Rosette Nebula (NGC 2237). We got it, but I think we needed to go twice as long to get a better and clearer image.

Except for the Sun, each one of these images took about 1 hour and 15 minutes to complete. The telescope basically tracked and stacked a series of images that it took. Each image had about 15-30-second exposure time. I left it up to the telescope auto settings for each of the items store in its library.

My next goal is to capture a few more galaxies, maybe an elliptical one, or even the Magellenic cloud (LMC) and see how that looks.

Zz.