Was able to visit the Tucson Amateur Astronomy Club's dark sky site, southeast of Tucson recently. When you have dark skies with little or no light pollution from large surrounding metropolitan areas, you can capture some truly stunning sights!
These are the Lagoon Nebula (M8) on the left, and The Trifid Nedula (M20) on the right. I was able to catch them both in the same field of view for this image. With a little photo processing magic, I think I ended up with a pretty nice image of the pair!
New Eye Candy:
Here's a small gallery of interesting pictures. They're not all taken through a telescope, and some are just long exposure images taken while mounted on a camera tripod, or even a cellphone shot. Processing was kept to a minimum, so that just about anyone can get similar results. Click on any image to get a slightly better view.
If you'd like any of your images included in our gallery, just send them along with your permission to use them. We'll update the gallery from time-to-time, and there is no set period until the next batch will be posted. Hover over the shots, to get a little info about each picture. Have fun!
Image Gallery:
The 2020 Conjunction of Venus and the Pleiades from my back yard!
The "star" of FLV at the June 2019 event was not Chuck! In the far upper right is Jupiter - the reason for this AAAZ adventure!
The Rosette Nebula is often mis-labeled as a planetary nebula, the final expansion of a dead star. In fact, this is a stellar nursery. Note the new baby star cluster in the core!
The 2020 Conjunction of Venus and the Pleiades from my back yard!