The Sombrero Galaxy, a Blood Moon, and a bit more!
Richard P. Hill
Present: Jonah Kassen
3/20/2025
The school year has been hectic. I have not made nearly as much progress as planned, but I still fit in some interesting observations. Over spring break, I went down to Tennessee. I tried to get a lot of observations, but only a couple of them turned out. The most significant is an image of the Sombrero Galaxy, which was taken on my ZWO Seestar S50. Then, the night we returned home was a blood moon. I'll just get right into it.
Besides astrophotography, I also try to do some normal photography. I haven't had much time to do this either, and the cold hasn't helped much, but I did get some stunning images of the Smokey Mountains. I took these with my Sony A7 III and a 16mm lens. I will absolutely be using this lens during the summer to get some Milky Way photos!
I've been waiting quite a while to get this photo. Spring is sometimes affectionately called "galaxy season." I bet you could guess why. I don't have much to say about the Sombrero Galaxy, so let me talk about the ZWO Seestar S50 briefly. In the coming months or by the time this is being read, the S50 is supposed to be getting an equatorial mode. In short, this will eliminate field rotation, thus allowing for much longer exposure times and more regularity in exposures. This second part is crucial as it will allow for multi-night exposures. This will allow me to pull more color out of these galaxies instead of just seeing the dust clouds and trails. This will require more post-processing, such as Siril, but that is a topic for another time.
I did not know this subject even existed. While in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, I did not have great viewing or locations to set up equipment. Thus, I had to find subjects that fit a set of parameters to image them. This object is within the constellation Virgo. I will attempt to get a better photo once the S50 eq mode is released!
The Seestar pitfalls began to show up when imaging a terrestrial object. Since it is a small sensor with a relatively short focal length, it had difficulty producing a high-resolution image of the moon. My Sony A7 III with a 300mm lens was not as good as the Celestron 11-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain at WLC. One note of the Seestar: it was easily disturbed by the wind. Thus, some of my videos of the moon were quite nauseating. The Sony A7 III was attached to a Sky-Watcher Adventurer 2i. This worked quite well. I have the tools to implement right accession tracking, but did not see fit to use it yet. As a test, before I started imaging the moon, I got 4-minute sub exposures on the Sony A7 III before star trailing became noticeable. This is very promising for future deep-space photography!
Please email me at rickyhillzero@gmail.com if you are interested in these photos. There are many more than is usually shown per report.