Over the past month I only had two opportunities to observe and image, and unfortunately clear and c-c-cold go hand in hand during the winter season.

One of those evenings the meteorological data and CSC were both calling for lots of cloud cover but fortunately I was following the satellite imagery that day and found a potential clearing over Lake Michigan that looked like it would drift over our region by the evening hours. I felt a little nuts at first setting up in total cloud cover but I had faith 🙂 later that evening the skies finally became reasonably clear enough to image B33 Horsehead and Flame Nebula. There was a very thin layer of cirrus but it wasn’t enough to make my efforts futile. The effects of it were noted in the image below with Alnitak (Zeta Orionis) appearing even more oversized, and brighter than usual.

Canon 40D unmodded + 80mm, 3min exposures totaling 1.5 hrs @iso1600

My wintery setup that night

Again, another clear night presented itself this past Saturday, but sadly the moon was really bright and fairly close to my region of interest. As an experiment I imaged anyways. Kind of a bad experiment to try M78 which has a very pretty blue reflection nebula but very faint and interesting dark nebula/dust around it. I was happy to see that parts of it showed up after some post processing magic, but I had to crop it severely because of a bad gradient from the brightness of the moon.

Canon 40D unmodded + 80mm, 3min exposures totalling 1hr @iso800

That night got down to -12C and at first I thought I could handle it (esp since I could run inside frequently to warm up) but in the process of trying to debug/restart my guiding software a few times my exposed fingers felt like they were going to get frost bite… so I ended up giving up after an hour and a half. So -12C may be my absolute lowest temperature limit for extended imaging and possibly observing.

KerryLH