Here is 18 exposures of the Elelphants Trunk  (vdb142) recorded from the observatory in Wasilla. I used an EOS 40D camera for this through an 8" APO refractor. This light travelled aboute 2400 years before landing on my cameras sensor.

This is 275 minutes of exposure through a 200mm refractor.

M109 is a barred spiral galaxy discovered by a French guy named Messier in 1781. This object appears in the sky about 1/4th by 1/7th the apparant size of the full moon. This galaxy is moving away from us at about 2.5 million miles per hour.

This light travelled for about 47 million years before being lucky enough to land in my camera.

 

What do you think? This entire galaxy NGC7331 is devoid of life? Only life here on Earth, period? This is one of my favorite galaxies, it's got it all -- Nice spiral arms, an exciting core, and a nice lane of dust right across it's face. This is about 2 hours of exposure from the back yard observatory.

 

I used to be consistently 45th place (forever it seemed)  , then 70th place, now I've fallen all the way to 100th place. I don't think I'll be here long, given the amount of thought that I give to finding you quality entertainment.

 

I think I need to shift directions, maybe eldery defecation as a theme? It seems like there should be much more to it than casually shaking a leg and departing.

 

We have a 2001 Saturn station wagon that we are planning to milk for every mile possible. For the last year, the heater has been on again and off again. In Alaska, "off again" in the Winter is a disaster, the window turns into a sheet of ice and you bring an ice scraper to scrape your frozen breath from the inside of the window every 3 minutes. With the whole family in the car, it's full time scraping. If we were lucky, the heater would run for a few minutes every hour and defrost the windows. Saturn said about $700 to replace the wiring harness.

 Well, I bought a new EOS 40D camera over the last couple days and was catching some flak about spending money on non-essentials when the car needs repair etc. So I decided to finally pull the dashboard, the radio, the vents, the heater (took about 10 minutes is all actually), and sitting directly in view, right in front of me, is a burned wire. I open the connector it's on and find it's melted inside it. I tap the connector and the heater comes on. Tap it again, heater goes off.  One pair of wire snips and 20 minutes later, I've got the wire cut off the burned connector and jumpered with a wire-nut.

$700.... $700 my ass. Total repair cost was 5.12 cents and maybe an hour of time total (including doofus factor that Saturn wouldn't suffer.) I really do despise that dealership.

 

This was taken after the glorious opposition, so Mars had already shrunk to 1/225th the width of the full moon by this time. To put this size into perspective, hold your thumb out at arms length. Mars as seen here is approximately 1/900th the width of your thumb.

I took this with an 8" refractor and a Phillips webcam.

 

From Wikipedia:

" M13, the Great Globular Cluster in Hercules (also known as the Hercules Globular Cluster, Messier Object 13, Messier 13, M13, or NGC 6205) is a globular cluster in the Hercules constellation . "

 This light travelled for 25,000 years before being captured. I took 42 exposures of 20 seconds each and stacked them to increase the signal of this faint object.

Imagine living on a planet orbiting around one of these stars. What would the night sky look like?

 

I'm on a deep sky kick now for the first time.  This is 40 photographs of 20 seconds each combined.

The Eskimo Nebula (NGC 2392), also known as the Clownface Nebula,^[4] is a bipolar^[2] double-shell^[5] planetary nebula (PN). It was discovered by astronomer William Herschel in 1787. From the ground, it resembles a person's head surrounded by a parka hood.

(All from Wikipedia.)

 This object appears about 1/45th the size of the moon, but of course is fantastically huger.  The light from this object travelled for between 1000 to 3000 years (uncertain) before landing on my camera sensor.

 

I collected my first inter-galactic photons last week. Next time I'll rotate the damn camera! This light was emitted 37 million years ago.

Here is one of Comet Holmes from the backyard tonight. This is a great thing to look at just with binoculars so make sure you don't miss it.

Being an amateur astronomer in Alaska has a few ups, and many downs.  It's light half the year, thats bad, but it's also dark half the year, so that's good. Unfortunately the darker it gets the colder it gets, and that gets bad. (Ever bumped your lips up against a -10F telescope?) I think the worst aspect is that we are so far North that the planets, the Moon and the Sun do not climb as high into the sky as would be desirable for good steady seeing conditions. Jupiter cant even been seen from my location for another couple years. I have no recollection of ever seeing the Moon or Sun be directly overhead until a few trips to the continental USA in my late 30's! What a strange sight that is. Here are my best Saturns from last Winter. I'm a newbie astrophotographer, so my results suck compared to the experienced, but I enjoy trying. This Winter it will be Mars I'm snapping pictures of.

Master set Dobby free!