Blue Horse Nebula in Scorpius, June 2021
This shot is more like just the Blue Horse’s ear. The image is about a 1/2 degree field of view out of a three or four degree wide object. I took the image over two nights in early June as the Milky Way made its entry into the summer. The area is only a little northwest of the Antares-Rho Ophiuchus region from my previous post and is an update from an image I took previously. This time with a little more red showing up. It is an extra gorgeous part of the night sky.
I have not imaged since June this summer. Either the observatory was down and I was in Salt Lake so couldn’t fix it, or it was cloudy in Torrey when the observatory was up, or if not cloudy it was smokey. Sometimes both. It was smokey enough on August 11, the night of the Perseid’s, that stars where smoked out for much of the horizon and only a grey, dim Milky Way was visible overhead.
Plate solve from Astrometry.net
- Exposure: 6.4 hours:
- Lum – 23 X 480 seconds = 3 hours 8 minutes (1×1)
- RGB – 33 total X 360 seconds = 3 hrs 18 mins (2X2)
- Dark, flat and bias calibration
- Mount: Paramount ME
- Telescope: Telescope Engineering Company TEC-140:
- Aperture 140 mm
- Focal length 980 mm
- Focal ratio f/7.0
- Camera: SBIG ST-10XME
- Guider: Unguided
- Software: The SkyX, CCDAutoPilot, CCDStack, Photoshop CS5, ProDigital Astonomy Tools, StarSpikes Pro 3
- By Mark Bailey
Hi Mark.
Sorry to learn about your sky issues, I hope the fires are not close. It can be frustrating. Fire, smoke, clouds, light pollution, Starling satellites. It’s not getting any easier. I know of one astronomer who has simply given up astronomy permanently out of sheer frustration. His website is gone too.
You did a good job with that nebulosity. Makes it all worthwhile!
By the way, I discovered links to astrometry.net weren’t working on my older posts. None of my linked images on the Nova server earlier than February are accessible. They do a good job but apparently they have hardware problems and are using a temporary server. I hope they solve it but I stopped hot linking to astrometry.net because the old post look bad with dead links.
Hi Roger- I should complain less. Reliability and complexity are inversely related and I have a lovely, but complex, system. Wrestling all the gadgets is, of necessity, part of the fun. I seek, however, to keep the focus on the sky (albeit a smokey one). Thanks for the heads up on astrometry.net. I just copied and pasted my image so should hold up for now. Meanwhile, keep observing and posting! -Mark
It’s nice to find you, Mark. (Or should I say, thanx for finding me.) This image is stunning to say the least and I look forward to following your blog and reading more about your journey and your astrophotography.