M17 on a summer's eve

Fighting the mid-summer twilight and a waning moon, M17 emerged from the southern horizon last night through a short series of 4 x 5 minute exposures at ISO800.

A sequence of 10xflatfield, 10xbias and 5xdarkframes helped to minimise image noise, coupled with an Astronomik CLS deep-sky filter to lift the nebula from the light sky background.

Williams Optics ZS80ii, Canon 300D
EQ6 autoguided, 4 x 5 mins @ Iso800

Interesting prediction of Nova

I stumbled across this on Sky & Telescope.com...

http://www.skyandtelescope.com/observing/highlights/43435242.html

Perhaps we'll see a Nova whilst Scorpius is up in the southern summer sky.

Jerry

M20 Triffid Nebula

Very low on the horizon at around 1.30am, the constellation Sagittarius is rising and revealing its intra-galactic gems such as the Triffid Nebula (M20).

William Optics ZS80II, Canon 300D
7 x 3 mins @ ISO800 (unguided)

M13 Globular Cluster

The gorgeous M13 globular cluster located in Hercules is easily visible to the naked eye at magnitude 5.8.

The cluster is also a nice target for beginners in astro-photography. At an apparent size of 23 arcminutes it shows up well even in large format cameras.

The following image was taken this weekend, despite a moonlit summer night with poor darkness.

William Optics ZS80II, Canon 300D
5 x 5 mins @ ISO400