Old images taken at GHO

While im waiting to build new observatory here at home I thought I'd add some old photos which I took up in Auckland at my old observatory "Gulf Harbour Observatory" or GHO for short.

Firstly my favourite shot of our moon, our closest neighbour.

Our Moon

And now some images of things further away but quite a bit larger!

Globular cluster (M5 I think.)

Open cluster, unsure which though.

M42, the Orion Nebula.

I took all of the images using my 8 inch Skywatcher Newtonian telescope, with the camera at prime focus (meaning the camera is attached to the telescope and the telescope becomes the lens of the camera).

The deep sky objects where by far the hardest to get images of. At the time when I took these images I was still finding my way around the night sky (I still am!), and the two different clusters I just stumbled on and was not actually looking for specifically. The Orion nebula was the easiest to find, being on the belt of the Orion constellation. But it was the hardest of the three to get a good picture of, because of the longer exposure time needed to get the detail. I didn't have a star tracker, or know how to properly align my telescope at the time of capturing these images, which is why in the case of the Orion nebula especially the image is not very sharp. Still its the best image I have taken to date and as such I'm really pleased with it.

My picture of the Globular cluster is extremely red because of a dirty great street light which was right next to my observatories old location. Fortunately the new location where it will be built is no where near any such light pollution so I shouldn't get any more images like that (fingers crossed!).

If anyone does know what the two cluster images are for sure then please let me know as I would love to know!