Rick's Blog

The International Space Station    I have been working on getting a good picture of this for two months. And this is the best I've got so far. This picture was taken this morning at 7:25 just before the sun was above the horizon but the sky was getting pretty bright. That is why some of it is in the shadows. Maybe next time it will be a better pass over. It is very hard to get a good picture of it because it is moving at 17,500 miles an hour and the telescope must be guided by hand. At the time of this picture the (iss) was 250 miles high and 16 miles north of me.  

The Eagle Nebula The nights around here have been terrible for months. But the nights have finally cleared and I was able to get back at it. This picture is the result of 60 four minute pictures for a total of 4 hours of exposure time. The reason there is so many stars is because M16 is right in the Milky Way.  

The Orion Nebula I took a picture of this about 2 years ago with a film camera and it is still on the blog. But this is a new picture I took with my astrophotography camera on 3-10-25.  

Horsehead nebula.    I took a set of photos of just the horsehead as seen here. The next photo is of the horsehead and flame nebula complex.  

The Flame and Horsehead nebulas  It only took me two years before I got good enough to get a good picture of this. The problem is the horsehead nebula is very dim and the bright star above the flame nebula looks like a head light. So it took me a while to figure out the right camera settings so that I could do the processing needed to bring out the horsehead nebula without blowing out the left side of the picture because of that d... star.

The Rosette nebula For the past 2 months the weather has been terrible. It has finally cleared up and for the last 2 nights I took 62 four minute pictures of the Rosette nebula. This picture here is what I saw on the computer screen. The next two pictures came from this one.