Greenhawk Observatory

04/04/2026

Last night I decided to see if I could track the Artemis II mission with my telescope.

Using my Takahashi Sky 90 with the ZWO 533MC camera I was able to capture 201 exposures of 10 seconds each which I converted to a movie. The 40 second movie captures 35 minutes in actual time.
It was a moving experience, watching the screen refresh every 10 seconds, watching how that point of light progressed on the background of the infinite void and background stars, knowing there are 4 astronauts inside that point of light heading for the moon.

I also stacked and stretched the 201 images to show the streak / motion of the capsule as it moves through space. Images were taken between 2:11 AM and 2:57 AM last night pacific.

Going to try and see if I can get it visually as well with my 12".
Fun experience.

04/01/2026

Take a beat from the insanity all around. For the first time since 1972, if all goes well, humans will be leaving Earth's orbit at 6:24PM ET and will orbit the moon as part of a series of missions that will lead to the first moon landing in over half a century.
“Astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to another.” Plato, 360 BC
Watch it live on YouTube or your favorite news station.

This live feed from our Kennedy Space Center in Florida will provide continuous views of the Artemis II Moon rocket beginning on Thursday, March 19, with rol...

03/07/2026

First Light with Takahashi Sky-90 telescope
This is the first image I have taken with this scope. 4 hours and 48 minutes of M78, taken on March 5&6.

02/13/2026

New Image: The Crab Nebula
In the year 1054 a new star appeared in the sky. For 23 days it was visible even in daytime, and at night it remained visible for nearly two years. It was carefully recorded by Chinese astronomers and likely noted by Indigenous peoples in North America.
That was the supernova of a massive star located about 6,500 light years away. Which means that roughly around 5400–5500 BCE, that star exploded in a Type II supernova, and it took over 6,500 years for the light of that explosion to reach Earth and suddenly blaze in our sky.
Today we call it the Crab Nebula.
The nebula is the expanding remnant of that explosion. And at its heart sits a pulsar — a neutron star about 1.4 times the mass of our Sun, compressed into a sphere only about 20 kilometers across, roughly the size of a city. It spins around its axis 30 times per second, sweeping beams of radiation across space like a cosmic lighthouse. Its radio pulses were first detected in the late 1960s, confirming the incredible physics at the core of this ancient explosion.
The image was taken with a 26 year old Celestron C-8 scope at it native 2000mm focal length, on an AP900 Mount with a ZWO ASI533MC camera (no filters). 80 minute exposure. It really needs longer to bring out more of the details.

02/09/2026

First light - working to refurbish a 26 year old C-8 SCT. Still work in progress. This is a short exposure taken last night.

08/22/2025

NGC 7331 Galaxy
This has been a fun image to work on. The center piece is the galaxy NGC 7331. I saw NGC 7331 visually a few times with my 12” Dobsonian. It is a challenging and faint target. Best view was at Glacier Point in Yosemite, where I was able to pick up some of the spiral structure and 4 of the dimmer nearby galaxies. This image has captured so much more – a supernova, a galaxy zoo (at least 39 galaxies that I could find), some galaxies that do not have published redshift data so their distance is uncertain, a historical NGC object that was incorrectly marked as a potential galaxy in the 19th century but is now known to be a double-star and one galaxy located 2.5 billion light-years away, making it the oldest photons I have ever captured.
The supernova near the center of the galaxy was detected on July 14, 2025 and is still quite bright. It is a supernova type 1a, when a white dwarf exceeds the mass of 1.38 solar masses (AKA the Chandra limit) and the entire star instantly collapses and detonates and for a while was as bright as the entire galaxy core. NGC 7338 was erroneously catalogued as a galaxy, we now know it is a double star, but it has been kept in the catalog to preserve the historical record. Below I have listed all the galaxies that I have been able to identify and their distances. The record is Galaxy PGC 3088708 with an estimated distance of 2.2 to 2.5 billion light years away! Not bad for a 5” refractor from a Bortle 7.1 sky.
Scope: 5” AP Refractor
Mount: AP900
Camera: ZWO ASI533MC with IDAS LPS 3 Broadband filter
Exposure: 3 hours
Processed in PixInsights

NGC 7331 distance 43 million light-years
NGC 7343 distance 343 million light-years
PGC 69402 distance 890 million light-years
PGC 2045849 distance uncertain (one source claims 2.2 Billion light-years)
PGC 69387 distance uncertain
PGC 141039 distance 1.15 billion light-years
PGC 141039 distance uncertain
PGC 2047594 distance uncertain
NGC 7340 distance 294 million light years
NGC 7338 is a double star
NGC 7337 distance 300-350 million light years
NGC 7335 distance 332 million light years
NGC 7336 distance 300-350 million light years
NGC 7333 distance 300-350 million light years
PGC 69291 distance uncertain
PGC 69281 distance uncertain
NGC 7331c distance 39.79 million light years
LEDA 2052629 distance uncertain
PGC 3088708 distance 2.2 - 2.55 billion light years
PGC 2051985 distance 290-400 million light years
NGC 7315 distance 283 million light years

08/21/2025

NGC 6604 located in the constellation Serpens is an open cluster seen in the lower part of the image. The nearby nebulosity (S54) is thought to be the source of these young stars estimated to be 6.5 million years old (a small fraction of the age of our sun). Located about 4,200 light years away and fairly close in the sky to the famous Eagle Nebula (M16).

Image details:
Scope: 5" AP Refractor
Mount: AP 900
Camera: ZWO ASI533MC (with Optolong L-Xtreme filter)
Exposure time: 1 hour and 45 minutes

08/14/2025

Have you ever seen this planetary nebula in the constellation of Hercules? Neither have I. You would need at least a 16” scope with an O-III filter with averted vision to spot this little gem. Say hello to Abell 39 (PN A66 39). This image is a 114-minute exposure with a 5” refractor and the ZWO ASI533MC camera. Really needs much more aperture and a couple of more hours to bring out finer details.
The nearly perfectly uniform spherical planetary nebula emanates from a star that is 60% the mass of our sun and located roughly 3,600 light-years away. While it is considered an “oxygen poor” nebula it is mostly the oxygen that we can see producing the green blue (Teal) color. Hydrogen is present but does not show well due to the low surface brightness and low density of the nebula. To put things into perspective, this planetary nebula is over 90 times dimmer than the ring nebula (M57).

08/06/2025

Had a few cloudy nights, so I revisited older images to see if I could improve on my image processing, here are a few samples. You can see the rest on www.greenhawkobservatory.com

07/30/2025

New 4 hour exposure of the Trifid Nebula. Click on the link to read about it: https://www.greenhawkobservatory.com/m20

07/15/2025

Say hello to NGC 7380 AKA the Wizard Nebula , imaged last night for 2 hours. This emission nebula and the star cluster nestled in it are about 8,000 light years away and like Pickering's Triangle mentioned in a prior post, was discovered by a female astronomer, Caroline Herschel in 1787.