Two weeks ago this day I was driving across southern Kansas heading home from the star party. I miss the dark skies and friends, the dusty field full of people waiting for the night sky. It’s a whole different world there.
From my time under the stars in western Oklahoma I’ve composed this one astrophotograph, a dusty reflection nebula called LBN 534 straddling the border of the constellations Andromeda and Cassiopeia. Click the thumbnail image for a bigger version.
LBN stands for Lynd’s Bright Nebula, a catalogue of objects compiled from examining the red and blue plates from the Palmer Sky Survey done in the late 1950s. This particular object is not bright, in fact its very dim. I attempted it before back in 2008 without success, I never had enough exposure time for a good picture then. This year I spent more than 12 hours time over three nights with a QSI 583 camera. I wish I’d spent even more time imaging this, the seeing was not particularly good on some of the nights and the area around LBN534 appears to be full of dust.
Astrophotography is not a hobby for the impatient. It took me three years to get the picture I wanted.