ROAST

November 12, and a completely clear night at last. The all-night schedule included M 31 (Andromeda Galaxy), the Pleiades. another go at the Horsehead Nebula, and M 81 (Bode’s Galaxy).

A note on power. The Mini was running continuously from 17:30pm to 6:00am the next morning, so 12½ hours. The Mini and the connected power bank were both fully charged to start with, and at the end the Mini’s battery stood at 20%; the schedule completed successfully. (If the internal battery drops below 10% the Mini will close itself down.) The power bank is a Tronic-branded item from Lidl, rated at 20,000mAh, and costs about £15. So to run the Mini all night needs a power bank with that rating. It was a cold night (below 0°C at times) which may affect the battery efficiency.

So, next morning I did a megastack of the two Horsehead Nebula sessions:

This has brought out some of the fainter nebulosity, and improved the detail.

Details:
Target: HD 37903 (Lump Star; includes Horsehead and Flame Nebulae)
Megastack session 1:
 Equipment: Dwarf Mini, Duo-Band, perfect EQ
 Time: 2026-11-12 00:25-02:26
 Integration: 1hr 50mins (110×60secs, +6 failures), gain 60
 Conditions: Clear; Bortle 6
Megastack session 2:
 Equipment: Dwarf Mini, Duo-Band filter, perfect EQ
 Time: 2026-11-13 00:06-02:22
 Integration: 2hr 2mins (122×60secs, +11 failures), gain 80
 Conditions: Clear; Bortle 6
Total integration: 3hrs 52mins
Processing: PhotoDesk equalisation, gamma, crop, rotation, usm 5,60,2

++++++ More to come

And so to bed…

November 11, and the first clearish night for nearly a month. The clouds finally parted at about midnight which provided an opportunity for a first go at the Horsehead Nebula, Barnard 33, in Orion:

The horse’s head is a dark nebula which lies in front of, and so obscures, the long emission nebula IC 434.

Just below the horse’s head is the small blueish reflection nebula NGC 2023. The star in the centre of this is the Lump Star, HD 37903, which was used to aim the Mini so that the image would include NGC 2024, the large bright Flame Nebula on the left.

The brightest star here is Alnitak, or Zeta Orionis, the leftmost star in Orion’s belt. It’s a blue supergiant, 20 times bigger than the sun, and is a triple star sytem.

The Flame Nebula, NGC 2024, is being ionised and heated by a central star cluster which is only visible in infrared observations. Despite appearances, it’s not connected with Alnitak, which is further away.

Details:
Target: HD 37903 (Lump Star; includes Horsehead and Flame Nebulae)
Equipment: Dwarf Mini, Duo-Band, perfect EQ
Time: 2026-11-12 00:25-02:26
Integration: 1hr 50mins (110×60secs, +6 failures), gain 60
Conditions: Clear; Bortle 6
Processing: PhotoDesk equalisation, gamma, crop, rotation, usm10,60,2

The Mini failed to detect a couple of frames where the tracking was off, leading to some trails on the brighter stars. Deleting these in the app and restacking fixed it.

And so to bed…

October 16, a clear night and as winter approaches Orion starts to become visible in the early mornings, though still a bit too low for M 42 to be imageable.

But the constellation’s environs include the Rosette Nebula in Monoceros — last imaged in February, just after I’d got the Mini — and a first go at NGC 2174, aka the Monkey Head Nebula, in Orion. Here’s the Monkey:

It’s an emission nebula about 6,400 light years away, associated with the star cluster in the centre of the nebula, NGC 2175. It looks more like a somewhat surprised human head than a monkey to me though.

Details:
Target: NGC 2174 (Monkey Head Nebula)
Equipment: Dwarf Mini, Duo-Band, perfect EQ
Time: 2026-10-17 01:07-04:03
Integration: 2hrs 34mins (154×60secs, +8 failures), gain 60
Conditions: Clear; Bortle 6
Processing: PhotoDesk equalisation, gamma, usm5,60,2

And this a megastack of last night’s Rosette Nebula shoot with the February one:

Much improved — I’ve learned a lot about using the scope and processing images in the last 9 months. There were 19 failed images in last night’s shoot, the last 17 because the nebula moved behind a wall — the perils of unmonitored schedule shooting.

