The past two weeks have been a bit better than normal when it came to clear sky opportunities. I’ve been taking advantage of them to catch up on some old and new targets.

Where is comet Holmes? Well currently it is pretty close to the California nebula. I attempted to image this rare meeting with my Canon camera and 100mm lens piggypacked on my c6 SCT. THe California nebula is about the size of Orion’s Sword. So that should give you a feeling of how large Holmes is now. It is also extremly faint. During processing I was able to pick up detail more easily in the faint HA nebula (with my unmodded camera and LPR filter) than I could with Holmes.

IC410 and 405 revisited. I added about an hours worth more frames to see what improvement I could get. It turned out the viewing conditions that night were horrible. THe sky glow got continually worse as moisture increased in the lower levels of the atmosphere. But I was still reasonably happy with the results… thanks again to the LPR filter. This filter is making me realize that if your skies are reasonably dark (mag 5 to 5.5 or better) then you can probably get by without having to modify (remove the IR filter) your camera.

This past Sunday with the moon at first quarter I picked up a new target: M108 and M97 and added more frames to some old targets NGC4565 (one of my favourite edge on spiral galaxies) and M13.

M108&M97

NGC4565

M13 Globular CLuster in Hercules and tiny galaxy IC4617

Image details and more hi-res versions can be found in my latest images section on my site: http://www.weatherandsky.com/main.php?g2_view=core.ShowItem&g2_itemId=101

KerryLH