I have had a few good nights for astrophotography. Now it looks like there will be a period of cloudy nights. I hope it doesn’t last long. The weather has been very nice, although it does get quite cool at night. I’m still picking up a few new birds for the year, but overall birding has been slow. There is still a good chance of getting four or five new birds for my year list but unless I decide to take a trip to the coast (either San Diego or Gulf of California) I don’t think I will get to 400 species for the year.
This is IC 405, the Flaming Star Nebula. I wanted to see what it would look like using the IDAS Nebula Booster filter. I had a difficult time getting the reflection nebula to show up, the filter does not work well for that. So I had to tone down the Ha quite bit and this is the result. IC 405 is about 1500 light years out there and is a big nebula, a frame filler at 500mm focal length. Another nebula I’ve been wanting to use the filter on, IC 63, the Ghosts of Cassiopeia. The bright star is Gamma Cassiopeiae, also known as Navi. NGC 281 (the Pacman Nebula) is perfect for the IDAS Nebula Booster. I really like how this came out. Located in the direction of the constellation Cassiopeia, it is around 9200 light years distant. My latest new bird for the year (number 377), a Varied Thrush at Lake Ajo. This bird has been present for three days now, quite a few people are coming to see it.
