Date: 11/29/2011

Location: San Bruno, CA

Seeing: 3/10, Transparency:  3/6, No Wind.

Celestron 11″ EdgeHD with DMK AS41 camera at F/D 10  (resolution: 1280×960)

Software:  Avi Stack (stacking of about 800 frames each), Photoshop CS4, Astraimage Wavelet filter

Both pictures were taken using a Baader Infrared pass band filter IR742. Not only this filter improve images degraded by bad seeing, but it helps taking pictures of the moon by reducing the (sometime too) high contrast between different parts of the lunar landscape.

Mare Crisium

In the “virtual atlas of the moon” I can read the following:

Type: Sea
Geological period: Nectarian (From -3.92 billions years to -3.85 billions years)
Size: Dimension: 638.0×638.0Km / 375.0×345.0Mi

Description:Formation with crater shape lengthened West East.
Very flat floor with ring of wrinkle ridge to the periphery and ghost craters to the South.
176 000 km2. 3.85 billion years old.

Langrenus (Top left) and Petavius (Bottom right)

The Petavius rille (or narrow valley) is easily visible from the mountains at the center of the crater, to the south rim. It said to have a dimension of 48Mi x 1.0Mi.

An smaller network of rilles is visible on the north west side of the crater.

On the cropped image below of the Petavius Crater, Petavius C (6.0Mi x 6.0Mi) and Petavius A (3.0Mi x 3.0 Mi) are highlighted. Petavius Rimae is 48Mi x 1Mi.

Date:  12/5/2011

Location: San Bruno, California – Transparency 2/6 – Seeing 3/10

Telescope: Stellarvue 90mm Triplet with Flat field corrector

Camera: CCD Camera Qhy9 at 1×1 binning with Astronomik 12nm H-Alpha filter

This image  is a detail of the Heart nebula (IC 1805)  with my 90mm Stellarvue Triplet. I had to crop the image at the bottom of the frame, having some frosting issue with my CCD camera …

This is a composite image based on 20 images of 6min – totaling 2h of exposure.

The heart nebula is a great target for astrophotography, whether it is for wide field (picture I took in new mexico with 200mm tele) or a longer focal length such as below.

At 600mm of focal length (with the stellarvue 90mm), the nebula reveals complex details between the darker dusk lanes and bright parts of the emission nebula.