Gallery

Smoke from the terrible forest fires in the western US spread across the country, and it produced some unusual sights. Donna Pursley took this image of the gibbous Moon reddened by the smoke in the atmosphere on July 20.

Fred Danowski captured very nice images of Jupiter and Saturn around midnight on August 16-17. Equipment: Orion XT8 Plus, Baader 2.25x Barlow w/ Neodymium filter, Nikon D5300. Processed with: PIPP, Autostakkert!, Registax, GIMP. Fred writes: “I also used Astro Photography Tool (APT) for both the histogram to verify exposure, and the Bahtinov Mask tool to get good focus… I have learned that attaining critical focus is the hardest part of this entire thing. I used the camera’s built in video mode to shoot the raw video that I used to process. “

At this year’s Connecticut Star Party, Al Johnson took this impressive shot of the Perseus Double Cluster. He used a Trius SX814C camera and a FS102 refractor.

Although the weather was not great for the Perseid meteors, Jim Mazur used a few hours of clear (but hazy) skies on the nights of August 12 and 13 to take hundreds of 15-second exposures of the sky with a Canon T6i and and wide-angle lens at f/2. In a few of these exposures a meteor was visible, and these images were combined to make the composite image below. The three brightest stars in this picture are Vega, Deneb, and Altair–the Summer Triangle.