With the first 6 nights with clear sky are we beating the odds, normally when you buy a telescope is it overcast and rain the first week.
The Williams, AZ area is in pretty dark sky and being 6 miles north of town in a rural area makes for a lot darker skies. This map allow you to check your location https://www.darkskymap.com/nightSkyBrightness. For some really dark sky can we drive 20 minutes north and setup the telescope in the desert or take the motorhome into the Grand Canyon and stay at the campground at Navajo Point with many daytime options too. The really good thing about the Dwarf 3 telescope is the filtering of light, it even allow to shoot pictures at full moon and in a heavy light polluted city like Tokyo.
Sun and Moon are good targets during the day, but at night is when thousands of good targets arrive. The first long exposure target was the Andromeda galaxy (M 31). The telescope works fine just sitting level as I used it the first night. but after equatorial alignment can the same target stay in the full frame for the whole night. This is a total of 4 hours exposure from 15 seconds individual pictures. I did nothing manually except down load the picture to my phone.
Just to verify everything is working well can a picture of Polaris the Northern star be a good test. It is one of the few things I can find in the sky without using the Atlas in the Dwarf 3, standard knowledge for a scout to be able to navigate at night :-).
The Lagoon Nebula (M 8) was captured for some time. Some additional processing to remove noise and make more vibrant colors is available in the Dwarf 3, but at this point I was not aware of those.
The Small Sagittarius Star Cloud is a very dense star region. I need to do more processing to get the colors more like in the Wiki article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Sagittarius_Star_Cloud
The Pelican Nebula (IC 5070) and North America Nebula. This picture is post processed with the cloud service Stellar Studio built into the telescope. Pretty close to Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelican_Nebula.
Night 4
Not everything is big enough to have a full picture. The Owl Nebula is pretty small in this picture and has not been processed further than the initial capture and stacking of 100 pictures by the telescope. The Owl is the small circle in the middle, but another galaxy just snuck in on the top of the picture.
The Owl is the two eyes looking when zoomed in. This clearly needed a lot more frames to get the noise removed.
The Veil Nebula is another large structure that can produce very nice pictures. This is a total of 2 hours picture. There is of course show offs that makes for much better colors on Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil_Nebula. The structure has 2 part that has been captured individually (C 33 and C34).
The Pac-Man Nebula (NGC 281) is a very good target this time of year, high over the horizon. Some cropping of the picture can be done, but no higher resolution by further zooming. Here is the Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NGC_281
The planets cannot be set in the scheduled captures. So I was up early and managed to get a picture with both Saturn and Neptune. Saturn is at the bottom and Neptune is right above on the top. Right now is a special time with many of the large planet very close to each other. The telescope is not large enough to capture planets with details it is more for faint bigger structures. The gain and other parameter also need a lot of change I have to play with, Saturn is supposed to have rings and not just be a huge blob of light.
Night 5
Fish on a Platter Nebula (Barnard 144), 2 hours. This is a dark nebula that does not allow light from objects behind. The nebula area become "dark".
Another 2 hour photo of the North America and Pelican Nebula, this one center on the Gulf of Mexico. This region is so rich on details and placed well in the sky to have a full night of light gathering in the future and restacking of all the already capture pictures.
Ghost Bush Cluster (NGC 6939) with a Spiral galaxy in a small detail in this larger picture. Many stellar objects become small when the distance get too far.
The resolution on the pictures are high so zooming is possible to see many details that looks like a small galaxy on the full picture.
Heart Nebula (IC 1805), 20 hours. This is a colorful object I for sure will come back to another night with a longer exposure. The nice things is that objects in the sky do no change and pictures taken long time apart can be restacked to improve details in the future.
Pleiades (M 45) star cluster, around 1 hour exposure. End of the night was approaching and the sunrise made many of the individual pictures fail stacking, but around 1 hour of good dark pictures. The sunrise made for a fun colorful framing of the picture. Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleiades
Night 6
I have been taking photos of the North America/Pelican Nebula a few times. This is high in the sky all night long, so I went for a 7 hour and 40 minutes photo stacked by over 1000 individual 15 second exposures. The unprocessed image is like below.
The automatic Stellar Studio make an enhanced picture. The colors clearly get better and the stars brighter.
The processing can also remove the stars to better show the details of the gas. With this option is it easy to recognize North America on the left and the head of a pelican looking at it from the right side.
Just removing the noise is also giving a picture with a very dark background.
The 7.5 hour recording this night created 25 GB of data. Over the last 6 nights have I capture over 180 GB of data. The telescope has ~100 GB of internal storage so it allow 3 nights of shooting without removing files. The camera can be connected to a computer and exporting files to an existing folder is as simple as selecting all folders and paste to the folder from previous files on the PC. Windows 11 copy the new files and after that can the captured detailed folder on the telescope under Astronomy be deleted. A very nice feature is the folder name contain the name of what is imaged for future reference.
Before the sun rise was I testing the Mosaic function that stitch multiple pictures to a single picture. Saturn and Neptune was the target again to compare with the picture from the other night. Saturn is way to bright for the default settings and blow out the area around it. I need to spend time one day trying to capture a planet and the moons better.
Night 7
The night was not working out the best way. The close to full moon washed out my mosaic of the vail nebulas with some clouds also drifting by overnight. It has to be redone when the moon is not close to full. The image looks OK.
With the stars removed in post processing is it clear how the light "pollution" from the moon has made it less than perfect. A scattered pattern of squares with no real darkness.
But on the other side is it making for very good pictures of the moon.
I also did a time-lapse of both the sunset and sunrise. with a little editing on my Samsung S25U to speed it up from 4 minutes per hour to 1 minute per hour is it a little more action. I also added some free relaxing music.
The sunrise version also managed to have Venus and Jupiter at the top of the frame in the beginning until the sunrise got too bright.
Night 8
Since the full moon yesterday made for pretty bad astrophotography was this night with full moon perfect for getting a high resolution picture of the moon. This picture is 500 individual pictures stacked.
As a comparison is this picture taken with my Samsung S25 Ultra. The Samsung phone has a special "moon AI mode" that recognize the moon and set the parameters perfect for the phones camera. A lot less detailed and sharp, but still impressive from a camera in a phone carried in your pocket.
Side by side with similar size does make a lot of difference between telescope and phone.
Check back later more to come.