Orion Ranch Observatory Blog

Last night I managed to get some decent shots of the M16, the Eagle nebula. I hadn’t posted last year’s effort yet because it really wasn’t up to snuff, but this one turned out pretty good despite numerous problems imaging. Enjoy!

Well, the skies actually cleared (more or less) last night and I managed to get some halfways decent images. Guiding wasn’t perfect and I didn’t get very many good exposures, but I managed to make something of it. The Pelican Nebula is located right next to the North American Nebula (see the picture taken last year — you can actually see part of the Pelican in that shot) in the northern spiral arm of the Milky Way. The posted picture was taken with my F/9 ED100. I also piggybacked my Nikon and took a stack of the Milky Way, centered on the Pelican.  You can actually see the red North American Nebula near the center.

Here’s hoping everyone had a Happy 4th of July Holiday (for those of us in the States). I had some family visiting and after shooting off a bunch of fireworks, the skies cleared just enough after all the storms that spun off of Hurricane Alex last week to allow us to do a bit of viewing Sunday night. We managed to take in Saturn, M13 (Hercules Cluster), the Swan Nebula, the Lagoon Nebula, M81 and M82 (Bodes and Cigar galaxies), the Butterfly Cluster, and the Wild Duck Cluster through all the haze before calling it a night. I spent most of the weekend working on another site, but I did add a couple of modules to the photo gallery. They’re experimental, but there are some neat features. After a bit of tweaking I’ll probably replace the random image in the sidebar with the scrollers that are there now.

Michael

I’ve completed uploading the observatory construction progress to date, as well as adding some pictures of my redesigned camera cooler box that will allow me to take decent astrophotos during the summer months.  Here’s hoping the weather will be suitable to do so in the coming weeks.   I’ll add descriptions to the pics as I have time, but it may be a while before that’s done. 

There’s a neat pic towards the end of the observatory construction that shows the constellation of Orion rising over Orion Ranch.  That was taken the night we had first light with our first pier.  I may post that pic, or a video of that to the astrophoto page.

Hope you enjoy the pics!

Michael

The first two months of work on the observatory have been posted, showing the progress through the first of November last year. I’ll add more descriptions, etc. some other time.  You can see them here.

Michael

Well, unless you skipped the front page coming here (doubtful) you’ll see I now have the latest blog post and the about page linked into the front page. Of course this post is more to test the feature than to tell you anything, but you’ve probably already guessed that! At any rate, welcome to the site!

Welcome to Orion Ranch Observatory’s new web log.  I’ve just recently moved my hosting from the HORRIBLE hosting at Go Daddy over to the quite excellent service at Host Monster.  As usual, I should have done some homework prior to choosing my host, but I was in a hurry to try something out.  Oh well, live and learn!

At any rate, enough of a rant and plug.  Now on to the website.  Right now the primary feature of the site is the picture gallery, of course!  The goal was to be able to share pics of my astrophotography and the development of my observatory.  I’ve spent quite a bit of time developing a custom theme for the Gallery 3 release candidate, and now that I’ve moved to a better host, it works great!

Located in the Texas Hill Country, northwest of Austin, TX, Orion Ranch will be the home to a new roll-off observatory in addition to the livestock and wildlife.  Progress is stalled for the moment as I work on other projects on the ranch, but check back regularly for new photos.