The Iris nebula is a bright reflection nebula in the constellation Cepheus. Dark skies are required to capture this object in its full glory, including the surrounding dust. This one also is one of the largest projects of the 2015 season. It is sort of a benchmark object, as I have made it a goal to image it every few years at least, beginning back in 2006. I will post my "Iris nebula style evolution project" at some point, but for now I will just say that not one image of th

Collimation (redux) I did some more reading on properly collimating an RC, because I felt something was off last time around. I was getting a defocused star shadow out of alignment, on all focused bright stars. Post processing that out of the images would prove quite a task, plus I think it's just a symptom of optical misalignment. Since there were no star elongations anywhere on the frame, I have ruled out the issue being camera tilt. As it turns out, the focuser needed a li

Interesting day yesterday. I had taken delivery of the AT 12 RC telescope a few weeks ago. It had been sitting in my living room floor, until yesterday when I finally got the time to install it. My trusty VC200L was unmounted, after 4 years of great service at Asteria observatory, with the peak being last year where I accumulated a rather large image backlog due to the nice weather from spring to fall. In total, I have owned that scope for 10 years. But I digress. Back to the