Another month has flown by – we’re only a week away from Halloween! October began with Donna taking a trip to Bennington, Vermont to visit her parents. I drove Donna to the airport in the early morning of Tuesday, October 3rd. I had time after dropping her off for a quick breakfast and coffee before sunrise. Then I packed my photography gear and headed over to the Riparian Preserve in Gilbert. The first hour or so after sunrise usually has great light for photography.

I shot a few bird photos that I thought were nice. This hummingbird is puffed up, warming herself in the sunrise.

I shot a sequence of a snowy egret skimming the water and capturing a fish for breakfast.

The third photo of the sequence above shows the nice early morning light on the back of the egret’s wings. I also captured an image of cormorants in flight.

The cormorants are flying toward the sunrise and the light on their underside is very nice.

The glassy water reflects the image of these black-neck stilts.

I also liked the simple composition of this black phoebe photo.

Friday, October 6th was my birthday. Donna was away, but she left me a card with a gift certificate for RJ’s Cigars. This was just right as I planned to go to RJ’s Cigar Lounge and enjoy a top-shelf cigar for my birthday. I also want to give a shout out and thank you to long-time blog follower, Miriam Armbrester. Miriam sent me a birthday card. I really appreciate the fact that she took the time to select a card and send it to me in the mail. We met Miriam and her husband, Rand, when we were in Alabama in 2018. They treated us to lunch at the oldest restaurant in Alabama – I wrote about it here.

Donna came back from Vermont on Sunday, October 8th. During the month of October and into November, many of the winter snowbirds return to Viewpoint. Residents of the northern states and Canada return as the weather here cools and becomes downright cold in the areas they summer in. We’ve had slightly cooler weather with a few exceptions where we had very warm afternoons. The evenings are pleasant and overnights are much cooler now.

My last attempt at astrophotography was on our trip to our housesit in Cortez, Colorado. I was foiled by clouds there. The summer months of July through September were too hot here for astrophotography. Here’s the thing – I use dedicated astrophotogrphy cameras for deep sky objects. These cameras have electronically cooled sensors to capture the image.

Deep sky objects are so dim and so far away that long exposure times are necessary. If the image sensor gets too hot, it creates noise – that is, random pixels will glow in uncontrolled ways, making the image appear grainy and lack clarity. For deep sky photography, I like to maintain the sensor temperature at zero degrees Celsius (32 degrees Fahrenheit). My best camera is able to cool the sensor 35 degrees Celsius below the ambient temperature – others are capable of cooling 30 degrees Celsius below ambient.

In the summer here, it’s not uncommon for the ambient temperature to remain above 90 degrees (about 30 degrees Celsius) well after dark. This would mean my camera’s cooling system would have to run at 100% output continuously to try and cool the sensor enough. I don’t like to run it above 50% and once cool, it should maintain the temperature with about 25% output. Thus, I give up astrophotography here in the summer. I could photograph planets or the moon. These are such bright objects, they can be captured with very short exposures and do not need cooling. But I find it hard to motivate myself to set up my gear when it’s hot outside and doesn’t get dark until after 9pm.

Lately, the temperature has been dropping to around 80 degrees shortly after sunset. I still have some new gear that I bought earlier this summer, but haven’t been able to try out. While Donna was away, I set up here at the Northpoint Recreation Center in the Viewpoint Resort. I used my Player One Poseidon astro-camera for the first time. I had some technical difficulties the first night and had to give up. I went back out on October 4th and captured just short of three hours of usable 75 second sub-exposures. This is the Andromeda Galaxy, one of the first deep sky targets I attempted when I got into this hobby about 10 months ago. This is an improvement over my earlier attempt, but it needs more time to reveal the detail.

Although this galaxy is over two million light years away from earth, it’s the closest galaxy to our own Milky Way galaxy.

I mentioned technical difficulties – they hit again the next time I went out. I was very frustrated and finally figured the laptop I was using, which was a refurbished unit I bought on Amazon had signs of impending hard drive failure. I bit the bullet and went to Best Buy and bought a better laptop with a 1TB solid state drive.

Unfortunately, the new laptop was loaded with Windows 11 – the old one was Windows 10. Most of the astrophotography open source (free) software I use was developed for Windows 10. I had to download all of the software programs and reconfigure everything. Some software, NINA for example, had to have new paths configured to communicate with other needed programs. NINA manages my session, communicating with as many as four other programs simultaneously. I’m not that computer savvy and it took a lot frustrating trial and error to get it working.

I’ve wanted to capture an image of the Eastern Veil Nebula for a while – it was to be my target when we were in Cortez, Colorado. It’s getting a little late in the year, but I went for it. My first session was full of technical issues that resulted in only 76 minutes of usable data.

After finally getting all of my gear and software to play nice, I added two more sessions for a total time of four hours and 23 minutes. This produced a nicely detailed view with vibrant, saturated color. The red areas are hydrogen gas and the blue is oxygen.

The Eastern Veil Nebula is located in the constellation Cygnus. It’s part of a large supernova complex called the Cynus Loop. The entire loop is quite large with distinct areas of gas created when a large star (20 times the size of our sun) died. When stars die (supernova) the outer areas explode away from the core creating these vast clouds of gas, while the core implodes into a high density mass that may become a black hole.

In the photo above, you can see traces of hydrogen throughout, leaving a reddish cast. I might try to capture more of the Cynus Loop – the Western Veil and Pickering’s Triangle.

With Donna back home again, I’ve enjoyed some gourmet dinners. First I’ll share the sheet-pan chicken with shallots and grapes. Served over spaghetti squash, it was an interesting and delicious dish.

Another goody was creamy scallops with fresh tomatoes.

Although the thermometer flirted with 100 degrees last week, the week ahead and into November calls for highs in the low 80s and eventually down to the 70s. Looking forward to that!