Fudge's Observatory
2-62530 Range Road 420A T9M 1P2 Cold Lake, AB, Canada

Perfect weather for imaging tonight - I'll be out with my portable, mini-setup fighting off coyotes.

Here is a wide-field image of a region of space in the constellation Monoceros (the unicorn); Monoceros is bordered by Orion (the hunter) and Gemini (the twins) - they're to the south at this time of year. The total field of view is about 10 from corner to corner, what you would get with a typical DSLR camera and a 160mm focal length lens. There are a lot of neat things in this image, but the Rosette Nebula is arguably the most prominent and interesting (seen at upper right).... It is an enormous molecular cloud of ionised Hydrogen (normally abbreviated as H II; spoken, "H two"). It lies 5,000 light years away and is roughly 130 light years in diameter. The scale mark on the image is applicable to the Rosette only. The nebula is a star-forming region, and many of the young stars 'born' there are exceptionally hot and bright. As a result, their energy is partially absorbed by the nebula and re-emitted as visible light, the same way a fluorescent light bulb works. While the shape appears to be similar to a rose (thus the name), it is more similar to a spherical bubble. The same hot, young stars that are causing the nebula to glow are also inflating it like a balloon thanks to the 'wind' of energetic solar particles. The Rosette Nebula is a complex structure and not all of it was visible or identifiable when it was discovered. More sophisticated equipment eventually allowed for the region to be better categorised; as such, it consists of NGC 2237 (nebula), NGC 2238 (nebula), NGC 2239 (nebula), NGC 2244 (the open star cluster at centre), and NGC 2246 (nebula). Overall, there are about 2,500 stars present in the nebula. Elsewhere you will notice all of the glowing red regions; similar to the Rosette, these are immense clouds of hydrogen ready to serve as the building blocks of future stars and solar systems. The Christmas Tree Cluster is toward the bottom left superimposed on a dense hydrogen region, but it is small enough in this image that you will have to take my word that it really does look like a Christmas tree! I will image it in more detail eventually. Image data collected 31 January 2020 Focal Length: 135mm 35mm Equivalent Focal Length: 252mm Focal Ratio: f/2.8 Total imaging time: 59 minutes Taken with a colour astro-imaging camera

After a very long layoff, I managed to get some imaging done. Sadly, it was not done from my observatory seeing as how I am still away from home, thus forcing me to use a portable astronomy setup from a public site which is not conducive to extended imaging. I will avoid my standard lengthy explanation here, albeit to say that this was done with a regular camera lens attached to an astronomy camera, and so it is a very wide field of view. With the right kind of tracking, a regular DLSR camera and lens could be used to capture this sort of thing. Focal Length: 135mm Focal Ratio: f/2.5 Imaging Time: 60 minutes

Hello all - as you may have noticed, not much has happened at Fudge's Observatory lately. This is not because I have abandoned astronomy, but because I have been away from the observatory for the last 8 months with work and will continue to be away for an indeterminate amount of time. When life slows down again I will be building a new observatory with more equipment and better capabilities. In the meantime I hope to capture some images of opportunity with a portable setup. Keep looking up!

Here is Mars at a distance of roughly 58,000,000km. Sometimes you get lucky. This also holds true with planetary imaging - while deep space objects are dim and need a lot of exposure time, planets are fairly bright and can be imaged with simple cameras (webcams, cel phones, etc.). The real challenge is that the atmosphere shimmers and blurs everything, and thus any details on the surface of the planets are almost completely obscured. However, if you take many (many!) images, ...sometimes you catch one at just the right moment when the atmosphere seems to stand still and you can start to see structure. In the summer, planets are very low on the horizon in nothern latitudes such as Cold Lake, which means there is a lot more atmosphere to contend with. Not only does this mean that luck begins to run out and almost no images are usable, but the atmosphere behaves like a prism and separates and distorts the spectrum. Image data collected 06 August 2018 Focal Length: 2000mm 35mm Equivalent Focal Length: 9690mm Focal Ratio: f/8 Total images collected: >80,000 Total images used: 800