One Week to Change It All!

My Stellar Week: An Astrophotography Deep Dive with Julio

Oh, holidays… so good when they start, and so tough when they end, right? I just wrapped up an amazing week with my good friend Julio, who flew all the way from Spain. We’d been planning this for months: a week of living by night and sleeping by day… a true ode to the stars!

We kicked things off by dedicating an entire night to getting my mount perfectly polar aligned in the observatory and measuring its periodic error. With the mount dialed in, it was finally time to put my C11 through its paces. And guess what? Right on the first night, we snagged some solid 5-minute subs at F10 (that’s a whopping 2800mm focal length!) with surprisingly little fuss. I’m also eagerly awaiting an adapter so I can finally use my 6.3 reducer and minimize any pesky vignetting…

We didn’t stop there! We captured a bunch of images using a variety of optics: the trusty C80ED, the C11, a 250mm F/5 Newtonian, and even several telephoto lenses. More than anything, this week was a fantastic opportunity for us to really hit home the idea of prioritizing image quality over sheer quantity. And that realization has spurred me into a new, rather ambitious adventure: I’ve set out to image M31 (the Andromeda Galaxy) for a total of 20 hours, spread across multiple nights, using 10-minute exposures. As I’m typing this, the observatory is chugging along autonomously, and we’ve already racked up over 10 and a half hours of glorious light frames, plus plenty of darks, of course… Stay tuned for the results!

A huge thanks to Julio for all the awesome images illustrating this post!