when i say that i yelped in shock at this kid’s sign

I will have a ton of #NoKings pics from Madison, but for now here's just one, which may be my favorite. Funny, gentle, peaceful, but perfectly captures the contempt we have for people who would make peasants of American citizens.

Got our signs. I've got my photojournalist gear. NO KINGS! Maybe I'll send video of tens of thousands of people protesting peacefully to Kimmel's (hashtag)showusyourhellhole!

BTW the Madison Astronomical Society's big community star party was a HUGE success. Thanks to the Monona Terrace Community and Convention Center for hosting Moon Over Monona Terrace again this year. 1300+ attendees! Free event, over a dozen telescopes, electronic astronomy, kid activities, talks.

1st go at last night's data. Think I can do better. Best 40% of 18,000 frames, AutoStakkert2!, sharpened (maybe too much!) in WaveSharp. Acquired with SharpCap with a 12" Richey-Chrétien, 2.5X PowerMate, and Uranus-C camera. Will follow up if I manage better! #redwolfastro #astrophotography

Some more data on this field -- it's really shaping up! I like this orientation better. Also, I just noticed the "hobbit door" toroid in the lower left. What's up with that? Star Rucba, reflection neb VDB 134, and "bubble" planetary PK86+5.1. #redwolfastro #astrophotography

My pal Bonnie just got a Photoline APO, my scope's little brother. Found an Astrobin pic of this field and suggested a two-scope collab. This is a quick 'n dirty of my first 2 nights' data, I think it's gonna be spectacular! Stars RGB, H-alpha is red. Note spherical planetary nebula PK86+5.1.

And ANOTHER one! One night's worth of Ha data with that gorgeous, reliable 130 APO. What a rock star! This is the hydrogen data (Crescent Nebula) with the stars removed, and cropped off-center to give the impression of motion. Very much in-progress. More soon. #redwolfastro #astrophotography

Finished this one just today: The Cygnus Wall portion of the North America Nebula. Liked the starless version so well I decided to keep it too. 4.5 hours NB, 1.5 RGB. PixInsight, then combined channels with Astro Pixel Processor's HSORGB preset. #redwolfastro #astrophotography

The Dark Shark is another dim one that the 130 just casually brought to life. "No big". I kept stretching until I was amused by the result. 2 hours of LRGB. Love the eyeliner. Someone beat me to APOD with their Dark Shark, or else I would have submitted this. #redwolfastro #astrophotography

The 130 APO continues to just keep cranking gorgeous data. Here's the Phantom of The Opera Mask, very dim but the 5" pulls it out. My own synthetic color for hydrogen, stars are catalog-calibrated. 4.5 hours of H-alpha, 1.5 of RGB for stars. #redwolfastro #astrophotography

Up next: Titan, with its shadow transiting Saturn. There are a handful of these transits, visible for a few weeks only every 15 years. 12" Richey-Chrétien with 2X Televue compressor, color planetary camera, couple hundred frames from several minutes of video. #redwolfastro #astrophotography

Boy, I've gotten behind in my posting! This pair of interacting galaxies is one of the closest such to us, at 85M LY. The Cocoon Galaxy and its companion have passed by each other with stellar stream trailing between them. Uncooled color planetary cam and the 8" RC. #redwolfastro #astrophotography

Here's the latest one-night wonder. From 40M LY away, NGC 7331 featuring supernova 2025rbs, here for a limited time! This imaging session was going great even with encroaching clouds till it started RAINING ON MY TELESCOPE. That was a charlie-foxtrot of car-stuffing. #redwolfastro #astrophotography

Welp, several clear nights around the new moon and nothing is broken. I'm pretty amazed how productive the new scope and camera make me. Actually I've imaged a dozen targets so far in 2025, but quite a few just didn't pass the so-what test so I've actually finished and published half of that.

