Our yard is currently under construction, so if I want to shoot right now, I need to travel. Luckily, I was able to rope my 14-year-old into taking a late-night trip over to Zelków. While we didn’t have much time, I reckoned it would be a good opportunity to spend some time imaging Cassiopeia. Well, it almost worked out. Unfortunately, from where we set up, we had to wait a bit before Cassiopeia rose high enough above the treeline to image. Practically, this means we don’t have many images to show for our effort. But hey, it’s the father-son time that means the most to me. So with that blessing and a little patience, here is what happened when we revisited Cassiopeia.
A Bit Darker Than My Backyard
I mean nothing groundbreaking, but a 10-minute drive moves me from a solid Bortle 6 zone to a nice little Bortle 5 spot with half the brightness of my backyard. It’s worth the drive when the skies cooperate. It didn’t take us more than a few minutes to get set up and finish the polar alignment. Beta was ticking away and trained on Cassiopeia so we retreated to the car to monitor the images. It took about half an hour for Cassiopeia to fully clear the treeline which put us at half-past eleven when we started shooting.
Nothing notable here – just my standard settings lately. 30-second exposures at f/2.8 and an ISO of 400. We’d finish with 40 dark frames and 40 flats before heading back.
Things were going well until… That all too familiar and annoying buzzing sound appeared. Yeah, I suppose it’s that time of the year again. We’ve been spared the scourge of mosquitoes thus far this season as it’s been dry and the nights have been cool. But we’re now in summer so from here on out we’ll need to remember to pack our bug spray. Fortunately, we were able to quickly take care of the few brave scouts out this evening. It also didn’t hurt that there was a pretty steady light breeze that kept the little creeps away.
One of Us Was Counting Sheep
Well, about 20 or so minutes into our session, a lull in the conversation was more than enough time for the Sandman to swoop in and do his thing. While we didn’t have any more mosquitoes, the evening calm was interrupted by the low rumble of my teen sawing logs. I just let him go and waited for the current program to finish. He’d wake back up to help me finish taking the darks and then we just broke down the rig and headed home.
Putting Things Together in Post
The next day I pulled my images together and decided to keep about 54 images. That’s a disappointing 27 minutes of integration time from a photo perspective, but more than enough to play with. I decided in processing to mimic the workflow I came across on YouTube by a gentleman named Gary Snow of the channel BorealisLite. I just used Siril, Starnet++, and Gimp to process the image, and below you will see the result of the photo my son and I captured as I revisited Cassiopeia for the first time this year.
It’s cool to see that even with such a short amount of integration time, a bit of nebulosity sitting above Cassiopeia along with the Pacman nebula. And the Cassiopeia constellation looks great. I think when we head away for vacation this summer under darker skies, I’ll look to target this region again.
Of course, I hope to be able to start shooting Andromeda again soon as well! Beta is ready to take on this challenge with the 50mm and with any luck, maybe I’ll have the 135mm on Gamma by then as well. Too soon to say. But that’s the goal anyhow. I’ll post again if I manage to get outside or if there are any significant developments with Gamma.