Jupiter 2-1-17

Finally, Jupiter is back in the night sky! Oh, how I have missed this beautiful gas giant of a planet. As much as I enjoy imaging deep sky objects, my first love will always be planetary imaging. There is just something about imaging our local neighbors that puts me in a wonderful mood. Watching Jupiter rotate throughout the night is a sight to behold, and for such a large planet it does so about every 10 hours as opposed to our 24 hour Earth rotation. This means I can watch the great red spot on Jupiter slide across the surface in a matter of hours, and I can even see the movement of its 4 brighter moons. The black dot you see in the image is a shadow transit of Europa, one of Jupiter's larger moons.

P.S. This is my best image of Jupiter...so far

Technical details:
9,000 frames de-rotated in Winjupos
Stacked in Autostakkert2
Sharpened in Avistack2 and PS
Celestron Nexstar 6se telescope + 2x Barlow + 24mm eyepiece and extension tube
Celestron AVX Mount
Asi120mc-s camera

The Rosette Nebula

The Rosette Nebula taken in Cathedral City, CA

I've wanted to image the Rosette nebula for some time now, but with my Celestron 6se telescope it was not really feasible due to the large focal length of the scope. The Rosette nebula is huge! I decided to give it a try with my new Orion ST80, and I could not be happier with how it turned out. It is certainly not a Hubble image, but I did the best I could under light polluted skies, and man does it look beautiful.

5 hours total exposure time
Canon 450d
Orion ST80
Orion Skyglow filter
Celestron AVX mount

Stacked in DSS
Edited it CS6 and LR