Mike's Astro Photos

A10 with eagle on July 4th 2009

About 7-10 A10s flew over my house a couple times in the late morning on July 4th, 2009. I heard and saw them earlier but didn’t have my camera handy. I figured they would fly back over when they were done so I get everything ready and was able to get pictures of them when they were flying back to the base. While I was reviewing my photos I found this one, with what looks to be an eagle flying with the A10. Click the picture to enlarge and see the detail on the plane and bird. Since its July 4th I’m going to go with — this is an American Eagle just because I’m a true romantic. If there’s anybody out there that can prove or disprove this claim please comment on the post. We have lots of hawks and big birds where I live and I’ve seen American Eagles around our neighborhood before, so who knows. Happy July 4th!

Sirius is one of the brightest stars in the sky, if not the brightest. It looks like a diamond when you look at it thru the eye piece.

Sirius

I had a great session Friday Febuary 6th 2009. It started out with numerous shots of m42 (my novice obsession). Later in the night I cycled thru several objects in the goto tour. All of the pictures with the exception of M42 are single shots. The lunar and Saturn shot are short exposures < 1 sec with relatively low ISO. The deep space shots are 30 second exposures @ 800 ISO. All shots were taken with a Canon 20Da DSLR camera attached to a CPC1100 fork mounted scope. No guiding is taking place, the 3 star align GOTO tracking is enabled.

Random Star Cluster -- not sure which one.

Ghost of Jupiter

The Moon

M42 Orion Nebula

Saturn

Unknown Aberration