I don't usually have this good of a view of the southern parts of Scorpius. I took a trip to some dark skies near Julian, CA in hopes of getting a good shot of this desert critter constellation. Though there is still a bit of a light dome to deal with from the south, this is the best view I have had of the Scorpion's tail in a while.

Stack of 16 exposures that are about 2 minutes each at ISO 3200 with a Nikon D80. Tracking was done with an omegon MiniTrack LX2, which left the blurred remains of some local flora in the lower left of the image. Most of the work was done in PixInsight, with a little cleanup of gradients in Photoshop.

Tags:   Milky Way Scorpius Antares stars space cosmos dust Interstellar dust nebula star clusters dark nebula astronomy astrophoto sky night Shaula Dschubba Alniyat Pipe Nebula

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This is a mosaic that I had mostly constructed in 2019. The area around Antares (brightest star, in the lower left) was too challenging for a straightforward approach, so I hoped to try some different optics or other approaches in 2020.

I did not get out to a dark sky site with my rig in 2020. Hmmmm...

A magnitude 1 star like Anatares star will bring out any oddities in your optical path. Regardless of where I put the star in the field, I got these strange Lissajous figures of light somewhere else in the frame. After trying to shoot with an 80mm refractor, I thought about taking a bunch of images with Antares in different places on the sensor. Then, maybe I could build the mosaic around where these odd ghosts were appearing.

Thankfully, that worked. All sub-frames for this mosaic are 90 s exposures with an Atik 314L+ color CCD on a HyperStar on a Celestron Edge HD 925. Stacks were used to construct 23 separate panels. Preprocessing was done in Nebulosity. Registration, stacking, and plate solving was in PixInsight, then Mosaic by Coordinates to put the panels together. Some additional processing in PI before moving over to Photoshop for the final tweaks.

What all is in this image? The lower left corner is Antares - a Type M1.5 Iab-Ib supergiant star. The brightest star in the constellation Scorpius, it is massive enough that it will end its existence with a core collapse supernova. It is actually a double star, with its companion being a B2.5 main sequence star. I have no chance of resolving the companion with this setup. To the right of Antares is M4 - the globular cluster that is nearest to the Earth, at about 2200 pc away. This is one way of understanding how you can't tell distances from brightness or visual appearances in space. Antares is only about 170 pc away - about 12 times closer. M4 (NGC 6121) is a gravitationally bound association of tens of thousands of older stars. Another globular cluster - NGC 6144 - is above and to the right of Antares. At 8500 pc, it is roughly 4 times more distant than M4. This cluster is also partially obscured by all of the dust in this region.

That dust appears bright blue around the star i 22 Sco in the upper left. This is a reflection nebula - the dust particles are the right size to preferentially scatter the blue light from the star. Portions of this dust complex fill most of the left half of this image.

The bright star in the upper right is Alniyat (σ Sco). The red glow associated with it is an emission nebula. The hydrogen in this nebula is hit with high energy photons that separate the electrons from their nuclei. As they recombine, the strongest visible wavelength produced is this characteristic red glow.

Tags:   Antares Scorpius Alniyat M4 NGC 6121 NGC 6144 dark molecular clouds interstellar dust i Sco 22 Sco globular cluster emission nebula reflection nebula space astronomy sky astrophoto astrophotography cosmos supergiant

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I had been hoping to catch a total lunar eclipse in this part of the sky. As the Moon slipped into the Earth's umbra, the Milky Way came out along the entire length of the sky from the southwest to the northeast.

I had 14 minutes to try to get all the data for this image.

All images shot from the mountains above Santa Barbara, CA with a Nikon D80 on an omegon Minitrack LX2.

Stack of 11 30s exposures at ISO 3200
Stack of 12 6 s exposures at ISO 3200
Stack of 27 2.5 s exposures at ISO 1600

The eclipsed moon is from the 2.5 s stack, and the background is from the 30 s stack. The 6 s stack was used for some blending. All images registered and processed in PixInsight, with a lot of wrangling in Photoshop to get them to all work together.

Antares is the bright star at the left. Just below and to the right of it is the globular cluster M4. I couldn't quite pull out all the dust in this area, but this composition does a reasonable job of showing how rich this region is with stars. There are some other deep sky objects (mostly globular clusters) if you hunt around. The Moon barely made it into the umbra for this eclipse, and the stark contrast from its northern end to its southern end shows this.

Tags:   moon lunar eclipse total lunar eclipse blood moon super moon Scorpius Milky Way Antares Nikon D80 night sky

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Although I've shot this area of the sky plenty of times with a DSLR, I never gave it focused attention through the telescope. It's another off-center framing because I was trying to get some of the dense star clouds on the right edge of the picture. "Where are they?" you ask. Since I was shooting from my light polluted backyard, I thought maybe I could get them to show via narrowband filters. Alas, I could not. I will need to revisit this part of the sky during some spring or summer when I get get to dark skies again.

M6 - aka "The Butterfly Cluster" or NGC 6405 - is one of the bright star clusters off the tail of Scorpius. Its brightest members are mostly B-class stars, though one K-class giant star stands out on the right. The cluster is about 1600 light years from Earth.

This is a combination of Hα, [O III], and [S II] narrowband stacks. A combination of the hydrogen and sulfur channels were mapped to red, and oxygen used for green and blue. Colors were calibrated after channel combination in PixInsight. Each channel is a stack of 90 s exposures taken with a Celestron Edge HD 925 at f/2.3 with Hyperstar and an Atik 414-EX camera with Atik narrowband filters. Processing in PixInsight and Photoshop.

Tags:   stars space astronomy cosmos sky star cluster M6 NGC 6405 Butterfly Cluster Scorpius open cluster

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I shot this area originally with the Atik 314L+ one-shot color as part of the mosaic I am trying to put together around Antares. Alniyat (σ Sco) is just north and west of Antares in Scorpius. With the color camera, I had to work to bring out this nebula. Using the hydrogen-alpha (Hα) filter with the Atik 414-EX, it was no issue getting it to show up, even from my light polluted backyard.

This is another combination of RGB data from one camera and Hα data from a different camera with the same optical configuration -- Celestron Edge HD 925 at f/2.3 with HyperStar. Preprocessing in Nebulosity; stacking, channel combination, and processing in PixInsight; final touches in Photoshop.

Tags:   stars space cosmos astronomy astrophoto Alniyat Scorpius emission nebula HII region

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