Scenic Vista Star Party

On June 23, My local club, the Mahoning Valley Astronomical Society hosted another star party at Scenic Vista, just West of Lisbon, OH.  It was cloudy on my way down to the location, but the weather map said it was going to clear up, so I attended.  It ended up being a perfect evening for astrophotography, and the visual guys were showing off many different objects to spectators.

I brought my 6" dobsonian and my C6NGT.  Early in the session, I was showing people the moon, Saturn, M57 and a few other objects.  When the public thinned out, I began photographing several different objects.


The first object, I wanted to get was another M51, as the one I got last time had that diffraction spike in it.  This time, my test image was absolutely perfect, so I snapped off 30 frames and ended up with this:

I am VERY happy with this image of M51.  Lots of weak nebulocity present, and no spike!

Next, I thought I'd try a few more difficult objects, they didnt come out as good as I'd liked, but I'll post them anyway.  The first is of the Crescent Nebula in Cygnus...


The nebula is visible, but the background star content is quite high.








Next we'll go with the Pelican Nebula, also in Cygnus.  This consists of very few frames because I didnt see a thing on the screen, but with some red channel stretching, I ended up with this...

Of course I didnt get all of it, as the object was larger than I expected.






Finally, I did a wide field Milky Way shot which came out OK.  Not the quality of some of the guys taking these images from truly dark sky locations, but not bad nonetheless...

This is the Milky Way in the Cygnus area.  The sky was too cloudy and bright south toward Sagittarius.