Details:
Target: NGC 2237 (Rosette Nebula)
Megastack session 1:
 Equipment: Dwarf Mini, Duo-Band filter, perfect EQ
 Time: 2026-02-28 20:34-21:05
 Integration: 1hr 32mins (92×60secs, +8 failures), gain 90
 Conditions: Clear but hazy; Bortle 6
Megastack session 2:
 Equipment: Dwarf Mini, Duo-Band filter, perfect EQ
 Time: 2026-10-17 04:12-06:09
 Integration: 1hr 45mins (105×60secs, +19 failures), gain 60
 Conditions: Clear; Bortle 6
Total integration: 3hrs 17mins
Processing: PhotoDesk equalisation, gamma, usm 5,60,2

And so to bed…

October 10. A lovely clear night started with a country-wide aurora:

This was taken with a phone — I tried using the Mini’s wide-angle camera but it had a very limited view to the north from the garden, and it didn’t work well. I could have moved it, but that would have messed up the equatorial alignment.

Anyway, a good start to the evening. I had set up a schedule of three objects, starting with some more work on the Soul Nebula upping the total integration time to 10 hours. More detail than the previous megastack, and the fainter nebulosity is clearer.

Details:
Target: IC 1848 (Soul Nebula, Westerhout 5, Sh-2 199, LBN 667)
Megastack session 1:
 Equipment: Dwarf Mini, Duo-Band filter, perfect EQ
 Time: 2026-07-18 01:10-03:30
 Integration: 1hr 24mins (84×60secs, +45 failures), gain 60
 Conditions: Clear; Bortle 6
Megastack session 2:
 Equipment: Dwarf Mini, Duo-Band filter, perfect EQ
 Time: 2026-08-08 01:40..03:59
 Integration: 2hrs 7mins (127×60secs, 0 failures), gain 60
 Conditions: Clear; Bortle 6
Megastack session 3:
 Equipment: Dwarf Mini, Duo-Band filter, perfect EQ
 Time: 2026-10-10 20:11-00:57
 Integration: 4hrs 15mins (255×60secs, +6 failures), gain 60
 Conditions: Clear; Bortle 6
Total integration: 10hrs 27mins
Processing: PhotoDesk equalisation, gamma, usm 5,60,0

Next up was a 2-panel mosaic of the Flaming Star Nebula, IC 405, in Auriga:

Details:
Target: IC 405 (Flaming Star Nebula)
Equipment: Dwarf Mini, Duo-Band filter, perfect EQ
Time: 2026-10-11 01:08-04:55
Integration: 3hrs 20mins (200×60secs, +4 failures), gain 60; 1hr 40mins/panel
Conditions: Clear, Bortle 6
Processing: PhotoDesk equalisation, gamma

This has both emission and reflection areas, so might benefit from combining with an Astro-filtered session.

Finally, Mars was passing through the Beehive Cluster in Cancer. This is fairly low in the sky at the moment and only gets to be visible at 5am or so. I used 30-second exposures and reduced the gain to 40, to hopefully not blow out Mars too much. The hour-long exposure did mean that Mars is slightly elongated though.

Details:
Target: M 44 (Beehive Cluster + Mars)
Equipment: Dwarf Mini, Astro filter, perfect EQ
Time: 2026-10-11 05:02-06:03
Integration: 54mins (108×30secs, +1 failure), gain 40
Conditions: Clear, Bortle 6
Processing: PhotoDesk equalisation, gamma

And so to bed…

October 7, another clear night and a repeat of the Oct 3 schedule. Like the previous schedule all three sessions were incorrectly marked as failed in the details panel of the app — a known “issue” in the software which will hopefully be fixed soon.

Here’s a megastack of the two IC 417 sessions. More detail, especially in the Fly:

I’ve reduced the star layer opacity to 60%, which brings out the nebulosity a bit more.

And so to bed…

October 3 was a fully clear night at last, with 0% chance of rain, so I did a schedule of three objects. The nights are getting much longer now, and the schedule ran from 8:00pm to 5:00am the next morning. I always connect a power bank when doing schedules (essential when it’s running for 9 hours), and next morning the Mini still had 100% power and the power bank still had some reserve. The bank I was using was from Lidl, the Tronic rated at 20,000mAh.

This is IC 417 and NGC 1931 in Auriga, known as the Spider and the Fly respectively. The Spider is an emission nebula about 7,100 light years away, while the smaller emission and reflection Fly nebula is a bit further, at 7,500 ly.

Details:
Target: IC 417 (Spider Nebula)
Equipment: Dwarf Mini, Duo-Band, perfect EQ
Time: 2026-10-04 01:04-05:00
Integration: 3hrs 32mins (212×60secs, +2 failures), gain 60
Conditions: Clear, waning gibbous Moon; Bortle 6
Processing: PhotoDesk equalisation, gamma

The middle session was yet another go at the Triangulum Galaxy, M 33. This is the result of megastacking all my efforts to date, 6 sessions combining 623 images using Astro and Duo-Band filters:

Better, but still needs improvement. I’m hopeful that when the Draco arrives it will do much better at this target.

