Moonlight Imaging (broadband version)

Two months ago I wrote about how one could narrowband image under moonlight. Actually, you don't have to use narrowband filters to image with a full moon in the sky. But you do need to choose your targets with a thought to where the moon is. And it helps to have a haze-free sky that's otherwise fairly dark--yellow zone at least.

Here was the situation the night of the 26th: One night before the "supermoon" total lunar eclipse. The moon's magnitude was a brilliant -12.6 and at meridian crossing reached an altitude of about
42 degrees here in Minneapolis:

The Moon on the night of 9/26/15 at meridian crossing

This shows the part of the sky with an altitude of over 30 degrees. It's not going to be good imaging in Pegasus, but going further north things get better. Polaris is about 48 degrees from the moon, and if we can find something between that and the northern horizon it might be worth a shot.

So I chose objects that were on the northern side of the zenith well away from the moon and close enough to the celestial pole that they'd be available all night. And I imaged from a darker site than my backyard in the inner red zone. Here's how it turned out:

NGC 2276 (Arp 25) and NGC 2300 (Arp 114)

NGC 0040

Not too bad, really. I imaged at f/10 because these are small targets and partly in the hopes it would help contrast. The galaxies were imaged in the time before midnight and the planetary after followed by dark frames. As it ended up I was out there until after 4 A.M., but a clear night is not exactly a common event this year and I wanted to take full advantage of it.

Note that exposure times were kept short because of the moonlight. Unbinned luminance frames were only 180s and 2x2 binned RGB frames were a brief 90 seconds. As it was I got about two hour total exposure time for each image.

After three hours of sleep I went home the next day, to bed at 7 P.M. and slept right through the lunar eclipse. Imaging has a  price!