It is rare, but it happens! If you are going to drive out a 100 miles from your residence to a dark location, don’t forget to charge the battery for your telescope!
At least when I came out the next time, I more than made up for it!
| Date: | September 6 and October 5-6, 2021 |
| Location: | Cottonwood Spring, Joshua Tree National Park, CA |
| Time | 22:00 – 4:00 / 22:00 – 5:00 (UTC-7) |
| Weather | clear/calm ; 80°-75° F | clear, calm, humid, 70° – 60° F |
| Bortle Scale | 3 |
Equipment Used
- 8″ (203 mm) f/4.9 Newtonian Telescope
- Atlas II EQ-G Mount
- Starshoot Autoguider
- Nikon d5300
September 6
IC 5146 or C 19 – Cocoon Nebula 
NGC 7293 or C 63 – Helix Nebula
Sept. 6 – Constellation Shots
Auriga and Taurus rising 
Capricornus with Jupiter and Saturn 
October 5-6
Altair 
Betelgeuse 
M1 – Crab Nebula 
M31- Andromeda Galaxy 
M35 
M37 
M42 – Orion Nebula 
M45 – Pleiades
October 5-6 Constellation Shots
Canis Major 
Gemini 
Notes:
The reason for this mega gallery is simple – On September 6, I had a great night planned with what I wanted to shoot, only to find out that I forgot to charge my telescope battery… oops!
Desert clouds after sunset – October 5, 2021
While I managed great shots of the Cocoon Nebula and Helix nebula, the battery had only enough juice for a couple of hours until it could no longer provide enough electricity to power the scope. So I did a couple non-tracking constellation shots to call it a night.
On October 5-6, I made sure the battery was fully charged, and after presenting to a few curious people who came out specifically to see the stars and happened to see my telescope, I was ready for doing a composed mosaic of M31, C49, and M45.
With M31, I had successfully done this before, but it was before I had a coma corrector, and a trained eye could see my mistakes on the picture of it I took last fall. While I did properly get the entire galaxy in frame, the color balance would NOT match between the sections, therefore I kept the image as black and white.
With the Rosette Nebula and Pleiades, I simply wanted to make sure I didn’t leave anything in these large objects cropped out, and they ended up being really good compositions!
What’s cool about the Rosette Nebula is that one orientation makes it look like a rose, hence its namesake, but the other orientation makes it look like a skull!
Rosette Nebula – Rose 
Rosette Nebula – Skull
ORION BEAR ASTRONOMY 
👌👌👌📷
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Always a pleasure to see your great images and read your commentary, Anthony!
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