New scope won't quite frame both Trifid and Lagoon. So here's M20 (Trifid) & M21 star cluster. Couldn't stop looking at the starless image so finish-processed that too. Neighbor's comment ruined it forever, though: "South end of a northbound baboon?" Dammit Sue! #redwolfastro #astrophotography

Took the new 130mm APO refractor out for a good trot over several nights. The Eagle Nebula, H𝛼=R, SII=G, OIII=B. About 5 hours total. Really quite taken with how sharp this scope is. #redwolfastro #astrophotography

And another -- this is a SINGLE 30-second frame on the Eagle Nebula, M16, with the red filter. What's really shocking is the 100% zoom showing the Pillars of Creation (remember that Hubble image?). Yeah, gonna like this scope and camera *just fine*! #redwolfastro #astrophotography

First light for the new refractor. Sorry Mark is no longer with us, but I hope he'd be happy his scope is getting the love it deserves. Photoline 130 APO, just an hour worth of testing from a Bortle 4 site, LRGB on my also-new-to-me 2600MM. #redwolfastro #astrophotography

Better take on the Iris. Two nights' data this time -- one with 30" subframes due to wind gusts, the other 60". From Merritt Reservoir in Nebraska. #redwolfastro #astrophotography

Next up on the Mad Astro Nebraska feed: One (windy) night's take on the Iris Nebula through the 8" RC with a Player One Uranus-C camera. ~4 hours integration time, had to drop to 30" for a better "keeper" ratio. #redwolfastro #astrophotography

Madison Astro Society members did a campout at Merritt Reservoir in Nebraska (site of the famous Star Party). I took some pictures! :-) This one is practically unedited -- much brighter than was to the eye, of course, but colors are straight out of the camera. #redwolfastro #astrophotography

And another first look -- this one is M104, the wonderfully-named "Sombrero Galaxy". Again the issue with the walking noise, gotta solve that. 70' of integration time from my back yard. This one will definitely improve as I add more data. #redwolfastro #astrophotography

A much, much better Cocoon. Figured out the dumb mistake that led to the donuts. Didn't even have to retake any of the flats or light frames. However I kept getting terrible "walking noise" if I used all the integration time, so this is only 10' of integration! #redwolfastro #astrophotography

Farley nails it. Although my nastier self wants to argue, he is SO right. Watching the leopards eat their faces is not something that a decent human should enjoy. www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/03/an-e...

OK, a peek under the kimono that most astrophotographers won't give you: This is what happens when I screw up bigly. This is a really cool pair of gravitationally-interacting galaxies, the big one is the Cocoon Galaxy. The irritating donuts are *supposed* to be calibrated out!

In February 2025 alone, we tallied 2085+ protests, incl major protests in support of federal workers, LGBTQ rights, immigrant rights, Palestinian self-determination, Ukraine, demonstrations against Tesla, & protests against Trump’s agenda more generally. This compares w/ 937 protests in Feb 2017.

At last! The Thor's Helmet image is in the bag -- not perfect, could always use more data and tweaks, but after working on nothing else since mid-January...I think it's done! Supernova remnant in hydrogen and oxygen, RGB stars. 8" RC telescope. #redwolfastro #astrophotography

Was going to get some star-color RGB to finish up my Thor's Helmet project, but apparently the tarp over the rig isn't as waterproof as I thought. Both the old Windows laptop and the Raspberry Pi appear dead. Trying to knock together an old Pi 3 to run the devices so I can get some data this week.

Elephant's Trunk again; think I've learned a thing or two in the meantime. 3h Hubble (S-H-O = R-G-B) palette+1h broadband for star color. Really brings out the molecular structures in the nebula. That brings me up to date; I'll post new ones as I finish them. #redwolfastro #astrophotography

NGC 7635: Bubble Nebula. Pentultimate image on my journey. 6H of H-alpha, OIII, and SII plus ~1H broadband for accurate star color. The Bubble is blown by immense stellar winds from the huge bright center star that will probably go supernova in 10-20M years. 9/2024. #redwolfastro #astrophotography

Here's what the aurora really looked like to the eye.