And so to bed…

October 1, a clear night and another session with M 31 before it moves away.

This is a megastack of three mosaic sessions, with somewhat less aggressive processing than the previous effort. It’s easy to overdo unsharp masking, and here it’s radius 5, contrast boost 80%, threshold 0%. Good to have no failures in last night’s session though.

Details:
Target: M 31 (Andromeda Galaxy)
Megastack session 1:
 Equipment: Dwarf Mini, Astro filter, perfect EQ
 Format: Two-frame mosaic, 1.0×1.8
 Time: 2026-09-08, 23:20 - 04:03
 Integration: 3hrs 42mins (222×60secs, +28 failures), gain 50
 Conditions: Clear with sporadic cloud; Bortle 6
Megastack session 2:
 Equipment: Dwarf Mini, Astro filter, perfect EQ
 Format: Two-frame mosaic, 1.0×1.8
 Time: 2026-09-10, 00:10 - 03:01
 Integration: 2hrs 30mins (150×60secs, +1 failure), gain 50
 Conditions: Clear; Bortle 6
Megastack session 3:
 Equipment: Dwarf Mini, Astro filter, perfect EQ
 Format: Two-frame mosaic, 1.0×1.8
 Time: 2026-10-01, 20:52 - 01:21
 Integration: 4hrs (240×60secs, 0 failures), gain 60
 Conditions: Clear, waning gibbous Moon; Bortle 6
Total integration: 10hrs 12mins (5:06 per frame)
Processing: PhotoDesk equalisation, gamma, unsharp mask

And so to bed…

September 28, and the first clear night for many weeks.

Here’s a much better four-session megastack of the Ghost Nebula in Cassiopeia, IC 63. Full details to follow.

And so to bed…

September 8-10. And after more than two weeks, at last some clear skies.

On 21 August I imaged C 30, aka the Deer Lick Group. In early September a supernova was discovered in this galaxy, so I decided to have a go at imaging it. Here’s an animation of the two images with the supernova marked:

So, a success. The 8 September session was interrupted by clouds so was limited to 90 minutes total exposure (the earlier one was 3 hours), so some of the fainter stars haven’t shown up well.

This supernova is designated SN 2026aaiv; more info and pictures here. It’s a type 1a supernova, which means it’s a binary system in which one of the stars (the one that exploded) is a white dwarf. A similar supernova was seen in this galaxy in 2025.

The clear(ish) skies meant I could at last have a go at doing a mosaic of the Andromeda Galaxy to get more of it in the frame. This is a megastack of a pair of 2-frame mosaics taken on 8 and 9 September; the occasional cloud on 8 September caused the left edge problem. It’s a large image, so click for biggie:

And for comparison, an unsharp-masked one (10,100,1). Not sure which is better:

Details:
Target: M 31 (Andromeda Galaxy)
Megastack session 1:
 Equipment: Dwarf Mini, Astro filter, perfect EQ
 Format: Two-frame mosaic, 1.0×1.8
 Time: 2026-09-08, 23:20 - 04:03
 Integration: 3hrs 42mins (222×60secs, +28 failures), gain 50
 Conditions: Clear with sporadic cloud; Bortle 6
Megastack session 2:
 Equipment: Dwarf Mini, Astro filter, perfect EQ
 Format: Two-frame mosaic, 1.0×1.8
 Time: 2026-09-10, 00:10 - 03:01
 Integration: 2hrs 30mins (150×60secs, +1 failure), gain 50
 Conditions: Clear; Bortle 6
Total integration: 6hrs 12mins
Processing: PhotoDesk equalisation, gamma

And so to bed…

August 28. A near-total lunar eclipse should have been visible in the early hours, but when the alarm woke us up the sky was completely clouded over. And even the promised lightning display never turned up. Doh.

So here’s another go at processing the Triangulum Galaxy, M 33:

M 33 seems a rather hard target to process, given it’s one of the brightest and closest galaxies. Here I’ve tried unsharp-masking the Astro filtered images from August 14 (radius 2, contrast boost 300, threshold 2). It’s better, but there’s still a lack of detail.

Details:
Target: Triangulum Galaxy (M 33, NGC 598)
Equipment: Dwarf Mini, Astro filter, perfect EQ
Time: 2026-08-14 23:33-02:28
Integration: 2hrs 21mins (141×60secs, +19 failures), gain 60
Conditions: Clear, Bortle 6
Processing: PhotoDesk equalisation, unsharp mask

And so to bed…