Rick's Blog

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.  

The Rosette nebula #1  

The Rosette nebula #2  

Jupiter Jupiter with it's giant red spot and the shadow of it's moon Io being cast on Jupiter's cloud tops. A few nights ago the sky was crystal clear and no jet stream with very low humidity. It does not get any better than this in this part of the country.