Much of North America saw the aurorae last spring. Janet and I almost missed it, but a friend texted me and we dragged our aged butts out to Blue Mound. Awful glad we did. This is what Photoshop's "auto tone" made of my panorama. Naked-eye, wasn't quite so wild. #redwolfastro #astrophotography

2024 Eclipse #3! My favorite, just past totality and just before the diamond ring. The huge prominence at 4 o'clock was naked-eye visible the whole time, it was crazy how you could see the whole corona but with this tiny spark just blazing out. #redwolfastro #astrophotography

Here's the closeup shot of totality in 2024, through the 8" RC. HDR composite of three exposures.

Next up are a few shots of the 2024 total eclipse. We went to Paragould, AR and I shot from the motel parking lot. This is a composite of 6 different images from 2 scopes -- HDR widefield for the corona, and three from the 8" for detail. Exposures 1/2000" to 1/30". #redwolfastro #astrophotography

NGC 6888, the Crescent Nebula. Ha+OIII+RGB stars. Wikipedia: "...formed by the fast stellar wind from the Wolf-Rayet star WR 136 colliding with and energizing the slower moving wind ejected by the star when it became a red giant". WR 136 is the center bright star. #redwolfastro #astrophotography

I originally got the 8" scope for Galaxy Season, the spring when the nebula-rich part of the Milky Way has moved into the daytime sky and so distant galaxies are The Thing. But it also has enough reach for tiny planetary nebulae. Here is M27, the Dumbbell Nebula. #redwolfastro #astrophotography

Continuing with that one magical night at Newport State Park, here's what greeted my snoozeful eyes as I was packing up. May 2023. #redwolfastro #astrophotography

This is the target I was going for during the night I shot the previous Milky Way image: M94, the Croc's Eye Galaxy. Small for my rig at only 10 arcminutes; deconvolution extracted detail that was blurred by seeing and tracking effects.

Just gonna put this out there every once in a while: #redwolfastro means redwolfastro.com, where you can buy prints of my stuff. Won't deluge you, I promise, but just an occasional shout-out.

Newport Park is still my favorite astro place. Frequently I'll set a camera up to do some Milky Way imaging while the scope looks at some deep sky target. This is from May 2023, while I was imaging M94, the Croc's Eye. The lakeshore is really wonderful to work from. #redwolfastro #astrophotography

Stars in a deep sky image are invariably in our own galaxy and just happen to be in the line of sight. But Japanese astronomer Koichi Itagak, whose avocation is supernovae, found one (SN 2023ixf) in M101, the Pinwheel Galaxy. ONE STAR visible from 21M light years! #redwolfastro #astrophotography

Now caught up in time to my current rig: 8" Richey-Chétien scope, cooled mono cam with filter wheel, big-prism off-axis guider with a super-sensitive guide camera on a chonker of a mount. NGC 4565, the Needle Galaxy. About five hours of integration time, 3/2023. #redwolfastro #astrophotography

Another lucky imaging attempt, this one (obviously) Saturn. I thought I had experimented with a 12" scope at some point but my notes say this too was with the 8" RC. September 2022. I have another Jupiter and Saturn in the gallery but ehh, not as good. #redwolfastro #astrophotography

The Big Guy himself. Processed from 3 sets of video frames (R, G, and B, 90" each). Shot with the RC when Jupiter was in opposition (closest to Earth). No moons visible, but the Great Red Spot is obvious. September 2022. #redwolfastro #astrophotography

After joining madisonastro.org, I started using the Yanna Research Station dark site. Electricity, concrete pads, dark skies, a building with a couch to sleep on -- ahhh! LRGB image shot with the 8" Richey-Chrétien in July 2022: M51, the Whirlpool Galaxy. #redwolfastro #astrophotography

Found out that the Richey-Chrétien actually is a sharp scope when you focus it! (Admittedly this is sharpened with software!) M13, the great globular cluster in Hercules.

Couple of images from today's 50 states protest in Madison. My wife is in the first one. Yelling.