We are now in our standard
summertime weather pattern in the SF Bay area: we get the low "marine
layer" clouds nearly every night.
It is great for imaging from
mountain tops because it does a great job of blocking the lights from
the cities, but it stinks if you like to image from the backyard as do
I, because my home is only at 400 feet elevation and usually you need
to be about 2500 feet or higher to get over the clouds.
So Saturday I schlepped my gear up
to Fremont Peak (~3000 feet) to do some imaging. My plan was shooting
nebulae down in the lower southern part of the sky but the marine layer
was up a bit high to make me feel comfortable choosing such low
targets. About two hours after sunset it did finally settle down below
the horizon but by that time I had decided to pursue another part of
the sky that was less likely to be threatened by the clouds.
I ended up on NGC6946, a nice face
on grand design spiral galaxy. Keeping things simple I shot straight up
RGB without any luminance. I just took 6 x 10 minutes through each of
my three filters and then moved on to another target before sunrise and
flat taking time.
I didn't realize that I had the
remnants of SN2004et in the FOV until one of our local astronomers
called it to my attention.
So I sort of got a twofer. SN2004et
was discovered about nine months ago so it is not as bright as it was
when discovered.
Here are the images
NGC6946 from AP180EDT f/9 and
IMG6303E
SN2004et with additional links to
prediscovery image and image from three days after discovery and this
work, which is nine months post discovery
I'd like to post this to the ccd
list but the moderator has banned me for violating unwritten rules. I
am still trying to figure out how a guy can violate a rule that isn't
written down. Maybe someone can tell me how that works?